Five years ago, I read Homer’s Odyssey for the first time and hated the main character. I couldn’t get over Odysseus’s infidelity, especially contrasted with the unwavering love of his wife, Penelope. Sure, ancient Greek culture had different standards of morality, but that didn’t mean I had to be happy with Homer letting his hero have (on the surface) consequence-free affairs with goddesses. I returned to the Odyssey this year for my Moral Philosophy class. And this time, I appreciated it a lot more— not only in spite of the way Homer handles Odysseus’s bad choices, but because of it. As I read more closely, I noticed a deep significance to the events on Calypso’s and Circe’s islands. Odysseus’s character is more layered and complex than I’d realized! We first meet him on the island of Calypso, a goddess who offers immortality, safety and endless pleasure— if only he’ll stay on the island forever as her husband. Although Odysseus recognizes the attractiveness of the offer, he says “even so, I want to go back home, and every day I hope that day will come.” Odysseus desires his homeland, his wife, his son: Ithaca, Penelope, Telemachus. His desire runs so deep that he turns down an opportunity to join the ranks of the gods. And yet, this desire has not always been so strong. Earlier on his journey, Odysseus makes a brief stop on the island of another woman, Circe— a brief stop that morphs into a year-long love affair. Only at the prompting of his men does he finally leave her and resume the journey home. While with Circe, it seems that Odysseus has forgotten any love he might have once had for his home and his family and is content to linger, perhaps forever. But later, on Calypso’s island, Odysseus encounters an even stronger temptation: all the pleasures of Circe, with immortality to boot. But this time, he rejects it, taking the course he knows will lead to pain and eventual death. What changed? Asking this question doubled or tripled my ability to enjoy the Odyssey. Once I realized that the contrast between the two islands was a deliberate choice on Homer’s part, I sifted through the poem for an explanation. Here’s the answer I found: In between Circe and Calypso, Odysseus has an earth-shattering epiphany, one that reignites the fires of his love for Penelope and makes him determined to get home. This revelation takes place during a strange and seemingly pointless detour along his way: Odysseus’s journey to the land of the dead. When Homer recounts Odysseus’s time among the dead, he gives little insight into his hero’s inner thoughts. And yet, he sows his poem with clues about the crucial nature of the incident. When Odysseus’s men convince him that it’s time to leave the isle, Circe says “you need not remain here in my house against your will. But first you must complete another journey. Go to the house of Hades and the dreadful Persephone, and ask the Theban prophet, the blind Tiresias, for his advice.” Odysseus obeys her, but this detour raises a question: why does he have to go to the land of the dead? Once he returns, Circe gives him instructions on how to get back to Ithaca without any reference to the dead. Couldn’t she give those instructions and send Odysseus homeward immediately? Indeed she could, but she knows a deeper truth: if Odysseus does not go the dead, he will never make it home— not because he cannot return, but because he will not. He spent a year with Circe, a year during which he could’ve left at any time with a full crew and an excellent ship. This Odysseus is not the kind of man who would choose to leave Calypso’s island alone on a shoddy raft. For Odysseus to pass by the remaining obstacles barring him from Ithaca, he does not need new ability— he needs renewed desire. Later, during the final phase of his journey home, Odysseus will tell his story to his Phaeacian hosts using a structure that emphasizes his experience in the land of the dead and shows how it changed him. The structure is called chiasmus, and it consists of having the front half and back half of a story reflect each other, the events in the back paralleling the ones in the front, only in reverse order. At the center of the chiasmus is the key turning point, the event that marks the biggest change in the story. Odysseus makes the center of his chiasmus the land of the dead. After his experience among the dead, he encounters a series of challenges that reflect those he encountered earlier— but he reacts to them differently. The most obvious parallel lies in the two visits to Circe’s island that bookend the journey to the land of the dead. Pre-dead, he meets Circe and stays for a year; post-dead, he’s reluctant to stay even a day, and only agrees to remain that long because he needs to hear Circe’s instructions and his men need to refresh their strength. “I am a stubborn man,” he tells his Phaeacian audience. After the land of the dead, this stubbornness manifests itself as a revived yearning for home, one that goads Odysseus onward throughout the rest of his journey. Two other parallels illustrate Odysseus’s transformation: the temptation of the lotus eaters vs. the temptation of the sirens, and Cyclops vs. Scylla. Homer masterfully weaves in other parallels, but addressing them is beyond the scope of this essay. Let us first explore how the chiastic structure of the poem reveals Odysseus’s newfound determination to get home; then, we shall focus on the land of the dead to understand how that determination is reborn. The island of the Lotus-Eaters represents one of the earliest temptations that threatens to draw Odysseus away from his homeward course— as well as one of the weakest. After Odysseus’s men partake of the lotus, Odysseus recounts that “they wanted only to stay there, feeding on lotus with the Lotus-Eaters. They had forgotten home.” The Lotus-Eaters offer freedom in its crudest form— freedom from all memories of home, and thus from all desire and obligation to go back. Take the lotus, and you no longer have the grief, loneliness and fear that come from homesickness. You have everything you want right in front of you, as long as let you the isle of the luscious lotus become your new home. At its core, this temptation is the same one Odysseus begins to succumb to on Circe’s island. But it has not yet reached that sophisticated later form. For now, Odysseus is wise enough to see right through it. He says of his lotus-eating men, “I dragged them back in tears, forced them on board the hollow ships, pushed them below the decks, and tied them up.” Odysseus’s wisdom is enough to save his men, even against their will. This proves vital, for they will later save him, even against his will. The temptation of the sirens is in many ways the opposite of the temptation of the Lotus-Eaters— knowledge instead of forgetfulness. The sirens call to Odysseus, saying “All who pass this way hear honeyed song, poured from our moths. The music brings them joy, and they go on their way with greater knowledge, since we know everything.” The knowledge of the sirens is truly godlike, and something that no living man can claim to possess. Their offer tempts Odysseus greatly. While his men plug their ears so as to pass by safely, Odysseus himself listens, and finds himself enthralled. “Their song was so melodious,” he says. “I longed to listen more.” But even as the sirens exert their hold over him, his desire for his home determines his course. For Odysseus has been warned of the siren’s song by Circe, and taken steps to prevent it from leading him astray: he is tied to the mast, with his men under orders not to free him until they are past the sirens, no matter how hard he begs them. With the Lotus-Eaters, Odysseus tied up his men to allow them a chance at getting home; now, he allows his men to tie him up. In recognizing his weakness and inability to control himself when presented with the temptation of the sirens, Odysseus shows that his desire for home exceeds his desire for personal glory. This, too, contrasts sharply with an earlier episode— the encounter with the cyclops, in which Odysseus’s yearning for glory nearly stopped him from ever returning to Ithaca. The cyclops parallels the monster Scylla. Both eat six of Odysseus’s men, and in both cases Odysseus wonders if he can overcome them by force. But Odysseus demonstrates drastically different attitudes toward these two foes. He overcomes the cyclops with trickery, and can’t help but make his cleverness known. After poking out the cyclop’s eye and stirring him into a rage with taunting, he reveals his true identity: “Cyclops! If any mortal asks you how your eye was mutilated and made blind, say that Odysseus, the city-sacker, Laerte’s son, who lives in Ithaca, destroyed your sight.” At this point, the journey home has just begun. Part of Odysseus’s soul still lingers on the battlefields of Troy, where warriors fought for glory and the greatest thing a man could hope for was to make his deeds known. But Troy is sacked and the war is done. The time has come for Odysseus to bring order to Ithaca, not glory to himself. Odysseus pays the price for his boasting: now that he knows the identity of his attacker, the cyclops calls upon Poseidon to block his way home. This is the real beginning of Odysseus’s troubles. Odysseus has to cross the sea to get to Ithaca, and since Poseidon is the god of the sea, he’s the worst enemy Odysseus could possibly have. Many trials and temptations pass before Odysseus must face the cyclop’s parallel, the six-headed monster Scylla. But this time, a desire for glory and deeds of renown has no place— not when considered alongside Odysseus’s dogged determination to return home. The warrior-spirit hasn’t left Odysseus, as is evident when he asks Circe if he can defeat Scylla rather than letting her eat his men. But Circe’s reply puts that spirit in its place: “No, you fool! Your mind is still obsessed with deeds of war. But now you must surrender to the gods.” Odysseus accepts Circe’s rebuke. He realizes that he is no longer at Troy, that winning glory is no longer his primary goal. After losing six of his strongest men to Scylla, he says “That was the most heartrending sight I saw in all the time I suffered on the sea.” Yet he does not weep. Odysseus grieves his men, but he refuses to let it distract him from his course. His mind is fixed. Glory and grieving alike pale in importance next to his impending arrival at Ithaca. Odysseus has changed. His spirit is reoriented toward Ithaca, his desires stoked into a fire that propels him ever homeward. Even once he has lost his ship and all his men, he longs to get home, longs for it more than the everlasting life and pleasure of Calypso’s island. At last, we have reached the final question of this essay: how was this desire formed? What happened in the land of the dead that so changed Homer’s wandering hero? Odysseus goes to the land of the dead to hear a prophesy from Tiresias. But when he retells the story, he emphasizes the other spirits whom he speaks too— specifically, the spirits of women. Odysseus names no less than fifteen women who speak to him in the land of the dead, and goes on to say “I cannot name each famous wife and daughter I saw there; holy night would pass away before I finished.” In fact, he originally ends his story of the dead with these women, and only at his host’s insistence does he tell of the men who spoke to him. Clearly these women make an impression on Odysseus. In fact, they are the reason behind his final, irrevocable decision to go home. Meeting these women among the dead snaps Odysseus out of his own form of deadness, a deadness toward Penelope and Telemachus, a deadness that, as we shall see, robs him of truly living even while he yet breathes. The first female spirit to speak to Odysseus is that of his own mother. The sight of her shocks Odysseus as if he’d taken a spear-thrust, for he did not know that his mother had died. The reason behind her death drives the spear in deeper, for it makes clear that Odysseus’s absence has had irrevocable costs— costs he could easily have set aside during those ten long years at Troy. “It was missing you, Odysseus, my sunshine; your sharp mind and your kind heart,” his mother says. “That took sweet life from me.” Until now, Odysseus has been well-supplied with plausible justifications for remaining on Circe’s island. Ten years is a long time; ten years of brutal warfare, longer. He deserves some rest. Besides, Penelope has begun to fade from his mind, and Telemachus is a stranger to him. Who knows if Penelope even cares about him after so long? Perhaps she’s taken a new husband. But his mother’s revelation changes all that. Ithaca, so long consigned to dusty corners of his mind, bursts into the light. He cannot escape the truth: his home needs him, and suffers in his absence. More ghosts follow, and they all have one thing in common: they are “the daughters and wives of warriors.” As they tell their stories, another common thread emerges. Most of these women had poor relationships with their husbands in life, and most of them met tragic ends. Some, like Iphimedeia and Tyro, have affairs with gods. Their children are powerful— but never know their fathers. As he listens, Odysseus could not help but be reminded of one of who would one day join their ranks: Penelope. She, too, is the wife of a great warrior; she, too, is separated from her husband; she, too, has a son who has never known a father. The stories told by the ghostly wives raise a single, burning question: which story will Penelope tell? Although he has not seen his wife for over a decade, Odysseus receives one small hint about the answer to that question. He asks his mother, “tell me what my wife is thinking, and her plans. Does she stay with our son and focus on his care, or has the best of the Achaeans married her?” Odysseus seems to consider Penelope’s faithfulness no greater than his own. He believes she could have taken the easy path— the path of remarriage to a wealthy and powerful suitor. Given her husband’s willingness to linger a year in the arms of another woman, it would be hard to hold such a decision against her. But his mother’s answer reveals a far different reality: “She stays firm. Her heart is strong. She is still in your house. And all her nights are passed in misery, and days in tears. But no one has usurped your throne.” Penelope’s faithfulness to Odysseus outstrips Odysseus’s faithfulness to her. In the face of mounting pressure and dwindling hope, Penelope still looks out for her husband, shaping her every action around the belief that he’s alive and that he will return to her. Suddenly, the stakes are clearer than ever before. If Odysseus fails to return, he betrays Penelope’s love and kill the hope she’s nourished for so long. Love is what drives Odysseus ever onward toward home. Love is what he finds on Ithaca that he finds nowhere else along the journey— the newly-awakened love given him by Telemachus, the patient love from his loyal servants, the grief-stricken love of his father, and above all the unyielding love burning bright within Penelope. And how does he know Penelope loves him? Because she’s willing to suffer for him. The spirit of Odysseus’s mother emphasizes Penelope’s tears, tears she sheds every day. Penelope’s willingness to continue suffering for Odysseus’s sake earns her praise throughout the poem. For twenty year she waits, holding out against pressure to remarry, and for twenty years she offers love to Odysseus that Calypso could never match. This is why Odysseus admits that, on the surface, Calypso’s island has more attraction than Ithaca— and chooses to go back to Ithaca anyway. Calypso cannot show love for Odysseus because she cannot suffer for him. Her island is so abundant that even another god is amazed when he sees it. In the midst of all this luxury, Odysseus can never be more than a trophy to her. She saves him from the sea and provides him everything his flesh could desire— at no cost to herself. She is beautiful and powerful, and yet Penelope— a weak, mortal woman— makes her jealous. She tries to brush her off, saying to Odysseus, “If you understood how glutted you would be with suffering before you reach your home, you would stay here with me and be immortal—though you might still wish to see that wife you always pine for.” Despite seven years of working her wiles, Calypso cannot dethrone Penelope from her place in Odysseus’s mind and heart. In the land of the dead, Odysseus discovers an unforeseen depth to Penelope’s love. It burns itself into his mind, he cannot escape it. The knowledge of that love prevents him from making his home in any of his stops before Ithaca. Although he finds himself overwhelmed at times, he cannot rest until he returns to Ithaca and makes right everything that’s gone wrong in his absence.
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Progress on Doombear, Rough draft:10%
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"In truth, by leaving, I was seeking only one thing. A journey."
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