The Odyssey by Homer: Day 4
Book 4, lines 1-346
Menalaus offers a crash course in “xenia” (as Wilson describes it, a word that means both “hospitality” and “friendship”—the root of “xenophobia”) when the strangers arrive unannounced at his door at the absolute worst time—midway through his children’s wedding feast. Xenia here is an acknowledgment of past gifts bestowed and safety maintained; also, selfishly, a hedge against future risk. Menalaus is fervent, practically pedantic, in his insistence:
“We two were fed by many different hosts / before returning home. As we may hope / for Zeus to keep us safe in future times, / untack their horses! Lead them in to dine!”
Telemachus searches for knowledge of his father (not just knowledge of his whereabouts) across these early books. Maya Phillips’s poem “Telemachus” opens:
“Fathered by rumor, raised / by ghost, you’ve learned // to love the slimness / of the shadow from which you grew, // the glory of the myth you inherit— / you can build a father out of this.”
Ocean Vuong’s poem “Telemachus” foregrounds the implicit, multidirectional violence in this act of filial resurrection and in the sheer fact that it is necessary:
“Like any good son, I pull my father out / of the water, drag him by his hair / through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail / the waves rush in to erase.”
It is striking that Helen—famously objectified, spoil of war—takes such control of this scene. Dosing the men with “powerful magic drugs,” she proceeds to tell her own, and Odysseus’s, story. (Note how Menelaus makes her the problem again almost immediately in the next few lines.)
Join us on March 18 for a virtual discussion of The Odyssey with Stefania Heim
“The Trojan women keened in grief, but I / was glad—by then I wanted to go home.” (IV.260-1)
There’s so much happening in this sentence. Helen aligning herself more with the men of Greece than the women of Troy is a great insight into her role as a wealthy, treasured woman, while at the same time throwing doubt onto the circumstances of her years in Troy with Paris. “By then” implies that at one time, she did not want to go home and was glad to be there—that at one time, she would have felt deeply for the keening Trojan women, as one of her own. An incredible choice for the translation here. The story is never black and white, and though Helen plays a small role in the Odyssey, Wilson’s decision to ascribe her an ounce of agency and doubt is just brilliant.
I loved the Helen in this passage—it strikes me that she has a particular ability to see people’s true identities—recognizing Telemachus in her palace and recognizing Odysseus at Troy. That plus her potions… magical Helen undoing the gods’ works?