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The wandering Ulysses

The Language Lobby by Carl Muller

Many of us watched and were impressed by the TV version of "Odysseus" that was "unveiled" (to use a hack TV presenter's overworked word) recently. But the film had its usual pyrotechnics and more of that savage mien than Homer would have ever indented. In the Iliad, there was an electrical atmosphere of doom.

The Odyssey, however, is written in milder style. In fact, one author suggested that the Iliad was written for men, the Odyssey for women. True, there is one atrocious episode of revenge and torture, but the people of the epic mild; and there is a great deal of "domestic' interest. So there IS a temperamental gap between the poems although the Homeric quality of each cannot be denied.

Troy had fallen; Helen had returned to Sparta with Menelaus; the heroes had gone home - but of Ulysses there is no sign. His wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, wait with anxious hearts.

It was folly to kill and eat the oxen of the Sun. Ulysses and his men were condemned to suffer and Ulysses was cast away on a lonely island where the nymph Calypso lived. She does her best to make him forget wife and home and we again see how the gods and goddesses get into the act.

God of the seas, Neptune, wanted Ulysses to suffer the torments of his watery domain. He had never forgiven Ulysses for killing Polyphemus - the one-eyed ogre he had fathered. But other gods and goddesses seize their chance when Neptune is away, to arrange for Ulysses' safe passage home. Mercury tells Calypso to release Ulysses.

Minerva appears to Telemachus, bidding him to seek news if his father in Sparta which he does. In Sparta, he is received with great joy. Helen and Menelaus weep over the great days and the manner of the fall of Troy.

We also see, in Homer's lines, Helen's wit as her suspicions of the famous Wooden Horse. She tells of how she walked round it, struck the hollow belly with her hands and imitated the voice of each Greek prince so well that the men, crouched within the horse, would have cried out in answer or even leaped out if Ulysses hadn't restrained them.

Ulysses' voyage from Calypso's isle is once again dashed by the return of Neptune who, in a rage, raised a fearful storm that sweeps the hero overboard. He is washed up, battered and naked on the shore of Paaeacia where he is found by the princess Nausicaa who clothes and feeds him and directs him to her father's palace.

In "The Odyssey Done in English Prose" by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (Macmillan), we have Nausicaa's directions to Ulysses:

"When thou art within the shadow of the halls and the court, pass quickly through the great chamber, till thou comest to my mother, who sits at the hearth in the light of the fire, weaving yarn of sea-purple stain, a wonder to behold. Her chair is leaned against a pillar, and her maidens sit behind her.

And there my father's throne leans close to hers, wherein he sits and drinks his wine, like an immortal. Pass thou by him, and cast thy hands about my mother's knees, that thou mayest see quickly and with joy, the day of thy returning, even if thou art from a very far country. If but her heart be kindly disposed towards thee, then is there hope that thou shalt see thy friends, and come to thy well-builded house, and to thine own country".

King Alcinous receives Ulysses and urges him to tell of his adventures.... and what a saga that is: the sacking of the city of Cicones' the land of the lotus-eaters where some of his men wished to remain. He relates:

"Whatsoever of them did eat
The honey-sweet fruit of the lotus,
Had no more wish to bring tidings
Or to come back, but there he chose
To abide with the lotus-eating men,
Ever feeding on the lotus and forgetful
Of his homeward way."

He then told of his encounter with the one-eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus; the visit to the god AEolus, who lived on a floating island; then to the island of AEaea where the enchantress Circe turned his men into swine.

The dramatic adventures have their climax with his decent into Hades where he talks with the seer Tiresias, meets the ghosts of his mother, Agememnon and Achilles, sees Minos judging the dead, shudders at the everlasting punishments that Tityus, Tantalus and Sisyphus endure, and his meeting with Hercules. He then tells of the voyage to the narrow strait of Scylla and Charybdis:

"I kept pacing through my ship, till the surge loosened the sides from the keel, and the wave swept her along stript of her tackling, and brake her mast clean off at the keel. Now the backstay fashioned of an oxhide had been flung thereon; therewith I lashed together both keel and mast, and sitting thereon I was borne by the ruinous winds.

"Then verily the West Wind ceased to blow with a rushing storm, and swiftly withal the South Wind came, bringing sorrow to my soul, that so I might again measure back that space of sea, the way to deadly Charybdis. All the night was I borne, but with the rising of the sun I came to the rock of Scylla, and to dread Charybdis.

Now she had sucked down her salt sea water, when I was swung up on high to the tall fig-tree, whereto I clung like a bat, and could find no sure rest for my feet nor place to stand, for the roots spread far below and the branches hung aloft out of reach, long and large, and overshadowed Charybdis.

Steadfast I clung till she should spew forth mast and keel again; and late they came to my desire.... And I let myself drop down hands and feet, and plunged heavily in the midst of the waters beyond the long timbers, and sitting on these, I rowed hard with my hands....Thence for nine days was I borne, and on the tenth night the gods brought me nigh to the isle of Ogygia."

We come to that terrible final movement - Ulysses' return home, dressed as a beggar.

He is treated as a vagabond, but when the reckoning comes, it is not a battle but a massacre. This has been considered by many scholars as inhuman, inartistic, and "un-Greek". Yet, after 3,000 years, we still read the epic and, as Andrew Lang says in "Homer and the Epic" (Longmans):

They hear like ocean on a western beach

The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Prose translations have never given the Odyssey that poetic beauty and Homeric grandeur. The translations of Chapman, Pope, Matthew Arnold and Cowper are too literary to convey the sense of the plain thinking and plain diction of Homer. I would ask all who wish to get as clear a picture and an insight into Homeric poetry, to read the translations of William Morris or Lord Derby. For prose translations, Samuel Butler's stands out, even if he once attempted to prove that the Odyssey had been written by a woman!

It would be deficient of me, while on this theme, to ignore the Homeric similes - a characteristic feature that has been employed by all the makers of the "artificial epic" from Virgil to Milton. Homer's similes are dramatic, like the illustrations of a book. Pope commented: "Secure of the main likeness, Homer makes no scruple to play with the circumstances." The Iliad has about 180 full length similes, the Odyssey only forty.

Homer delighted in the homely image, Justas the writers of the Old Testament did. In the Bible, 2 Kings xxi, 13, we have:

"I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down." Homer compares the obstinate Ajax, beset by enemies, to an ass in a cornfield, being cudgelled in vain by boys. To heighten the terrors of war, by contrasting them with small, innocent affairs, he tells us that Apollo brings down the Greek ramparts as easily as a child destroys his sand-castle on the beach.

In "The Similes of Homer's Iliad" Rev. W. C. Green's translation gives us a fine version of a most striking simile:

"As from an island city, seen afar,
The smoke goes up to heaven, when foes besiege"
And all day long in grievous battle strive
The leaguered townsmen from this city wall:
But soon, at set of sun, blaze after blaze,
Are lit the beacon-fires, and high the glare
Shoots up for all that dwell around to see,
That they may come with ships to aid their stress:
Such light blazed heavenward from Achilles' head.

There are no fewer than thirty comparisons to the lion in the Iliad. This is where Homes gives us history as well as story.

The frequency of his leonine similes confirms that the lion was a familiar beast and this fact is also emphasized by Herodotus and Xenophon who tells us that the lion was still met with in Macedonia, Thessaly and Thrace in the fifth century BC. In fact, we are now in a position to detach the historical from the legendary and imaginative. We also know that the epics are not merely artistic myths. They are records of lives of men actually lived, and of men very like of today.

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