Odyssey Books 20-24

[cahn]

Book 20: this book is clearly here just to heighten the tension before The Big Fight happens. Various people show up and sometimes they chat. The people who seem to miss Odysseus most (besides of course his family) are his servants, who mostly really want him back. (As others pointed out to me, an interesting contrast to his sailors... who are all gone now, anyway...) The suitors have a banquet, at which Telemachus actually speaks up more. (Go Telemachus!) Then we get this bit:

Athena turned the suitors' minds; they laughed
unstoppably. They cackled, and they lost
control of their own faces. Plates of meat
began to drip with blood. Their eyes were full
of tears, and they began to wail in grief.

Okay, now that is creepy. But the suitors get over it very quickly. Apparently this is not as weird to them as it was to me? If this happened at a party I was at, I'd make my excuses and leave the party!

Book 21: Penelope!! My fave! She sets up the contest with the bow: whoever strings it easily and sheets through twelve axes will marry her. (It is SO my headcanon that she absolutely knows who Odysseus is at this point, and is doing this because she knows, because it's a way better story that way!)

The first [after Telemachus]
was Leodes, their holy man, who always
sat in the farthest corner, by the wine-bowl.
He was the only one who disapproved
of all their bullying.

But not enough, as the narrative makes clear later, to just leave. Anyway he tries and fails and says

This bow will take away
courage, life-force, and energy from many
noble young men; but better we should die,
than live and lose the goal for which we gather
in this house every day.

That goal being, of course, to marry Penelope. Uh. OK, if you say so, Leodes...

Odysseus to his cowherd and swineherd: So. What if -- just speaking hypothetically, mind you -- Odyessus were actually here? How would you feel about that?

This guy! Anyway, they are both totaly pro-Odysseus and anti-suitors, and Odysseus FINALLY lets them know who he is. He gives them some instructions, including this frankly scary one:

Command the women
to shut up tight the entrance to the hall,
and go to their own quarters; if they hear
men screaming or loud noises, they must not
come out, but stay there quietly, and work.

Meanwhile, all the other suitors fail at even stringing the bow, much less the shooting part. Odysseus asks for a turn, and the suitors deny him a turn, saying he's getting too big for his britches.

Penelope:
And do you think
that if this stranger's hands were strong enough
to string the bow, he would take me away
to marry him and live with him? Of course not!
He does not even dream of such a thing.

Ha ha, of course Odysseus would not take her away, this is his house! SHE TOTALLY KNOWS WHO HE IS. I'M JUST SAYING.

And theeeeeen his plan comes to fruition: the swineherd gives him the bow (encouraged by Telemachus when the suitors scare him) as pre-arranged, his old nanny Eurycleia is told to lock the doors as before, and
Odysseus, with ease,
strung the great bow. He held it in his right hand,
and plucked the string, which sang like swallow-song,
a clear sweet note.

And the arrow goes through each axe head.

Book 22:
Odysseus ripped off his rags. Now naked,
he leapt upon the threshold with his bow
and quiverfull of arrows.

Okay, uh, I realize this is because I have the mind of a teenager and also not the mind of an ancient Greek, but I totally laughed here. Like... really?? He's just standing there naked with his bow??

Anyway, this is of course the point at which Odysseus declares himself and takes revenge. The suitors try to fight but Odysseus keeps shooting them. Telemachus, thinking it's a bit awkward and also maybe not so safe to be NAKED (I'm just saying), gets armor for himself and his dad. The goatherd also gets to the storage room and gets armor for the suitors, but our heroes catch him and string him up (literally).

Anyway, Odysseus kills pretty much everyone. Leodes the priest asks to be spared, but Odysseus remembers perfectly well from the previous Book that he was all cool with this idea of maybe marrying Penelope, so he kills him. The poet Phemius askes to be spared, and Telemachus confirms he's innocent. (I wonder if it's a coincidence that it's a poet who is innocent... haha, no I don't.) Also, he says, they should save the house boy, Medon.

Medon was sensible: he had been hiding
under a chair, beneath a fresh cowhide,
in order to escape from being killed.

I like this guy! Very sensible, indeed.

Now -- and I knew this coming in, I believe selenak mentioned it -- the slave girls who slept with the suitors are made to clean up all the dead bodies, and then Telemachus hangs them. (And cuts off various body parts of the goatherd.) The narrative fully believes the girls are guilty and super deserve it (ugh), though selenak pointed out that the chance the girls had a choice in the matter are... very low.

They gasped,
feet twitching for a while, but not for long.

Book 23:
Eurycleia: Odysseus is alive!
Penelope: You poor old thing, the gods have made you crazy.

In my headcanon she is like, "Of course I already know this, but I'm not gonna give you or him the satisfaction!" (Also, I like the translation "Evilium.") She does react happily when Eurycleia keeps pressing the point, but then goes back to being "yeah, not true."

If this is really him,
if my Odysseus has come back home,
we have our ways to recognize each other,
through secret signs known only to us two.

Odysseus smiles and is content with this, apparently, and they turn to the problem of what to do about the fact that they've killed a bunch of the island's young men, which is bound to make some people unhappy, and he gets dressed and washed and looks like himself again. And Penelope tells Eurycleia to pull out the bedstead.

She spoke to test him, and Odysseus
was furious , and told his loyal wife,

"Woman! Your words have cut my heart! Who moved
my bed?"

because, of course, as he announces to everyone, he made their bed out of a tree.

Now I have told the secret trick, the token.
But woman, wife, I do not know if someone --
a man -- has cut the olive trunk and moved
my bed, or if it is still safe.

In my headcanon (textual evidence: Odysseus smiling at the mention of secret signs), this is all, or mostly, a dramatic performance for the onlookers; Odysseus knows Penelope knows. I suppose you're going to tell me it's just one of those textual things where the poet was smooshing together older versions, but that's my headcanon, so there.

Anyway, regardless of that, Penelope/Odysseus are made for each other, and that's clearly the case regardless of whether my headcanon is right or not!

Odysseus: But also Tiresias told me there were other labors I have to do. But let's go to bed now!
Penelope: Uh, no. You can't leave it there, you gotta tell me now.
Odysseus: "You really are/ extraordinary. Why would you make me tell you/ something to cause you pain?"
Penelope: No, really. Better to get it over with.
Odysseus: blah blah blah make a sacrifice. If I do that, I will grow old.
Penelope (sensibly!): If the gods allow you / to reach old age in comfort, there is hope / that there will be an end to all our troubles.

Then they have sex and tell stories to each other all night of their respective adventures. Truly they are meant for each other!

Book 25: You thought we were done? I thought we were done. We are not done.

Hermes takes the spirits of the suitors to the underworld where they meet -- wait for it -- Agamemnon! (And Achilles and some of our other Iliad homeboys.) Because GODS FORBID we should not bring up Aegithus's murdering at every point possible!

Agamemnon: Achilles, you were glorious and at least you died gloriously. While I got murdered by AEGITHUS UGH. Hey, you kids over there, what happened to all you boys? Did you die in a better way than getting MURDERED BY AEGITHUS?
Ampimedon: Yeah, let me tell you a story. Remember Penelope? We wanted to marry her, she absolutely did not want to marry us and did that loom trick. Then Odysseus came back and killed us all.
Agamemnon: The moral of the story here is that Penelope is a hero NOT LIKE MY WIFE, who MURDERED HER OWN HUSBAND.
Me: Agamemnon, I see that like your brother Menelaus you can get awfully fixated. Although to be fair, if I'd got murdered by my wife and her lover, maybe I'd be fixated on that too.

Her fame will live
forever, and the deathless gods will make
a poem to delight all those on earth
about intelligent Penelope.

Well, score! I move that this book be called the Penelopiad!

I think that is, FINALLY, the last mention of Aegithus!

Odysseus goes to see his dad Laertes, and for no reason I can determine "thought it best to start / by testing him with teasing and abuse." What is WRONG with this boy. Anyway, he lies through his teeth, as usual, and then reveals himself. At this point the fathers of the slain boys try to fight against Odysseus, but he, Laertes, and Telemachus fight against them. They are about to kill them all but then Athena intervenes and tells them all to stop.

Her voice
struck them with pale green fear and made them drop
their weapons.

(I love that "pale green fear"!) Odysseus tries not to stop (oh Odysseus) but then Zeus also sends down a thunderbolt, and Athena says,

"Odysseus, you are adaptable;
you always find solutions. Stop this war,
or Zeus will be enraged at you.
He was
glad to obey her. THen Athena made
the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace
for futhre times--still in her guise as Mentor.

Yeah, I bet he was not actually glad to obey her, but that's the end!
I really liked it! What a ride. And OH ODYSSEUS. And yay Penelope!

Comments

[cahn]

Hm. So -- if this isn't a terrible barbaric thing to say (I'm sure it is a terrible barbaric thing to say, lol) -- I think I actually like the Aeneid less now that I've read the Odyssey -- because the Odyssey does cool things that the Aeneid doesn't do. Like, where are the awesome Penelope-types in the Aeneid?? We get Dido, who does start out being awesome but then it all just goes sideways from there, we get Lavinia who may or may not get two words in the entire thing?? The Odyssey has cool puzzles, like Penelope's loom and the tree-bed! The Odyssey has these (small, but tantalizingly still there) parts that don't glorify war, like Achilles' words in the underworld, which I don't remember in the Aeneid...

But maybe this just means I don't remember the Aeneid well enough and I need to read it again? :) Like, I thought the athletic games were cool in the Odyssey because they were saying things about Odysseus as well as his hosts, whereas I found the athletic games in the Aeneid deathly boring, but that may have been a factor of having read the Aeneid ten years ago more than anything else?

[selenak]

Hey, nobody likes all the epics. (Or is obliged to.) The Aeneid's high time of popularity were the centuries of the Middle Ages plus the early Renaissance, but it didn't really take a dive until the 18th century, not so much for content reasons but because there were far more people around able to read Latin (among the tiny population percentage which could read, that is) than there were people who could read Greek. You can tell, for example, that Dante was unfamiliar with the Odyssey and the Iliad and knew the characters only via their Aeneid versions. (Hence Odysseus/Ulisses being a boo, hiss kind of figure in the Divina Comedia.) Then with the 18th century the Latin reading declined while there were actual translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey into English and German and French etc, and suddenly everyone was "rediscovering" Homer and in then in the 19th century applying a distinctly romantic and nationalitic view, i.e. Homer is the real deal and the true voice of the people and Virgil is already decadent city dweller writing and so forth. Proving that the both of them, Homer and Virgil, are always regarded through contemporary views, and hey, same here.

(I like the Odyssey better than both the Iliad and the Aeneid, too, but I think the Aeneid has the more interesting-to-me-personally-descendants, so to speak: notably Watership Down, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica and Black Ships (which solves your female character problem by making the Sibyl who goes with Aeneas to the Underworld into a main and our pov character who is one of the Trojan women).

As for your other points: the Aeneid does have riddles - the advice Aenaes and his band of refugees get early on in Delos to seek out their "old mother" (when they ask where they should settle down) and which Aeneas' Dad Anchises interprets as meaning Crete as the home of the Great Mother Kybele turns out to mean Italy instead (I forgot how and why, it's been so many years...), and equally the prophecy that the exiled Trojans will eat their tables will turn out not to mean they're driven insane by starvation but that they will eat the hardcore Italian bread they put the other food onto first.

(There's also the metatextual riddle and eternal debate starting in the 20th century as to whether the whole thing is shameless Augustan propaganda or whether Virgil was really sneaky and subversive and worked in some critique, and whether or not the fact he never finished the epic and wanted it to be destroyed means he despaired of the subject or that he was just doing a Kafka (and being ignored, like Kafka.) Which brings me to....

Tidbits that don't glorify war: well, there's the much debated non-ending of Aenaeas, after defeating Turnus, going from his intention of sparing him to killing him after he has surrendered when he sees Turnus' wearing the armor of his dead friend. Now there's some obvious Iliad reminiscence of Achilles there (and if the first part of the Aeneid is Odyssey fanfiction, the second part is Iliad fanfiction, with poor Lavinia getting far less personality than Homer's Helen), though Achilles' going against the warrior code isn't that he doesn't spare Hector (nor does Hector ask him to) but how he treats his dead body. But it is still a distinctly non-heroic moment for the poem's central hero.

On the sympathetic side, there's also, contrasting with this, far earlier, Aeneas rescueing an old enemy, one of Odysseus' men whom Odysseus has left behind in the cave to be eaten by Polyphem (yep, Virgil really has it in for the guy from Ithaca), putting rescueing another human being over feuding.

And not about war, but subverting the poem's "founding the city that will lead to the founding of Rome has to come before hanging out with Queens located in Northern Africa, and of course none of us is thinking here of Cleopatra and Antony, dead only a measly twenty plus years" message re: Aeneas leaving Dido, there's the moment in the Underworld where he sees her, but she doesn't forgive him, instead, she ignores him. It's an interesting way of letting Dido have the last (unspoken) word, which given she stands in for two traditional Roman enemies - Carthage and Cleopatra in her capacity as a foreign queen temporarily distracting a proto--roman - definitely is not Augustan propaganda.

Re: female characters: Camilla the Amazon like Queen of the Volscans gets an entire book devoted to her. (Ursula LeGuin clearly suspects her of being Virgil's fave, since in her novel Lavinia she has Virgil lament he paid more attention to Camilla than to Lavinia.)

I entirely agree about the respective athletic games, and the way they say something about Odysseus and his hosts in the Odssey and come across as purely ornamental in the Aeneid. Boys and their sports?

[cahn]

Oh, I do like the Aeneid a lot, sorry that did not come through! (It's the Iliad that I rather dislike, although now I feel like I should find the Emily Wilson translation and see if that changes my mind. I suspect I will be even more put off by all the bro posturing, though.) It's just that, even though I quite liked it when I read it, you asked about how my feelings changed after the Odyssey, and I sort of feel -- and I realize this isn't particularly rational, but it's a feeling -- like Virgil ought to have done better having the Odyssey to pattern off of, somehow? :) (It reminds me of the feeling of when one reads (or otherwise consumes) a canon and then finds a fanfic for it that doesn't quite scratch the exact itch one had in mind.)

But yeah, your comment points out something interesting to me, which is that one thing I haven't done (yet) is go back and read Dante all the way through recently, and certainly not since reading the Odyssey -- because a lot of what I adored about the Aeneid is reading what it was that Dante was working off of, Dante being my absolute fave. So I'd totally forgotten Odysseus/Ulysses in the Inferno until you mentioned it! And, heh, because of Dante I suppose I also agree that I admire the Aeneid's literary descendants more. And then as you mentioned there's Le Guin's book, which is on my shelf staring at me. (Though I also remember really liking the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? when I watched it quite a while ago.)

Aenaeas, after defeating Turnus, going from his intention of sparing him to killing him after he has surrendered when he sees Turnus' wearing the armor of his dead friend.

Yeah! And at least Achilles gives the body back, eventually :P

But OH how did I forget about Camilla?? Who was my absolute favorite! :D Yes, there's that!