Honor

The world of the Odyssey and today's world are two very different worlds.

Values:

Ancient:  Honor, Courage, Bravery, Heroism, Nobility, Aristocracy.

Modern:  Aspiration, Enterprise, Efficiency, Tolerance, Democracy.

High-status occupations:

Ancient:  Soldier, Warrior, Priest, King.

Modern:  Investment Banker, Lawyer, Politician, Pro Athlete.

And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming,

after Poseidon has smashed their strong-built ship on the open water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy seas,

and only a few escape the gray water landward

by swimming, with a thick scurf of salt coated upon them,

and gladly they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil;

so welcome was her husband to her as she looked upon him,

and she could not let him go from the embrace of her white arms.

Now Dawn of the rosy fingers would have dawned on their

weeping,

had not the gray-eyed goddess Athene planned it otherwise.

She held the long night back at the outward edge, she detained Dawn of the golden throne by the Ocean, and would not let her harness her fast-footed horses who bring the daylight to people:

Lampos and Phaethon, the Dawn's horses, who carry her.

Then resourceful Odysseus spoke to his wife, saying: "Dear wife, we have not yet come to the limit of all our trials. . . .   

- Odysseus XXIII, 233-49

Odysseus, one of the meanings of whose name is "trouble," cannot rest. He will soon go off to complete his adventures.

You can go back to the amniotic sea, or you can make your surface shining and impenetrable, so no one knows you. You think you can find unalloyed happiness. Some of you are hermetically sealed; some of you are going to be terrified if you are found out. Look, I don't know why you can't just have joy. But if you're going to be truly recognized and experience joy, it has to involve trouble and pain. You can be Calypsoed or Odysseused, buried or troubled.

Some advice! Some advice to give the future leaders of the Western world, the hegemonic lawgivers, the triumphalist accountants of the white imperium!

The Odyssey is an after-the-war poem, a plea for relief and gratification, and it turns, at times, into a sensual, even carnal, celebration.

...when great Odysseus had bathed in the river and washed from his body

the salt brine, which clung to his back and his broad shoulders, he scraped from his head the scurf of brine from the barren salt sea.

But when he had bathed all, and anointed himself with olive oil, and put on the clothing this unwedded girl had given him, then Athene, daughter of Zeus, made him seem taller

for the eye to behold, and thicker, and on his head she arranged the curling locks that hung down like hyacinthine petals.

So Athene gilded with grace his head and his shoulders, and he went a little aside and sat by himself on the seashore, radiant in grace and good looks; and the girl admired him.

- Odyssey VI, 235-37

MGM in its heyday could have done no more for Gable. The elderly Homer writes about sensations and domestic comforts, about physical happiness and relations between people. His heroes have gone from fighting the war to telling stories about it, from asserting identity on the battlefield to asserting it at the feast table and in bed. The body, abused, torn, sated only by killing and savage meat-and-wine feasts in the Iliad, now requires its normal daily tending and comfort. Odysseus needs a bath and needs to get back into his own bed; his elderly father, Laertes, who has left the palace in Ithaca in disgust, and now lives in the country on the floor of a hovel, needs a winding sheet to be buried in. We are all in need of a home, an enclosure, tightly wound around us, and friends.

And now comes the surprise, the source of the Odyssey's amazing power. It turns out the poem is a huge black comedy. Just when the exhausted heroes most want rest and comfort and pleasure, they find terror and entrapment. The Odyssey is the most famous of the Nostoi, or homecoming poems—epics about the return of the heroes of the Trojan War. A disastrous return in many cases, as the men, punished by the gods for some crime or dereliction of worship, suffer catastrophic weather and shipwreck, or, landing home at last, die at the hands of treacherous wives.

In the Odyssey, you either eat, or you are eaten, and if you eat, you had better eat the right thing and in the right place. Sensual pleasures—eating the lotus blossoms that bring peace or the cattle of the sun god, which brings punishment, or yielding to the island nymphs and sirens—can destroy you or sap your will to go home.

Yes, a cruel joke! The gigantic poem is built around an excruciating paradox: The temptation to rest, to fill your stomach is almost overwhelming, yet the instant you rest, you are in danger of losing consciousness or life itself. In the end, short of death or oblivion, there is no rest, a state of being that might be called the Western glory and the Western disease. That Homer cannot attain peace—that there's something demonic, unappeasable, and unreachably alien in the spirit of the Odyssey as well as in the Iliad—has not much figured in the epic's popular reputation as a hearty adventure sage. It was a finer, more exhilarating and challenging work than most people thought.

- David Denby