The Iliad and the Odyssey (Classics of World Literature) (10 page)

‘Euryclea, rise, and wash the feet of one

That is of one age with your sovereign gone,

Such hands, such feet hath, though of alter’d grace.

Much grief in men will bring on change apace.’

Euryclea imagines the man in front of her as Odysseus and weeps for both. Her recognition of the scar brings to her and us a vivid evocation of his naming ceremony and young manhood. Like fond carers through the ages she sees the man but remembers and is bonded to the boy; like sons through the ages Odysseus is conscious of everything in his identity that is not continuous with his early self; he threatens her and prevents her from revealing who he is to Penelope.

Penelope keeps Odysseus with her until late, confiding in him her indecision and her unwillingness to have confidence in the prediction of Odysseus’ return and reclaiming of his own. While talking to him a bond is established; she decides to set up a bridal contest – her new husband must match her old in shooting an arrow through a line of twelve crossed axes. Both, separately yet similarly, pass a turbulent night.

Books 21–22

Book 21 is a tense, exciting, self-contained book – the trial of the bow. Penelope takes out and weeps over this attribute of Odysseus, now a symbol of his power and loss. Its history points to its significance – an heirloom given to Odysseus before its owner was murdered while Heracles’ guest; so potent a symbol and so precious that Odysseus left it behind when he went to Troy. The suitors are ambivalent about the test – worried that they might fail, might prove themselves inferior to Odysseus, yet secretly hopeful of being the bow’s master. The narrator points to the baselessness of their hope – they will die by the bow, long eager to revenge abuse of hospitality, safely back in its rightful owner’s hands.

Telemachus highlights the significance of this trial of men – he describes his mother’s many attractions and tries to string the bow in order that he might replace his father as his mother’s lord and guardian. As he is about to succeed he glances at Odysseus – through tact, cunning and/or inhibition he then pretends to be too young and weak. All except the two leading suitors try and fail; Odysseus reveals his identity to two more faithful servants and shows his scar as a proof of identity, a sign. The chief suitor tries and fails, acknowledging the ignominy of being so demonstrably weaker than Odysseus. The final contestant consoles him and himself with pointing out that this fateful day is that of Apollo the archer – of course they will fail (and Odysseus succeed) on such a day. When the bow is lain aside Odysseus’ proposition that he just try his strength with the bow (he is carefully not entering the competition but transforming the feat into the prelude to his revenge) is met with outrage and the accusation that he is drunk. A warning story of the vengeance wreaked by a centaur when his animal passions were aroused by alcohol misfires, pointing as it does to the terrible fury Odysseus will with justice wreak on them.

There is continued tension between Telemachus, Penelope and Odysseus: Penelope’s continued interest in standing up for the beggar encourages him to try to string the bow and promises rich rewards. Telemachus leaps to assert his authority over the bow and tells her to take her distaff and go back to the women’s quarters where she belongs. He has had it in his power to win her himself: he now feels able to stand as an independent man in front of his mother (and perhaps of his father). The stringing of the bow has indeed been a test of manhood. The book finishes with the long-anticipated sight: Odysseus easily stringing his great bow and sending an arrow surely through the twelve crossed axeheads.

With Book 22 comes the vengeance – a complete cleansing of the suitors and their consorts, completed by Odysseus purifying the palace with fire and brimstone. The deaths are described with delight in the skill and appropriateness of the shot or stroke and perhaps with a certain bloodthirstiness that, despite its battlefield setting, is less a feature of the
Iliad
.

Antinous is shot through the throat in the act of drinking and in falling overturns the banquet table – a fitting start to the punishment of the suitors’ greed. He is killed by Odysseus in the guise of the stranger-beggar who has been insulted and buffeted; then Odysseus declares who he is and kills the other suitors as the returning, vengeful lord. Now Telemachus can act without guile as his father’s helpmeet – he helps Odysseus arm and together with the two loyal retainers, gets access to the armoury. Melanthius the collaborator is, literally, strung up – dangling from the roof timbers all night, he waits to be finished off and mutilated. Odysseus’ henchmen repay the insults to their master – the suitor who threw an ox-hoof at Odysseus now has an answering ‘guest gift’ – death.

Some sue for mercy – Liodes the suitors’ diviner pleads non-involvement but is denied on the grounds that he must have wished for Odysseus’ death in his wish to wed and bed his wife:

‘If you be priest amongst them, as you plead,

Yet you would marry, and with my wife too,

And have descent by her. For all that woo

Wish to obtain – which they should never do,

Dames’ husbands living. You must therefore pray,

Of force and oft, in court here, that the day

Of my return for home might never shine;

The death to me wish’d therefore shall be thine.’

Odysseus comes as avenger, as bringer of justice, as punisher of those who sought to replace him.

The poet Phemius has a more persuasive suit and is allowed by the poet Homer to make it very powerfully: the bard is in charge of heroes’ reputations and Odysseus’ fame is in his and his brethren’s hands. He is allowed to live, when Telemachus vouches that he sang for the suitors under duress. Chapman makes Telemachus appeal for clemency as a prince to a king:

This did the prince’s sacred virtue hear,

And to the king, his father, said: ‘Forbear

To mix the guiltless with the guilty’s blood.’

With Athene’s help, all the rest are killed like fish caught in a net; Odysseus is covered in gore like a lion feeding on an ox. In a ghastly episode, the twelve maidservants who have been consorting with the suitors are made to clean up the slaughter in the hall and then are led out and killed by being strung up by the neck as a pigeon ‘in any grove caught with a . . . net, With struggling pinions ’gainst the ground doth beat Her tender body’; their feet soon stop kicking. In blackly comic contrast, the old Nurse refuses to fetch fire and brimstone to cleanse the gore of the mass killing until she has first brought Odysseus a cloak: it is not proper that the Master should go round in rags. The book ends with the faithful women servants embracing him in joy at having him back, a recognition which brings tears to his eyes:

And plied him so with all their loving graces

That tears and sighs took up his whole desire;

For now he knew their hearts to him entire.

Book 23

Book 23 is the final twisting together of the stories of the
Odyssey
– of Odysseus’ final and completing recognition by his wife, of Telemachus’ establishment as a grown son within a two-parent household, of Odysseus’ final narration of his adventures – to his wife.

Now only Penelope, sunk in the deepest sleep she has known since Odysseus’ loss, does not know of Odysseus’ return. Euryclea flies upstairs with the speed of youth; Penelope is only with difficulty convinced that it might indeed be Odysseus: even the scar, she points out, might be faked by a god!

This reserve, this caution, this insistence on putting the stranger to the test, is what marks Penelope as Odysseus’ ‘other half’. Precisely because it is how Odysseus would have acted, he is both amused and understanding; in answer to Telemachus’ anger at his mother’s ‘flint hard heart’ he says:

‘Take

Your mother from the prease, that she may make

Her own proofs of me . . . But now, because I go

So poorly clad, she takes disdain to know

So loath’d a creature for her loved lord.

For Penelope, least of all, is the recognition that of simple continuity of identity – she has to accept him back. Chapman’s understanding and sensitivity makes the exchange between them one of the most moving parts of his
Odyssey
(he embroiders Penelope’s speech by adding the parts in brackets):

Like an immortal from the bath he rose,

And to his wife did all his grace dispose,

Encount’ring thus her strangeness: ‘Cruel dame,

Of all that breathe, the gods past steel and flame

Have made thee ruthless. Life retains not one

Of all dames else . . . as twenty years

To miss her husband, drown’d in woes and tears,

And, at his coming, keep aloof . . .

[Penelope replied]

[‘Your mean appearance made not me retire,

Nor this your rich show makes me now admire,

Nor moves at all; for what is all to me,

If not my husband? All his certainty

I knew at parting; but, so long apart,

The outward likeness holds no full desert

For me to trust to.] Go, nurse, see address’d

A soft bed for him, and the single rest

Himself affects so. Let it be the bed

That stands within our bridal chamber-stead

Which he himself made. Bring it forth from thence,

And see it furnished with magnificence.’

This is a test (the bed, as the real Odysseus well knew, was immovably constructed round a living olive tree) worthy of Odysseus the cunning – a trick that he recognises and wonders at:

This said she to assay him, and did stir

Ev’n his establish’d patience, and to her;

Whom thus he answer’d: ‘Woman, your words prove

My patience strangely.Who is it can move

My bed out of his place? . . .

For in the fixture of the bed is shown

A masterpiece, a wonder; and ’twas done

By me, and none but me.’

Penelope has held out against hope ever since the first signs that Odysseus was alive and returning, has refused to believe even when told that he had killed the suitors, has demanded proof even when he stood in front of her. Now the last barrier is removed:

This sunk her knees and heart to hear so true

The signs she urg’d; and first did tears ensue

Her rapt assurance; then she ran and spread

Her arms around his neck, kissed oft his head . . .

Meanwhile, Telemachus is given a job to do: he is to arrange the festivities of his mother’s wedding, to create the impression that Penelope has accepted the suitor who succeeded in the bow competition (as, in a sense, she has).

The book ends with Penelope and Odysseus making love:

The king and queen then now, as newly wed,

Resum’d the old laws of th’embracing bed.

and exchanging stories – it is as if all the suffering and losses are redeemed by becoming the means of intimacy:

The bride and bridegroom having ceas’d to keep

Observed love-joys, from their fit delight

They turn’d to talk. The queen did then recite

What she had suffer’d . . . Great Ulysses then,

What ever slaughters he had made of men,

What ever sorrows he himself sustain’d,

Repeated amply; and her ears remain’d

With all delight attentive to their end.

Book 24

There are still some loose threads to be resolved in Book 24 – Melanthius’ story is woven into those of the other heroes of Troy by the narrative following the souls of the suitors down to the Underworld. Here the dead heroes are given voice by the narrator and can talk to one another as if for the first time. Agamemnon tells Achilles about Achilles’ funeral and contrasts it sadly with the way his own dead body was treated. There has been a running contrast between Odysseus’ story and that of Agamemnon and Menelaus: Telemachus adjured to live up to Orestes’ example in ridding his household of rivals to his absent father’s bed; Penelope in her constancy compared favourably with Clytemnestra; in her prudence and chastity with Helen. Now, the news of Odysseus’ avenging homecoming being brought by the suitors to Agamemnon in the Underworld, these stories are stitched together; the end of Odysseus’ story told to the heroes of Troy forms a fitting conclusion to both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
.

There is one last thread – Odysseus has yet to be accepted by his father, Laertes, living in the country like a poor peasant. As always, Odysseus observes, tests out and deceives before telling his father who he is; the shock nearly kills the broken-down old man. As with Penelope, though, the habitual distance between himself and those to whom he tells ‘Cretan tales’ is disturbed by his emotions –

Him when Ulysses saw consum’d with age,

And all the ensigns on him that the rage

Of grief presented, he brake out in tears;

. . . his mind

Had much contention, if to yield to kind,

Make straight way to his father, kiss, embrace,

Tell his return . . .

but he keeps to his plan to tell how he entertained Odysseus, years ago. Laertes presumes his son dead:

This a cloud of grief

Cast over all the forces of his life.

With both his hands the burning dust he swept

Up from the earth, which on his head he heap’d,

And fetch’d a sigh, as in it life were broke.

The effect on Odysseus of his father’s distress is physical; he drops his pretence and reveals himself. As with Penelope, the declaration is too sudden a turn to be believed – Laertes needs physical proof and identification. Odysseus shows him the scar, the mark of his boyhood hunting trip with his grandfather, and reminisces about the planting of the trees which Laertes gave him, now full-grown. Laertes is rejuvenated, metaphorically and actually, and takes his place as a hero among his people. The
Odyssey
ends with the three generations of heroes reunited, facing the suitors’ vengeful kin, before Athene intervenes to end the the killing. Laertes tells Telemachus to be worthy of his lineage; Telemachus, now a proven warrior, replies with vigour: