Odyssey 7.261-347 (end)

Let me call attention to two moments in the close of Odysseus’ speech to Queen Arete. The first is Odysseus’ comment that Calypso ordered him to return home “because of a message from Zeus—or perhaps even her own mind was turned …” The truth is that when Hermes delivered Zeus’s message to her island, Odysseus had been alone on a headland, wasting away in tears. He may not have known the visit had happened, and so we are left with him at this point perhaps genuinely unsure what Calypso’s motivation had been. This could be a moment of rare, unmotivated honesty on Odysseus’ part. Perhaps he supposes it possible that she had tired of him, in the way it is said explicitly by the poet that he had tired of her (5.153)? The fact is that Calypso had never let on that Hermes had visited—Homer seems to enjoy pointing out that Odysseus had later sat to dinner in the exact chair on which the Olympian had just been sitting, presumably unbeknownst to himself—and she breathed no word of the fact that Hermes had actually departed with a threat of violence from Zeus if she should disobey (5.146-7). No, Calypso announces the return on a raft as her own idea, swears an oath (to satisfy Odysseus’ suspicions) that she’s not intending him harm, and even offers him sustenance and immortal clothing to protect him—which does not, at the end of the day, do much for the fellow but weigh him down. It seems that when it comes to speakers, this Homer particularly enjoys composing for ones who dissemble, Calypso no exception.

But Odysseus’ own big lie comes at the end of his speech. He claims that for all his grief, he has recounted the truth (ἀληθείην κατέλεξα). But we know that ‘in reality’, Odysseus had been too modest to be naked among Nausicaa’s handmaids, and had asked them to leave the area while he bathed himself in the river. The girls then go off and report this to Nausicaa, who is of course out of the picture. As she later tells the stranger:

… I would be indignant with another, any girl that does this sort of thing,

Who against the will of her own father and mother, yet living,

Would have sex with men, before they go for a public wedding. (Odyssey 6.286-8)

(One notes the plural ‘men’.) But Odysseus tells her own parents that Nausicaa herself bathed him, and then dressed him in the clothes he’s now wearing, which her own mother had made. What’s he playing at? Why this lie direct, falsely impugning their Nausicaa’s propriety and judgement, titillating the idea that they had been intimate? Is this to suggest that he’s now willing to do the honourable thing by their daughter, as a previous one of our generations might have put it?

Alcinous does not acknowledge the possibility of this scandalous impropriety, but deflects to another one: that his daughter and her attendants should have brought the stranger to him themselves, as he came to Nausicaa first as a suppliant. But we shall soon see that the stranger’s possible marriage to his daughter is very much top of mind.

Odysseus then purports to defend Nausicaa’s judgement, after imputing acts to her she had no part in. He then lies and attributes to himself, not to Nausicaa, the decision to separate from their entourage on the way to the town. He claims he wanted to avoid rousing resentment and jealousy. This from a man who’s just made her parents imagine their virginal daughter bathing him herself, a naked old hunk in a river.

In response Alcinous prays to Zeus, Athena, and Apollo that a man “of the sort you actually are—thinking the things that I myself do,” would settle down in Phaeacia and possess his daughter in marriage. He doesn’t even know the stranger’s name! And what is it about the stranger that makes him suppose they think exactly alike, share the same tastes? Well, there is this. If Odysseus did fancy Nausicaa, and want to marry her, as he has given Alcinous ample reason to suppose, the King would have found a buddy who also likes to rob the cradle. (His wife Arete is his brother’s daughter.) Peas in a pod.

Alcinous is quite the braggart. Homer’s dramaturgy is fully developed when it comes to the speeches. (In academic environments, such seemingly obvious things still need to be said.) His speakers have an angle which they leak, to Homer’s (and his performer’s) evident delight. The stranger gives him a rare outside audience to impress, and one gets the sense that his proposed escort is as much a chance to show off the prowess of his shipmen as it is a sacred service to the passenger. There is a fascinating but frustratingly vague allusion to a journey the Phaeacians undertook, to carry Rhadamanthys, the blonde judge in the Elysian Fields where blonde Menelaus is destined to dwell, to see Tityus the Gaian giant. Apparently this Earth-born prodigy was something to go a distance to see, unlike, say, some washed-up hero from the Trojan War. I find no elucidating footnote to give this episode any context, but it certainly serves once again to link the Phaeacians to figures from a past who were ‘mythical’ already to Homer. They are a bridge to an age of giants that has passed, just as, in a slightly different way, Odysseus himself bridges the poetic world of the Iliad, of the berserkers who kill by nines and the Götterdämmerung, and that of the unformed, rudderless, bourgeois youth of Telemachus and the suitors.

The mention of Euboea strikes a particular note. Alcinous is boasting of how vast the sea journeys are, which the Phaeacian seamen can make in a day. Of course one does not at all know to where Homer’s place names refer, but for a classical audience, Euboea is just over there. It’s New Jersey. To my mind, it suits the Odyssean humour for Alcinous’ so distant-to-be-legendary Euboea, to be comically local for us. To adapt Monty Python’s ‘Nudge Nudge’ sketch: “Euboea? Euboea! Say no mowah!”

In Greek:

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“We’re a jealous lot on the ground, the tribes of mankind”: Homer in English

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