Odyssey Books 13-15

[cahn]

Book 13: The Phaeacians sail Odysseus home, and Odysseus and Athena take turns lying to each other.

I didn't mention it before, but there was a prophecy way back in one of the early Phaeacian books about how Phaeacia one day would be destroyed because of their habit of helping travelers. And here we see it again: Poseidon isn't happy that the Phaeacians got Odysseus home safely and turns their ship to stone. King Alcinous says,

My father long ago
said that Poseidon hates us for our habit
of helping travelers get home again;
we got away with it, but he foretold
that one day great Poseidon would destroy
a ship on her return from such a journey;
the god would hide our city with a mountain.
And now the old man's words are coming true.
So all of you must listen to me now.
Stop helping visitors to travel onward.
We have to sacrifice twelve bulls, handpicked
for Lord Poseidon, so he may show mercy,
and not enfold our city in a mountain.

Ugh Greek gods!! Go Phaeacians for doing the right thing even when they know the god disapproves, but also, ugh! I am NOT OKAY with this. (But wow, it's great drama and Homer has succeeded in that I'll remember this afterwards!)
(I don't know whether we get any updates on whether they do get covered by a mountain despite their sacrifices to Poseidon -- I haven't seen any so far, but I kinda assume this is some kind of origin myth or something that the reader/listener is supposed to know.)

Anyway! They have left Odysseus sleeping in Ithaca. He wakes up, doesn't know where he is, and sees a shepherd who is actually Athena. They exchange total lies about who they are; Odysseus says he is from Crete and has a whole whopper of a story. (watersword, between this and the next chapter, now I see why you were rolling your eyes so much at his inability to tell the truth!) Athena thinks this is all very amusing and reveals herself.

Odysseus says,
"Goddess,
even the smartest man may find it hard
to recognize you. You disguise yourself
so many ways."

okay dude, idk why you are getting on Athena's case for this when you JUST did the EXACT SAME THING yourself?!

Anyway, Athena explains about the suitors and Odysseus says, "Oh! I would have died like Agamemnon/ in my own house, if you had not explained / exactly how things stand." HI THERE AGAMEMNON, again. I guess sucks that you didn't have a helpful god to tell you about Aegisthus!

Book 14: we finally meet a legit nice guy.

At the end of the last book, Athena disguised Odysseus as an old man, who then finds his swineherd Eumaeus, gives him a pack of lies about who he actually is (still claiming he is some Cretan, with a whole fabricated history) and begs a meal and shelter for the night from him. Eumaeus is possibly the nicest person in the Odyssey and gives him everything he asks for, though also extremely skeptical of beggar!Odysseus' claim that actual!Odysseus will come back. (I mean. It's been twenty years!)

Odysseus to Eumaeus, and his reply:
"If [actual!Odysseus] does not arrive,
and I am wrong, your slaves can drive me over
the cliff tops, so no other beggar tries
to trick you.
But the upright swineherd answerd,
"Yes, guest, I would be praised enormously
among all men, now and in times to come,
if I took you inside and welcomed you,
then murdered you!"

Ha! You I like, Eumaeus. Nice and snarky, a great combo!

Book 15: finally back to Telemachus!

Telemachus: I'd like to go home now, please. ASAP actually!

Menelaus (omg):
"Telemachus, I will not keep you here
if you are truly desparate for home.
I disapprove of too much friendliness
and of too much standoffishness. A balance
is best. To force a visitor to stay
is just as bad as pushing him to go.
Be kind to guests while they are visiting,
then help them on their way. So friend, remain
just till I fetch some splendid gifts to pile
onto your carriage. Wait till you see them!
I will instruct the women to prepare
a banquet in the hall from our rich stores.
Feasting before a long trip brings you honor;
it also makes good sense. And if you want
to have me travel with you all through Greece,
I shall yoke up my horses and escort you
through every town, and everywhere we go
we will be given gifts -- a fine bronze tripod,
a cauldron, or two mules, or golden cups."

Telemachus: Thank you, but no, actually, I wanted to go home ASAP.

So okay, Menelaus gets the hint the second time, but Telemachus still gets all the splendid gifts and the banquet. He's a nice dude! Just is a LOT sometimes.

They see an omen, and Helen, who has always seemed very sensible, makes a prophecy that apparently the gods have put in her heart, about Odysseus coming home.

Telemachus meets a guy who was descended from Melampus, and we get a little digression about this guy:

Melampus had been rich, and owned
a palace, but he left his home, escaping
from Neleus, a proud, important man,
who seized all his great wealth while he was trapped
and tortured in the house of Phylacus,
because a Fury put inside his mind
a dangerous obsession with the daughter
of Neleus.

It just makes me think about Sammy Tillerman, in the Tillerman series, talking about Greek myths and the idea that one can put the responsibility of how one acts onto the gods (or the Furies, I guess, but also see Helen talking about Aphrodite, etc.), and how in that book it's implicitly compared to the modern idea (that James T. has, though later rejects) of putting the responsibility of how one acts on one's genetic makeup. And also interesting to compare this to the awesomeness of the Phaeacians, who act in the way that feels right to them (is right) even knowing that Poseidon will eventually bring doom upon their heads for it. (No, I'm not over that. Why do you ask?)

(Also, Melampus eventually avenges hiself on Neleus, marries the chick, and then is "killed at Thebes / because his wife took bribes." Yeah, I really wonder what his wife thought about this whole sequence of events, and whether "took bribes" is not the whole story there...)

The chapter interlaces with Odysseus' POV in Eumaeus' house, where we get Eumaeus' story of being kidnapped and sold into slavery at a young age by a woman who was herself kidnapped and sold into slavery to Eumaeus' dad. Basically, sucks to be everyone in this story.

The ending of this part: I was really curious to see how Telemachus escaped from the suitors who were coming after him (back in the cliffhanger at the end of Book 4), but uhhhh those guys are not mentioned again?? Telemachus just docks in the harbor without incident??

Comments

[hidden_variable]

I really like Eumaeus! I remember him specifically thanks to my 10th grade English teacher dramatically intoning, "Eumaeus, O my swineherd!" whenever his name came up. But I had completely forgotten the multigenerational back-and-forth enslavement backstory--yikes.

[cahn]

Eumaeus is so great! Aw, your 10th grade English teacher sounds great.

It's really interesting how differently I'm reading it in many cases, and the different things I'm getting from the text, than if I'd read it, say, twenty years ago (and very different from when I read it as a teen, where apparently all I got out of it was "Odysseus had a lot of cool adventures.").

[selenak]

Eumaeus is probably the breakout characer of this epic in that I haven't come across someone, ancient or modern, who didn't love him.

I don't know whether we get any updates on whether they do get covered by a mountain despite their sacrifices to Poseidon -- I haven't seen any so far, but I kinda assume this is some kind of origin myth or something that the reader/listener is supposed to know.

Probably, but by the time the Greeks got literate, no one was sure anymore which island Scheria was supposed to be anyway. A popular theory was Corfu (or Corcyria, as the Romans called it), because it's just a 110 km from Ithaca, but equally you had people (in the ancient world already) arguing it couldn't have been an island this close because otherwise the Phaecians would have known Odysseus by sight, not just reputation, and clearly their island had to be much further away, maybe even in the Atlantic, so it needed their superships to go from there to Ithaca. Another theory was that it was Sicily. Most of the ancient world tourists went for Corcyria and were shown a rock that was supposedly the ship on which Odysseus was brought to Ithaca. Anyway, if it was, Corfu was spared the fate of being folded into a mountain.

Odysseus and Athena having their lie-a-thon: that's why he is her favourite.

HI THERE AGAMEMNON, again. I guess sucks that you didn't have a helpful god to tell you about Aegisthus!

Come to think of it, Agamemnon is one of the few main characters of the Iliad who doesn't have a god or goddess to protect them. Athena protects Odysseus and Diomedes, Achilles has his mother Thetis, of course, Hector as a Trojan and because he's himself as Apollo in his corner, and Aphrodite looks out for her son Aeneas and for Paris and Helen (of sorts). But the sole myth connecting a god(dess) with Agamemnon is him pissing off Artemis enough so she holds back the winds and he has to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to her.

The ending of this part: I was really curious to see how Telemachus escaped from the suitors who were coming after him (back in the cliffhanger at the end of Book 4), but uhhhh those guys are not mentioned again?? Telemachus just docks in the harbor without incident??


Homer clearly needed an editor reminding him of the cliffhanger he'd ended the previous Telemachus section with.

[cahn]

Eumaeus is so great!

Most of the ancient world tourists went for Corcyria and were shown a rock that was supposedly the ship on which Odysseus was brought to Ithaca. Anyway, if it was, Corfu was spared the fate of being folded into a mountain.

Thank you for elucidating this for me! I hope it was Corfu.

Come to think of it, Agamemnon is one of the few main characters of the Iliad who doesn't have a god or goddess to protect them.

Huh, that's interesting! What about Menelaus?

[watersword]

Iliad IV says Hera & Athena are helping Menelaus; Athena does save him specifically from Pandarus' bowshot (one of the many lovely epic similes), but both of them are generally pro-Achaean, so they'd be pro-Menelaus anyway. Hera mentions that both Mycenae and Sparta are particularly beloved to her, so presumably Menelaus has been sacrificing to her for basically all his life, but I can't remember textual evidence for her showing him particular favor.

[selenak]

Also, Hera as the Goddess of Marriage would see Menelaus as the injured party even if she weren‘t personally invested after the whole lost beauty contest to Aphrodite thing. But I note she doesn‘t do anything for him in any of the post Fall of Troy myths, either, i.e. after he has taken Helen back without vengeful reprisals. I do remember the retelling-for-kids version I first read as a child said that when Menelaus first saw Helen he intended to kill her but that Aphrodite (protecting Helen) then awoke the old love in his heart (and from thereon it was smooth sailing for Helen), but looking back now I have no idea which ancient source Gustav Schwab (the reteller) based this one - obviously not the Iliad which never got to this point. Euripides‘ The Trojan Women maybe, but Euripides makes the point without direct divine intervention.

[cahn]

The retelling I was thinking about was Marion Zimmer Bradley's Firebrand, which apparently lives rent-free in my head... Which must have been following Euripides, as it also makes the same point but without Aphrodite.

[watersword]

::cackles:: The Man Who Couldn't Stop Lying, I love him so much, he's so Character.

[cahn]

omg THIS GUY. I am now reading about him lying his head off to Penelope. It's like he can't help it! I'm now amazed that he told the truth in that one chapter, just like you were, lol!

[watersword]

I am so enjoying watching you discover my beloved fuckin' weirdo.