Honey, I'm home!

I finally finished The Odyssey. After some slow spots midway through, the pace picked up again, but not without the occasional boring interjection.

An Example of a Boring Bit

My favorite example of a boring plot interruption comes in chapter XV (although I suppose if it's my "favorite," it isn't maximally boring). Here we meet a new minor character, the wanderer Theoclymenus. It takes one long paragraph and then some to introduce him before we finally learn his name, and the introduction goes something like this:

So as Telemachus and his crew are about to sail away, this guy comes up to the boat. His great great grandfather Mumblyjumblius lived on the island Whatchamacallit way back when, but for some crazy reason moved to Yaddayadda, where they held him hostage and took all his stuff, and he was harassed by the lordship's mean daughter, but he finally escaped, and to get revenge, he took the mean daughter home with him and made her marry his brother. Anyway, he eventually moved to Thatotherisland and got hitched and had a couple kids, and they also had kids, but the one kid's kids didn't live to adulthood, and one of the other kid's kids didn't either, but the surviving kid did; but oy, he argued with his dad too much and moved away. Anyway, it was that kid's kid's kid who comes up now to Telemachus's boat and says, "Friend, I entreat you! Tell me, and hold nothing back: who are you?" (Paraphrase of Homer, The Odyssey, ca. 8th c. BCE, trans. George Herbert Palmer, 1891, rev. 1912; Dover Thrift Editions: 1999, Chapter XV, p. 147.)

The study group question for this chapter should be, "at what point in this paragraph did you fall asleep?" Of course, I suppose if Homer had been trying to score points by dropping my family's names, I would have hung on every word.

Blood and Gore

The later chapters include descriptive gore on par with the cyclops' eye-pokering. Highlights include Odysseus contemplating whether to punch someone hard enough to kill him or just hard enough to make a point; he decides on the latter, therefore,

he struck Irus on the neck below the ear and crushed the bones within. Forthwith from out his mouth the red blood ran, and down in the dust he fell with a moan, gnashing his teeth and kicking on the ground....Odysseus caught Irus by the foot and dragged him through the doorway... (Ch. XVIII, p. 176.)

All the suitors who are looking on think it is hilarious to see an old man beggar beat up an obnoxious young beggar. I'm not sure if the listener/reader is also supposed to think it's funny; after all, the suitors are boors, so they aren't great role models. Odysseus, however, seems pretty pleased with himself, since successfully beating up a beggar bodes well for eventually massacring 108 aristrocratic boors. So two points for the home team, rah rah!

Two more gory descriptions of mutilation and death stood out to me. First: need to teach a traitorous goatherd a lesson? Here's how!

...tie his feet and hands and drag him within the chamber; there fasten boards upon his back, and lashing a twisted rope around him hoist him aloft, up the tall pillar, and bring him to the beams, that he may keep alive there long and suffer grievous torment. (Ch. XXII, p. 215.)

It is worth noting that I read this chapter out of a different edition, since I was visiting my mom in Illinois and it was really cold outside and my Dover edition was locked in the car trunk, so I read from another prose translation that we had on a bookshelf in the study. That one said that the goatherd's hands and feet were to be tied behind his back, which makes things sound more uncomfortable; but it also said he was to be tied around the waist to the board, which makes it sound a little less uncomfortable.

Perhaps Homer was aware of the potential confusion, or at least aware that some of his listeners might not have caught the details the first time around, because he repeats the description a few 
paragraphs later, when two of Odysseus's loyal servants carry out the deed (although the boards are omitted):

...then on him sprang the two and dragged him by the hair within the door, threw him all horror-stricken to the ground, bound hands and feet together with a galling cord, which tight and fast they tied, as they were ordered by Laertes' son, long-tried royal Odysseus; then they lashed a twisted rope around and hoisted him aloft, up the tall pillar, and brought him to the beams [and mocked him...] (ibid.)

Poor Melanthius.

The second really notable description of vengeful execution pertains to the ladies. When you're as mighty as Odysseus, you have a houseful of servants; and as long as they are in your household's employ, they really shouldn't get cozy with your wife's boorish suitors. Out of the fifty women servants, Odysseus's dear nurse Eurycleia identifies "twelve in all [who] have gone the way of shame."

The way of shame! The way of shame! Odysseus punishes the women by making them clear away the dead bodies, sponge down the hall, and cart out the blood-soaked flooring. Then his son Telemachus locks them into a narrow, inescapable space while he rigs up their death machine:

He...tied the cable of a dark-bowed ship to a great pillar, then lashed it to the round-house, stretching it high across, too high for one to touch the feet upon the ground. And as the wide-winged thrushes or the doves strike on a net set in the bushes; and when they think to go to roost a cruel bed receives them; even so the women held their heads in line, and around every neck a noose was laid, that they might die most vilely. They twitched their feet a little, but not long. (p. 221)

Let that be a lesson, ladies, on going the way of shame. The men then bring out Melanthius, the goatherd who has been watching the slaughter from the rafters. They cut off his nose and ears, disembowel him, and let the dogs eat his still-warm guts, and--because they're still very very angry--they cut off his hands and feet. He presumably dies somewhere along the way, but Homer doesn't tell us when.

Apparently traitorous employees and women are worse than boorish suitors, since the suitors pretty much all enjoy clean, swift deaths.

Forgiveness and Love

But the end of The Odyssey is not all blood and gore, no no! Odysseus has a gentle side too. During the massacre, two people beg for mercy: the seer Leiodes and the bard Phemius. Odysseus feels that Leiodes should have known better, so he drives a sword through the seer's neck and cuts off his head; but Telemachus puts in a good word for the bard and another man, the page Medon. Generous Odysseus, smiling, spares them both. We love our bards.

Odysseus scores some points for realizing that brutally killing the best and the noblest youths of Ithaca is not going to go over so well with the neighbors. He and Telemachus hatch a plan appropriate to their nobility: they will get the servants to create a diversion and will sneak out of town the next morning to their well-wooded farm, where they can hide until the gods show them a way out of this mess (Ch. XXIII, p. 224). Fortunately, the gods decide they've had enough entertainment. Athene intervenes with an angry mob, calling, "Hold, men of Ithaca, from cruel combat, and without bloodshed straightway part!" This scares the bejeezus out of everyone and peace settles upon Ithaca.

Homer also tells us that Odysseus and Penelope, once reunited, "came gladly to their old bed's rites," where they "joyed in happy love" before joying in talking (p. 227). The lovey-dovey stuff is kept to a bare minimum, because mushy love stuff is harder to speak of than head-lopping bone-crushing liver-stabbing slaughtering.

The Final Grade

I give The Odyssey an A-. The A is for being the ur-roadtrip narrative; the - is for the boring bits and name dropping. Good job, Homer! Like The Scarlet Letter, I think high schoolers might appreciate this book more in a history class or a world literature class than in an English class. (When I was in high school, we read The Odyssey in an English class, even though The Odyssey has nothing to do with English per se. Today, such classes are called Language Arts, and The Odyssey would fit in just fine.)

Dragging my feet

OK, NO, I have NOT finished The Odyssey yet. I brought it with me to Germany thinking I might finish it there, but I also brought Siddhartha to read afterward, thinking it would be good to read a book by a German author in Germany. I found Siddhartha boring and puzzling in high school--really boring and really puzzling--and Siddarthaangst served as a deterrent to ever cracking open The Odyssey. I finally got back to the book last week, but got bogged down in the chapter about all the dead people Odysseus converses with. You'd think speaking with the dead would be pretty interesting, but Homer doesn't get into any zombie stuff, just tales of woe. There is a bit in there about the proper way to get the dead to provide the information you seek, but the methods don't always work (some dead people are pretty strong willed, plus there are certain Laws of Deadness they can't violate), and the whole chapter ends up being kind of list-y. In good faith, I took the book with me to a doctor's appointment for E, figuring I'd read in the waiting room--but I didn't read, and the book has been in the back seat of our car ever since. But I promise, PROMISE, I'll bring it inside one of these days and actually finish it.

Odyssey check point

The experiment continues.

After finishing The Scarlet Letter, I took a hard-earned romp through some creative nonfiction with David Sedaris' latest book, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. It lasted but the blink of an eye, but what a good blink it was. I wonder what the world would be like if U.S. high schoolers had to read Sedaris instead of Hawthorne. Would today's teens relate any better to OCD and colonoscopies than they do to Puritanism and adultery?

And now, boldly forward to what the Muse spoke to Homer of the adventurous man Odysseus. I'm a little more than a third of the way into The Odyssey, having read 9 of the 24 chapters. I'm sure I failed to appreciate, the first time around, that The Odyssey is more than just a story: it's a fascinating guide to geography, family trees, hospitality, manners, recipes, entertainment, deities, monsters, marriage, honor, games, and supplication etiquette.

I started to notice this in chapter 3. Chapters 1 and 2 had been relatively breezy (at least in comparison to The Scarlet Letter), but 3 got bogged down with lineage and places--things like "royal Onomatopoeius, son of Anacoluthon, fleet-footed king of Litotes, set sail on the seventh morning, and spurred by fair winds, returned a victor from war only to be slayed by his plotting uncle Anastrophe of Chiasmus, Anacoluthon's brother, who had, after much effort and with supplications to the deity of extra-marital affairs, successfully seduced Ecphonesis's wife Homiologia," etc. Dear reader(s), if your eyes didn't glaze over and you actually read every word of that, may the deities bless you.

Mixed into this came an excellent lesson on how to properly sacrifice a young heifer to Athene--information that clearly begged to be written down some 2800 years ago because it's something that frankly everyone needs to know. I really related to this part of the book because its how-to-itiveness reminded me of another, more contemporary household companion. Compare the following texts, the ancient and the modern (pardon the genealogy in the former):

Ancient: So after they had prayed and strewn the barley-meal, forthwith the son of Nestor, ardent Thrasymedes, drew near and dealt the blow. The axe cut through the sinews of the neck and broke the heifer's power. A cry went up from the daughters of Nestor, the sons' wives, and his own honored wife, Eurydice, the eldest of the daughters of Clyenus. The sons then raised the beast up from the trodden earth and held her so, the while Peisistratus, ever the foremost, cut the throat. And after the black blood had flowed and life had left the carcase, they straightaway laid it open, quickly cut out the thighs, all in due order, wrapped them in fat in double layers and placed raw flesh thereon. On billets of wood the old man burned them, and poured upon them sparkling wine, while young men by his side held five-pronged forks. So after the thighs were burned and the inward parts were tasted, they sliced the rest, and stuck it on the forks, and roasted all, holding the pointed forks in hand. (Homer, The Odyssey, ca. 8th c. BCE, trans. George Herbert Palmer, 1891, rev. 1912; Dover Thrift Editions: 1999, Chapter 3, p. 27.)

Modern: If possible, trap heifer 'possum and feed it on milk and barley cereals for 10 days before sacrificing to Athene killing. Gild horns Clean, but do not skin. Treat as for pig by immersing the unskinned heifer animal in sparkling wine water just below the boiling point. Test frequently with pointed five-pronged forks by plucking at the hair. When it slips out regularly, remove the heifer opossum from sparkling wine water and scrape. While scraping repeatedly, pour cool sparkling wine water over the surface of the heifer animal. Remove inward parts small red glands in small of the back and under each thigh foreleg between shoulder and ribs. Roast Parblanch about 20 minutes each, in two or three changes of sparkling wine water, then roast as for pork...Serve with turnip greens. (Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking, Bobbs-Merrill Company: 1975, rev. and exp. 1983, "Opossum," p. 515.)

Other how-to standouts in The Odyssey include:

How to select husband material for (a) yourself or (b) your daughter: 
(a) If Athene comes to you in a dream and reminds you that you're of marriageable age so wouldn't it be a good idea to go do laundry tomorrow morning lest your family's dirty clothes cause embarrassment, and a hungry naked guy washes up on the beach and you discover him in the shrubbery while you're playing catch while waiting for the laundry to dry, but it turns out he cleans up real nice, then declare admiringly, "Hearken, my white-armed women, while I speak. Not without purpose on the part of all the gods that hold Olympus is this man's meeting with the godlike Phaeacians. A while ago, he really seemed to me ill-looking, but now he is like the gods who hold the open sky. Ah, might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here, and content to stay!" (Chapter 6, p. 59)
(b) When you meet the shipwrecked stranger to whom your virtuous virgin daughter gave directions to your house, size up his noble dudeness, and then, even though you recognize it's a long shot, offer him your daughter and your wealth: "O father Zeus, Athene, and Apollo, that such a man as you, so like in mind to me, might take my child, be called my son-in-law, and here abide! For I would give you house and goods if you would like to stay." (Chapter 7, p. 68)

How to poke out the eye of a Cyclops with a stake: This is a real gross-out paragraph, not only for the graphic description of the deed itself, but also because the Cyclops, passed out drunk, vomits wine and bits of chewed up humans (whose brains, incidentally, had already been splattered on the cave floor once before, when Polyphemus slaughtered a pair of men for dinner the night before and another pair for breakfast. There's probably a rhetorical term for this sort of recapitulation, given that skull bashing and vomiting are both variations on the theme of How to Spread Human Brains on Cave Floors). I expect this level of goriness would appeal to pretty much any adolescent in any century; no wonder The Odyssey remains on high school reading lists. In the following excerpt, notice also the handy references to wooden ship building and tempering steel:

Out of his throat poured wine and scraps of human flesh; heavy with wine, he spewed it forth. And now it was I drove the stake under a heap of ashes, to bring it to a heat, and with my words emboldened all my men, that none might flinch through fear. Then when the olive stake, green though it was, was ready to take fire, and through and through was all aglow, I snatched it from the fire, while my men stood around and Heaven inspired us with great courage. Seizing the olive stake, sharp at the tip, they plunged it in his eye, and I, perched up above, whirled it around. As when a man bores ship-beams with a drill, and those below keep it in motion with a strap held by the ends, and steadily it runs; even so we seized the fire-pointed stake and whirled it in his eye. Blood bubbled round the heated thing. The vapor singed off all the lids around the eye, and even the brows, as the ball burned and its roots crackled in the flame. As when a smith dips a great axe or adze into cold water, hissing loud, to temper it, — for that is strength to steel,— so hissed his eye about the olive stake. A hideous roar he raised; the rock resounded; we hurried off in terror. He wrenched the stake from out his eye, all dabbled with the blood, and flung it from his hands in frenzy.(Chapter 9, p. 87)

And finally,

How to remind your audience to give you a big tip: Remember, you are da Bard. Whether the Muse motivates you to tell tangential tales about cuckolded deities or to provide brief recaps of the story so far, mention that there's nothing more satisfying than having a good bard around. Use adjectives like "sacred," "honored," "famous," "wondrous," and "noble" to describe folks in your profession, and have your hero compare you to deities thusly:

Then wise Odysseus answered him and said: "Mighty Alcinoüs, renowned of all, surely it is a pleasing thing to hear a bard like this, one who is even like the gods in voice. For more complete delight I think there cannot be than when good cheer possesses a whole people, and feasting through the houses they listen to a bard, seated in proper order, while beside them stand the tables supplied with bread and meat, and dipping wine from out the mixer the pourer bears it round and fills the cups. That is a sight most pleasing. (Chapter 9, p. 80)