A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (2 page)

  Poets are readers, too, and many poets have refashioned bits of Homer’s
Odyssey
to suit their own purposes, not simply mining the Homeric vein for foreign riches but adding levels of significance to the original poems. In a fragment of the archaic Greek poet Arkhilokhos often invoked as one of the first individual voices in the West, the singer describes how he threw away his shield and ran from battle. Alkaíos and Anakreon follow suit. Centuries later the Latin poet Horace picks up the theme, and it begins to look like part of the poet’s traditional self-deprecation. However, the originator of this claim is Homer’s Odysseus, who says of one particularly sticky pass, “I wrenched my dogskin helmet off my head, / dropped my spear, dodged out of my long shield / [and] ran,” here not away, but to beg mercy from the Egyptian king (XIV.318–20). Significantly for both later poets, this is one of Odysseus’ fibs, for this episode is part of the story the disguised Odysseus tells about his assumed character of Cretan traveler and fortune seeker. The individual’s and the poet’s voices then partake of the voice of Homer’s Odysseus in the very passage where Odysseus is being most himself—lying, and most poetic—inventing fictions.

This is not the place to explore the manifold transformations that
The Odyssey
and above all the character of Odysseus have undergone through subsequent literature, not least because a good map of much of the territory exists in W. B. Stanford’s survey of the “Ulysses theme.”
¹
Some stories concerning Odysseus which circulated in antiquity are lost to us, but many are still extant. We meet Odysseus in Sophocles’ tragedies:
Ajax
(before 441
B.C.E
.) and, more darkly,
Philoctetes
(ca. 408
B.C.E
.); briefly in Euripides’
Hecuba
(ca. 424
B.C.E
.); in the
Rhesus;
and in the satyr play
Cyclops
. The Odysseus of the tragedies takes on a life of his own, which will resound down the
ages through Seneca’s
Troades
, the mid-first-century
C.E
. Latin adaptation of Euripides, and ultimately to Shakespeare’s
The History of Troilus and Cressida
(1602–1603) and Jean Giraudoux’s 1935 theatrical fable
La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu
(The Trojan War Will Not Take Place). Shakespeare’s dark play is based in part on Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem
Troilus and Criseyde
(ca. 1385), which itself follows any number of medieval Latin and vernacular Troy poems.

Like Shakespeare’s, all the many stage representations in which Odysseus plays a role draw on other Odyssean traditions, beginning with
The Iliad
and including the meanings that gradually accreted to his figure across centuries and cultures, which then were partially erased and massively revalued. In Greco-Roman philosophical traditions, Odysseus became the example of the man who survives—for the Stoics by the strength of his character and the subordination of fear and desire to will; for some of the other philosophical sects by his astonishing adaptability.
The Odyssey
had shown Odysseus in both lights and did not apologize for the moments when his infinite adaptability crossed the line into guile and deceit. The Roman comic poet Plautus has more than one character invoke Odysseus as cunning strategist and archtrickster, and it is no surprise that the master wordcrafter among Roman poets, Ovid, chose Odysseus’ battle with Ajax over Achilles’ arms as the moment in Odysseus’ career he would highlight, a battle which was waged and won by skill in words alone (
Metamorphoses
,
Book XIII
).

As knowledge of the Greek originals faded in the West, reaching its nadir in the Middle Ages, Odysseus became little more than a byword for trickiness, even treachery. This was reinforced by the fact that the Roman Catholic West was inclined to regard in a dim light the Greek Orthodox East, with its center at Constantinople (once Byzantium, now Istanbul), from which the Catholic West had split first politically and then doctrinally. Of course, the theme of Greek “treachery” predates the schism of Rome from Constantinople, running back to the stratagem of the Trojan horse itself, and is kept alive in every retelling of the fall of Troy. This is inscribed in
Vergil’s
Aeneid
, the classical text which was most widely studied in the West and one of the few secular texts which was read and recopied without interruption throughout the Middle Ages.

The relationship of the crowning work of Vergil, the Roman Homer, to both Homeric poems is complex (as was noted already in Vergil’s own time), but the clever way the Roman challenges his Greek precursor may be well exemplified by the role Ulysses has in
The Aeneid
. In his epic about Aeneas—who, according to legend, escaped the fall of Troy, led Trojan settlers to Italy, and through both battle and alliance established the basis for the founding of Rome by his descendants, Vergil permits Odysseus to appear only at a distance, and in sharp and rather unflattering perspective. In Books II and III, Aeneas—not unlike Odysseus at the court of Alkínoös and Arêtê—responds to his hostess’ request and tells Dido of the fall of Troy and his own subsequent wanderings. Within this Vergilian tribute to Homer’s strategy of having Odysseus narrate
The Odyssey
Books IX-XII, Ulysses is mentioned. It is from
Book II
of
The Aeneid
, and with reference to Odysseus’ Trojan horse, that we derive the proverbial
“timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”
(“I fear the Greeks even when they are bearing gifts,” II.49). Despite such warnings and even more spectacular portents, the false Sinon manages to convince the Trojans to breach their walls and drag the wooden horse within the city. (The Greek Sinon had first established credibility and won Trojan sympathy by pretending to have been maltreated by his comrades, Ulysses in particular.) Although it is never stated in so many words, it is hard not to imagine that Sinon’s whole script is the work of Ulysses, whom tradition makes the inventor of the ruse of the horse. In this narrated scene in
The Aeneid
, Odysseus is thus invisible behind Sinon’s words (but visible in that invisibility), just as readers know that he is hidden in the horse.
²

Throughout Aeneas’ account of the travels that brought him from Troy to Dido’s Carthage, Vergil has him skirt Ithaka, and only once does he bring Aeneas’ and Odysseus’ itineraries together. At one stop on the desolate coast of Sicily, Aeneas and his companions
discover Achaemenides, who turns out to be—so Aeneas reports the story—one of Ulysses’ men who had been left behind in Polyphêmos’ cave. The Trojans give him aid and transport, despite his being a Greek and their mortal enemy. The more important point is to highlight an Odyssean episode which shows Odysseus at his most irresponsible. “Pious Aeneas,” in contrast, saves his followers—indeed, he even saves one of Odysseus’, if, that is, we permit Vergil to interpolate this character into
The Odyssey
and, as it were, correct Homer. Nor do the literary repercussions of this
Odyssey-
inspired scene end here: Vergil’s successor Ovid repeats the maneuver, interpolating Vergil as well as Homer, by recounting yet another version of Achaemenides’ experiences in the land of the Kyklopês and then presenting a newly invented character, Macareus, one of Odysseus’ companions who, Ovid claims, skipped ship after hearing of the dangers Kirkê foretold (
Metamorphoses
XIV. 154–444).

The Aeneid
memorializes the Trojan origins of Rome. In its wake, through the Middle Ages, cities and nations, most prominently France and Britain, put about stories that provided each with a Trojan foundation. In this way an ancient pedigree was provided for their contemporary aversion to the Greeks, with Ulysses standing first in the line of sworn enemies most directly responsible for the fall of Troy, a defeat they now made their own, and his character epitomizing the perfidious Greek at his worst.

The perfidy of the horse and the origin of the Roman people are specifically linked and heightened in
The Divine Comedy
when Vergil answers the pilgrim Dante’s query about the twin flames they see in the eighth circle of hell. These are Ulysses and Diomedes, Ulysses’ companion on many missions, who together, as Vergil says, “bemoan / the snare of the horse which made the gate / whence issued the noble seed of the Romans” (
Inferno
XXVI.58–60). What Dante knows of Odysseus he knows through the Latin tradition, primarily Vergil’s
Aeneid
, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, and Statius’
Achilleis
(widely read notwithstanding its unfinished state) along with their commentaries,
which were the staples of medieval schooling in the Classics or, as they were then called, “The Authors” (
auctores
). Dante conveys his recognition that his knowledge of these figures of Greek epic is entirely mediated by Latin, along with his profound sense of the historical belatedness of his Italian tongue, by staging a Vergilian intervention when it comes time for Dante to question Ulysses and Diomedes. “Leave the speaking to me,” Vergil advises, “who have understood / that which you wish: for perhaps they would be disdainful, / since they were Greeks, of your speech” (XXVI.73–75).

Vergil adjures them by his own celebration of both characters in verse and asks one of them to tell how he came to die (XXVI. 79–84). Dante makes Ulysses respond, and now it is the Italian poet’s turn to make the next move in the literary game of interpolation. The subsequent narrative of Ulysses’ last journey is often read, anachronistically, as a remarkable anticipation of romantic, even Faustian, striving. But Dante, like Augustine before him, need only have looked within himself to find the great temptation for an intellectual that the desire for unbounded knowledge represents. Indeed, that temptation, and all the woe born of it, runs back in the Judeo-Christian tradition to the first temptation in Eden. The shipboard address of Dante’s Ulysses to yet another set of comrades he will lead to destruction continues the tradition of Odyssean eloquence, and, while it wins over Ulysses’ shipmates, Dante expects the reader of the
The Divine Comedy
to be wary of its appeals to the senses and experience (XXVI. 115–16). He gives Ulysses these concluding words: “Consider your stock: / you were not made to live like brute animals, / but to pursue manly valor and knowledge” (XXVI. 118–20).

But for Dante there is a third way, between brutish existence and undisciplined striving for glory and wisdom: submission to authority and the willingness to brook the limits placed on human knowledge by God. Dante goes far beyond Vergil’s presentation of Ulysses as a negative example of irresponsible leadership, against which Vergil highlights Aeneas’ self-effacing responsibility. Dante’s Ulysses destroys
both his companions and himself not merely in striving to satisfy idle curiosity and to see other lands and peoples but in searching for knowledge, on which he, erring, places no limits. It is out of his own understanding of the temptation of the desire for knowledge that Dante could describe in such heroic terms Ulysses’ five-month-long sea journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules (i.e., the Strait of Gibraltar), which for Greco-Roman and medieval navigators marked the bounds of the known world. But, as even Dante’s Ulysses makes clear when he describes his ultimate shipwreck—“and our prow sank, as it pleased another, / until the sea closed back over us” (XXVI. 141–42)—this is a heroism which attracts us at our peril. The “other” mentioned in the canto’s penultimate line is, Dante’s Ulysses now understands, Dante’s God.

  While the double-sided nature of Odysseus, explicit already in
The Odyssey
, gave rise to the widest range of interpretations and responses, many of the other players have also left their impress. Penélopê, even if a bit impatient and peeved in the first of Ovid’s
Heroides
(“Letters from the Heroines”), became for medieval readers of that very popular collection of poetic epistles the epitome of married chastity. And beyond: “Penelope” became synonymous with “faithful wife” in English and other European languages—with the obvious possibility that the term could be used sarcastically (as in Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s
Così fan tutte
). Likewise, but with no blot on her scutcheon, her famous ruse has entered the proverbial: a “Penelopean web” is any work that will never be finished.

Diametrically opposed to Penélopê, Kirkê (Circe) became the archetypal temptress. She is the ultimate progenitor of Ariosto’s Alcina and Tasso’s Armida in the Italian Renaissance, not to mention the various Spenserian temptresses inspired by them. Nor is her afterlife limited to the literary tradition; she too became proverbial. For example, Germans, many of whose proverbial expressions reflect the value their culture has placed on a classical education, may
still call a seductive woman a “Circe,” and they have even created a verb,
becircen
, to describe Circe-like erotic enchantment. Like Penélopê’s web, Circe’s cup has become proverbial: it is the draft, literal or figurative, which works enchantment, particularly of the erotic variety.

Mentor too has a proverbial existence as the name of any adviser; indeed, so common is the appellation that in English we no longer even need capitalize the name.
The Oxford English Dictionary
suggests that its use as a common noun, which dates from the eighteenth century, is due largely to the important role Mentor played in the then wildly popular novel
Télémaque
by the French abbé Fénelon (1699). If so, this is yet another indignity inflicted on Telémakhos, who of all the characters in
The Odyssey
has had the least impact on literary and popular traditions. Historically, this is in large measure the result of his having virtually no profile in the Latin tradition, but it is also true that, without a careful and sympathetic reading, he runs the risk of becoming a rather uninteresting prig. Poor Telémakhos! The French novel of which he is the title hero is not only unread today but virtually unreadable, unless one is held by interminable discussions of virtue and theories of moral education.