Rereading the Odyssey

 

In anticipation of the Nolan movie, I am rereading the Odyssey, in new translations (Wilson and Mendelsohn). I loved the tale from the first time I read it in freshman class at Centre College, Literature and Philosophy. We read the Fitzgerald translation. I then came also to love the Lattimore translation. Both I love. I must confess, I have never been able to read the Bible or New Testament with that sense of joy and wonder, just the small number of parables and sayings speak to me, the Passion disturbs me, the Luke Christmas story is magical, but again these move me as fragments, not part of a larger story.

    Still, coming back to the Odyssey, although the homecoming, the father and son theme, the coming of age, of course the adventures and mythical creatures, the scene with Argos the dog, the tension leading up to the slaughter of the suitors are all wonderful, two things disturb me. The picture of the gods and the way Homer sets up the reader to delight in what is actually horrible, the slaughter of the terrible suitors, like a Hollywood film setting up a revenge plot by dehumanizing the bad guys (though  there were ambiguous cases among the suitors - but Athena wanted them all slaughtered). Athena you don't want as an enemy!

  Homer is masterful at drawing us into Odysseus' perspective. We have been with this man for twenty years of wandering. We have watched him weep, long for home, resist despair, lose his companions, and finally arrive as a beggar in his own house. We know the suitors through his eyes and through those loyal to him. Long before the slaughter begins, Homer has carefully cultivated our indignation.

  And he does more than that. Athena herself participates in shaping events and our attitudes. She repeatedly clouds the judgment of the suitors, encourages their arrogance, and explicitly says that their doom is fixed. The moral universe is therefore not one in which free human agents simply choose evil and are judged. The gods are actively steering them toward destruction. That is quite different from most modern moral intuitions. There is a striking passage (Book 18) where Athena inspires the suitors to become even more insulting "so that Odysseus' anger would be all the greater." The poem is not pretending to be impartial. It is deliberately intensifying both Odysseus' wrath and ours.

  Then comes the slaughter. From a Homeric perspective, this is not primarily revenge. It is the restoration of cosmic and social order. The suitors have violated guest-friendship – a divinely sanctioned good in Homer’s world – consumed another man's wealth, plotted the murder of his son, and attempted to force his wife into marriage and deprive the son of his rightful inheritance. They are polluting the household. The house must be cleansed.

    The language of pollution and cleansing is crucial because it explains why mercy scarcely appears as a virtue. Once the pollution reaches a certain point, complete removal is the appropriate response. That ain’t our moral world. Although we still know of it (think of how Germans and Germany were experienced after the unimaginable crimes became known; I feel something of that mentality is alive in the genocidal hatreds that are such a horrible part of the Middle East today).

  It is worth asking whether anyone in the poem ever asks the question we instinctively ask, at least I do and did from my first reading as a 17-year-old boy: Could Odysseus have spared them? Some of them? The poem barely entertains the possibility.

 Leodes, the priest among the suitors, throws himself at Odysseus' knees and says, in effect, I tried to restrain them. I never approved of their behavior. Odysseus kills him anyway. Phemius, the bard, survives only because Telemachus intervenes. Medon, the herald, survives only because Telemachus remembers his kindness. Those scenes are fascinating because Homer briefly allows mercy to enter the story, but only at the margins. It is Telemachus who first speaks for clemency. Leodes receives none. I find his killing hard to justify.

 I recall something Simone Weil writes in The Iliad, or the Poem of Force (although writing about the Iliad). Force turns everyone into an object. Not only the victims but also the victors become possessed by force. Even justified violence threatens to become morally intoxicating. Which changes how we feel about slaughter. I don’t just want to ask whether the suitors deserve what they get but also – my constant question – what kind of world requires this.

  There is an interesting comparison with Tolkien. When Frodo claims the Ring, Gollum is still alive. Had Bilbo killed Gollum decades earlier, as almost every epic hero would have done, the Ring could never have been destroyed. Mercy, which appears weak, becomes the hinge of providence. That is almost the opposite moral imagination from Homer's.

    Also in the New Testament, Peter asks how often one should forgive. Jesus' answer "seventy times seven" would sound absurd in Homer's world. The heroic code is built around honor, loyalty, reputation, and rightful vengeance. Jesus redirects the moral imagination toward mercy, even where justice might seem to permit retaliation. (The Odyssey shows that “an eye for an eye” – which Jesus explicitly repudiates – is still more morally restraining than Homer’s world. The slaughter Odysseus inflicts on the suitors is way beyond what “an eye for an eye” calls for.)

  All this doesn't necessarily make Homer morally defective. It makes him a faithful poet of an earlier moral universe, which, by allowing the reader (or listener in his day) to glimpse mercy, he subtly also calls into question at points. 

   Homer's tale expresses an entire conception of what it means to flourish as a human being. Virtues like courage, loyalty, intelligence, endurance, and honor are central. Compassion toward defeated enemies occupies a much smaller place. To condemn Homer for not fully embracing later moral developments would be anachronistic. But we should not suppress our own deep moral attitudes. The discomfort I felt even as a 17-year-old is evidence that I – we to the extent we all share a world – inhabit a different moral world, one shaped, directly or indirectly, by Judaism, Christianity, Stoicism, and centuries of reflection on the dignity of every person. The preciousness of every human being as human being is a gift of culture (Gaita). Which does not in any way entail cultural relativism, though it can also be understood in a way that is compatible with it.

  What disturbs me is how much I enjoyed the slaughter, after all the lead-up to it – except for when someone begs for mercy. This is psychologically revealing. Homer still succeeds in drawing me into the ancient desire for justice and homecoming. I want the house restored. I want evil defeated. But my sympathy no longer ends where Homer's (largely) does. Once a defeated enemy becomes simply a frightened human being asking to live, another moral voice begins to speak.

  Perhaps that is one reason I continue to love the Odyssey while also being troubled by it. Great works often survive precisely because they can be read from within their own moral world and from beyond it. Homer invites me into the heroic imagination; my own conscience, formed by later traditions and my own philosophical commitments, refuses to stay there completely. The conversation between those two worlds is itself part of the richness of the poem.