The Odyssey by Homer: Day 29
Book 17, lines 329-606
“Athena stood / beside Odysseus, and prompted him / to go among the suitors, begging scraps, / to find out which of them were bad or good— / although she had no thought of saving any / out of the massacre which was to come.”
Is this a comment on Athena’s coldheartedness? Is her “no thought” of saving even the “good” suitors (who are “innocent” in Fagles and “decent” in Fitzgerald) the equivalent of having “no intention,” thereby making the investigation of guilt gratuitous? Or is it simply a comment on the impossibility of individual salvation in the coming carnage? A statement of the inevitable?
I wonder, too, what is behind Odysseus’s provoking of the suitors, especially Antinous of the “soft feet.” Is it clever strategy or stubborn temper? After all, “he could have walked / back to the threshold, no harm done.” And yet, through his eruption of violence against an apparent beggar, Antinous condemns himself unequivocally:
“Antinous has wounded me / because I came here hungry; hunger brings / such suffering to humans. If there are / gods of the poor, or Furies to avenge us, / may he be struck by death, instead of marriage!”
Odysseus gets to performatively ally himself, and his grievances against the suitors, with the sufferings of the downtrodden.
Telemachus’s sneeze is one of those moments for me when the temporal distance between us and the epic collapses. So familiar and ordinary—that loud and violent involuntary sneeze that erupts in another room and makes everyone flinch and laugh. It thrusts me back into my body, reading.
Join us on March 18 for a virtual discussion of The Odyssey with Stefania Heim
I'm surprised at how casually people talk about murdering other people. They practically brag about their intentions to kill people. I think this speaks to what happens when there is no functioning state. This society is ruled by warlords, essentially: there is no authority higher than the individual warlord on his estate, with his household of family and slaves. If he wants to kill somebody, who's going to stop him or punish him later?
So the suitors (elite men) and Odysseus and Telemachus (elite men) can plot to kill each other without much to worry about except whether the other party will kill them first.
This reminds me of something Jared Diamond wrote about in one of his books. I think it was "The World Until Yesterday." He says that in New Guinea, well into the 20th century, there were warring tribes more or less constantly at war, and people were even afraid to go outside to pee in the night lest they might be murdered by a neighboring group. An enormous number of people had arrow wounds or had died from them. But now New Guineans can go to the airport, for example, and not kill each other, because there is a state. It's a kind of miracle.
Thriller fans should be enjoying this. Our hero is literally in the midst of his enemies, and loved ones, disguised, hiding out as it were. Tension is high and violence feels inevitable to break out at any time. The set up feels so timeless.