Among the Ancients: The 'Odyssey'

Hello, and welcome to the second episode in this series of podcasts from the London Review of Books with Emily Wilson. My name is Thomas Jones and I'm an editor at the LRB. Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Hello, Emily, and thank you very much for joining me again. - Hello, Tom. - Last time in our first episode, we talked about Homer's Iliant, and in case anyone listening hasn't heard that yet, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it first. And today we're moving on predictably enough to the Odyssey. Emily's translation of the Odyssey came out in 2017, and she's currently working on a translation of the Iliad. Both poems are attributed to Homer, whoever he, she or they might have been. Both poems consist of several thousand lines of dactilic hexameter, 15,000 in the case of the Iliad, around 12,000 for the Odyssey, conventionally divided into 24 books. Both poems tell stories from the Trojan War, both are concerned with gods and heroes, but there are huge differences between them as well, aren't they? Or to put that another way, the Odyssey isn't exactly a sequel to the Iliad. They're very different poems. They're very different in their mood and in their setting. The Odyssey, in its setting spreads all over the Mediterranean world, and even beyond into these sort of fantastical and mythological landscapes, whereas the Iliad is very much confined to these claustrophobic spaces of the city, the battlefield, the ships, the tents. The Odyssey is in many ways a much more expansive poem in its vision of what the world is, and what kinds of communities Greek speakers can encounter, including cultural difference and multiculturalism and colonialism in a very expansive, both narrative form and character ranges from enslaved people to goddesses. It's probably the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of the Odyssey is the voyage of Odysseus and his encounters with the Cyclops and the sirens, Cersei, the Lotus Eaters, Siller and Caribdus and so on. But those adventures take up only four of the poems, 24 books, don't they? They do. I think people who read the whole Odyssey having only read the kids' retellings are often very, very surprised by how little of it is the stuff they've already been prepared for, the magical encounters, which are all told as inset first-person narration by Odysseus himself, telling his travellers tales to one of his many hosts on the journey back to Ithaca. The vast majority of the poem is not like that at all in its level of realism. In the first four books, we get the journey of Odysseus's son, Telemachus, which is a kind of small and in some ways kind of futile journey to go visit his father's old war buddies and try and find out some news about his long-lost father. He doesn't find out any news and he almost gets murdered on the way back. Then we have the inset narrative of Odysseus's journeys. And then the whole of the second half of the poem is Odysseus's gradual recovering of his position back on Ithaca. So in a way, it's a very odd structure, and I think it's very interesting as an narrative structure. And it's also very interesting in what it says about what a no-stoss or homecoming journey really is. Very little of it is the geographical travelling. And a whole lot of it is the building or rebuilding of relationships, both with those Odysseus is going to be with in the future and also those he feels he needs to kill. And also, I have to point those he meets along the way, because his journey home from Troy famously takes ten years as long as the war. There's ten years of war, ten years for him to get home. But something like nine of those years, he's not actually travelling. He's with Calypso on her island. He's with the Calypso for seven years, and then half a year with Cersei. So eight out of the ten years are shackled up with these wonderful goddesses. So it's not as if he's actually been shipwrecked for a full ten years. Most of the time, it's not being shipwrecked and actually living the life. Yeah, because he's introduced at the beginning of the poem. When it opens, he's Calypso's prisoner or captive. So the goddess Athena describes him, although it's not quite clear how captive he is. He's not exactly an unwilling captive of course. Well, he is now unwilling. I mean, what we're told is that he no longer wants to be there. And that phrase no longer is of course a very resonant one, because it suggests that as some earlier point, and we don't exactly know when, he was willing to be there. But at some point, when the narrative of the poem begins, despite still spending his nights and days with Calypso, he's also spending a great deal of time sitting on the beach, gazing out at the sea and longing to see even the smoke that rises from his homeland, Ithaca. And I think there's a wonderfully resonant absence in that whole evocation of Odysseus is longing for home in book five, which in some ways is where the poem proper begins with the journey of Odysseus, that we're never actually told why does he long for home? What exactly does that mean to him? Calypso reminds him of just how, in some ways, how foolish that decision is. He's giving up the opportunity to be immortal and to stay with her forever, which is on offer. And instead, he wants to undertake a very, very dangerous and painful journey, which will involve the loss of all the wealth that he gathered in Troy, and all the men that he took with him to go back to an island where suitors are besieging his household and trying to marry his wife, and where he's going to die. And he chooses that all the same. So should we listen to that exchange between Calypso and Odysseus? Yes, so this is from book five, and their goddess is Calypso, who speaks first. The goddess queen began Odysseus, son of laity, blessed by Zeus. Your plans are always changing. Do you really want to go back to that home you love so much? Well then, goodbye. But if you understand how delighted you will 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. And anyway, I know my body is better than hers is. I am taller too. Mortals can never rival the immortals in beauty. So Odysseus, with tact, said, "Do not be enraged at me, great goddess. You are quite right. I know my modest wife, Penelope, could never match your beauty. She is a human. You are deathless, ageless, but even so, I want to go back home and every day I hope that day will come. If some God strikes me on the wine dark sea, I will endure it. By now I am used to suffering, I have gone through so much at sea and in the war. Let this come to. The sun went down and brought the darkness on. They went inside the hollow cave and took the pleasure of their love, held close together." He doesn't really give, as he said, he doesn't really give an adequate answer to the question of why he wants to go home to Ethiopia. Does he? Well, I've endured so much suffering, I might as well endure a bit more. He is giving himself up to fate, or is the will of the gods, or is what he is expected of him, because we know he does, so he knows he has to. He has to fulfill this part in the narrative and this part in his self. I mean, I think it matters that Calipso's name is related to the verb calucto, which means to hide or to veil, and so I think it's a decision to come out of hiding and to become a prominent named self. So what's repeatedly at stake in those wandering books is what kind of self-adjacious will be and how he will recover some kind of name. Remember that when he encounters the Cyclops, he says his name is nobody. And in a way, his name is nobody with Calipso as well, but he's in this kind of hidden place in Goddess' cave. We talked about the Iliad last time, but in a way, there were analogs between the choice of Achilles to rejoin the battle even though he knows that he will die if he stays at Troy and the choice of Odysseus to rejoin his human community on Ithaca, even though that means giving up the immortality of Calipso, because in both cases, for these elite warriors to rejoin their community, it's the only way to have a name, to have Cléos a word, which connotes fame, but it also connotes the being called something by other people. So is there a sense in which Odysseus's home, his nostos, can only be where he is Odysseus? Because from sort of a modern perspective, he seems quite at home with Calipso. He's quite at home. And I think the poem is very interesting on the question of whether you can have multiple different homes and in having multiple different homes, maybe you can also have multiple different selves. And that's part of what is, I think, so special about Odysseus as a protagonist and part of what makes him very different from Achilles is his multiplicity. And this poem is very interested in, and Odysseus is multiplicity and the possibilities that the world might be multiple. So he seems very comfortable with Calipso, but that's one side of himself. He seems very comfortable in being the trickster hero in relation to Calipso, to the Cyclops. That's another side of himself. He seems comfortable being a bossy dad to Lamacus. It's a different side of himself. And once he does finally get back to Ithaca, he tells us whole series. of false autobiographies, usually saying I came from Crete and I suffered Schifrach and I was trying to gather all this loot from various different cities and he gives himself different names and presents himself as different styles of pirate or looter or soldier or sufferers in various different ways. And one could say one could ask the question of which of these is the true Odysseus or one could also say he's the poem is presenting a hero who has multiple different true selves. And the very well yeah I guess the first epithet has applied to him is that even the first line of the poem he's Paul Lutropos right which one I mean can can that word imply that what you've just been saying that he has many selves. I think one can take it that the choice of that epithet in the first line is a way of way for the poem to define its own narrative multiplicity as well as the multiplicity of its protagonist. It literally suggests many turniness so he both is turned around a lot he turns other people around he's always twisting and turning and he's also going to go on a journey which is twisting and turning and the narrative is going to be twisty and turning and convoluted. It's going to be the opposite of the straight arrow one shot to a destination. I'm always going to tell you the truth which Achilles presents as part of what he's he's on this very direct path to death whereas Odysseus is never on a direct path anywhere he's always going to twist and turn and make himself into something else. And as happens when he leaves he leaves Calypso so he builds himself a raft right and then he sets off on Calypso's island to get to Etica and then he's shipwrecked or raft wrecked yet again and rescued by another beautiful woman who's immortal though she said to be as beautiful as a goddess who's a who's a the faiation princess Nosecare and it's to the faiations that Odysseus tells the tall tales he was mentioning earlier of his wondering so the famous voyage is his but before that he's not the first one to speak because it's at the feast they listen to a local poet singer Bart Entertainer and Odysseus asks him to tell of the fall of Troy and the and the wooden horse. Yes and so this is the only moment in the Homeric poems when we get the description of the Trojan horse which is which is in this insect narrative of the what the what the poet sings at the court of King Alcinous the court of the faiations and Odysseus has a strange reaction to the song. The town was doomed to ruin when it took that horse chock full of fighters bringing death to Trojans and he sang how the Achaeans poured from the horse in ambush from the hollow and sacked the city how they scattered out destroying every neighborhood like aries Odysseus with Menelaeus rushed to find deyifabus's house and there he won at last through dreadful violence thanks to Athena so the poet sang Odysseus was melting into tears his cheeks were wet with weeping as a woman weeps as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband falling fighting for his home and children she is watching as he gasps and dies she shrieks a clear high whale collapsing upon his corpse the men are right behind they hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery hard labor and a life of pain her face is marked with her despair in that same desperate way Odysseus was crying not the simile comparing Odysseus weeping as he listens to the story of his triumph and comparing him to a grieving widow is is really quite it's extraordinary yes i mean there are several what some people call reverse similes in the Odyssey where you think you're looking from one point of view but it actually turns out you're looking from the opposite point of view we have first the song which seems to be told from the point of view of those who are sacking the city and enslaving the women killing the men but then we have the simile which takes us to the opposite point of view of what's it feel like to be the woman who's going to be enslaved and this extraordinary thing that Odysseus who who's sort of the war hero is also the war criminal and he's the one who's who's caused so many women like this to have this experience by killing their husbands and enslaving them he's that kind of man and there's this again wonderful ambiguity or lack of full clarity about what exactly does that mean to me to say he's crying in the same way that she's crying is it that he feels guilty is it that his his grief for for the cities he's sacked is somehow analogous to the grief of those who've had actual suffering as a result of his actions I think it is something so wonderful about both the the way the simile takes us through an out of progression it's not just a single instance but also this really resonant sort of complex um lack of spelling everything out about how are we supposed to feel about this character and another thing that's mentioned in that in the passage it says that Odysseus comes up with a scheme to defeat the Trozans thanks to a Thena and as you've seen she also helps him throughout the Odyssey that in the way in the early added status the killie's his mother who goes to Zeus and asks him to intercede on a killie's behalf and he sets the perm in motion but the reat he's her son so the reasons why a fetus would would do that are plain enough but what is it about Odysseus that makes him a Thena's favourite? A Thena and Odysseus have a huge amount in common um we've talked about how he has a special bond with Calypso he has another special bond with Nasaka with Cersei with these various other people that he meets along the way but in some ways his um his closest most intimate relationship is with Athena they share an interest in schemes in manufacturing things manufacturing both um clever objects like the Trojan horse or the raft or the stake to blind the cyclops or the magical bed made out of a olive tree Athena's tree which grows through Odysseus's house they're good at making things so Athena is the goddess of technology and the arts of peace but they're also um good at making schemes and coming up with plots and plans Athena is the one who's micro managed the massacre in Troy through the Trojan horse with the help of Odysseus and she seems excited to be plotting with him again to do a similar feat of infiltrating a community in disguise but at this time Odysseus himself is in a way the Trojan horse that he's coming into his own house disguised as something which might look okay a homeless ragged old guy and and then he emerges as if from the Trojan horse of his own body into in fact I'm in a leap warrior with a huge bow and I'm going to slaughter everyone that moment when he when he first touches the shore the land makes land for the mythical after 20 years away with Athena's help a few weeks since leaving Calypso and that's as you said earlier it's the midpoint of the poem he actually he gets home in in books 13 because physically getting there is only half the journey and that's sort of implied even by the structure of the poem that and I know you say in his failure to recognise here he's home at last and he doesn't even realise it yes we talked last time about what has sophisticated take on the traditions of heroic narrative and stories of men performing exploits in war the Iliad is in that so much of it is really focused on internal action and inaction it's not actually an action movie and similarly the Odyssey is extraordinarily sophisticated take on what a Nostos narrative is we know that there are multiple different versions and tellings and stories and myths about how did the Akeans get home from the Trojan war the Odyssey is a very puzzling and strange story of Nostos because as you say it the actual physical journey takes the minority of the poem it's not even half of it and it seems to be suggesting to us that maybe Nostos isn't just about geography maybe it's about some some whole sequence of other things which it frames in terms of a sequence of recognitions recognitions scenes between Odysseus and all the other people and including the dark that he has to reconnect with and be recognised by Bacchianistica there are also moments of non-recognition aren't they of disguise of deliberately deceiving people and failures to recognise and in some ways the the moments of non-recognition are as important as the moments of recognition yes the moments of non-recognition are super important and the moments I already talked about how Odysseus comes out with the false sort of biographies and false selves he performs his ability to manipulate how people see him and and to control that reality there's there's one very dramatic and famous moment when he's recognised without wanting to be recognised when you're a player the enslaved old nurse who knew him as as a boy is washing his feet and gets to the scar on his leg and then from that scar recognises who he is and presumably I mean you might think Athena being a really good goddess good at disguise could have got rid of the scar but it doesn't it's not it doesn't operate like that but there's a there's a way that there are elements of his body which are totally recognisable for particular kinds of intimate touch yes but I mean the other thing is that The poem says that Athena. is Odysseus and obviously, yes, but I mean there's also that, I mean there's, you can see that metaphorically or not, there's also the simple fact of the passage of time, the ravages of time of war and shipwreck, he's been away for 20 years, if he were to come back because his ragged old shipwreck man and say, oh I'm Odysseus, it's kind of, you know, that's not the guy who showed up last week's head. I mean there is a sense of. And if anyone could say that, certainly a lot of people have been saying that, we're constantly reminded by both Penelope Odysseus' wife and various other people in the household that there've been many, many visitors showing up, trying scrounging around for handouts due to saying they were Odysseus. But I think you're also right to be setting it up that the poem is sort of playing with our expectations because of course in real life, if 20 years had passed, Odysseus would presumably look as he does in his disguised state, he would actually look old if 20 years had really passed. But then we're supposed to think the reality is that time is not passed for him because he's special and this special category of the elite hero blessed by Odysseus seems to have this quasi-immunity to time even though he rejected the offer of Calypso. He isn't immortal and he isn't ageless but he has the blessing of Athena so he has some almost agedness quality as long as he's under her egos. And is there some sense in which he imagines that while he's been away, that time when Etica has somehow stood still, is he surprised to see Telemachus what happens when he sees his, he left as a baby and then he comes back 20 years later and here's this young man who's sort of trying to be princely or kingly. Yes, so he spends time gathering information about what's happening in the big house before he sets foot there and I think that's an important element in the narrative of the second half of the poem because it shows how he has this intelligent, wily awareness that in fact he might not be welcomed with open arms if he just went into the house and said, "Hey, Odysseus, I'm home honey." Because in fact, if I had a lot of other people in that house who would not be welcoming him and are fully armed. So he spends time in the shed or hut of the enslaved swine herd, Yumeus. And in that marginal space away from the big house is where he meets his son Telemachus who comes back from his dangerous trip to see his father's old friends and is welcomed with open arms like a father by Yumeus, the swine herd. And we have a wonderful simile of a Yumeus welcoming Telemachus back just like a father who thought his child might be dying, but he's alive again and he's so relieved and he sees his child again. And I think there's something fascinating about how we have that simile which suggests Yumeus the enslaved old man is like Telemachus' father because Telemachus hasn't had an actual biological father around in the household. When he meets the real father Odysseus, Telemachus is kind of horrified and scared because Athena transforms him. First he looks like the ragged old beggar, and then Odysseus receives one of multiple divine makeovers that he gets from the cost of the poem and is turned 20 years younger and handsome and great looking and he has all his hair and it's like a churling round him. And Telemachus is very startled and thinks he must be a god and doesn't know what's going on. And Odysseus identifies himself as Odysseus. I'm your father. The one you've been crying for all this time, that's me. And the simile doesn't suggest they're like father and son in that instance. The simile after that recognition is that they're like two birds of prey mourning for their fledgling chicks which have been killed by hunters. So it's a simile which suggests there's something very painful as well as dangerous and cruel in this relationship, even though it's also full of grief and full of need and love. And another famous reconciliation, we're not reconciliation, a scene of meeting is when Odysseus meets his dog, his dog Argos who has apparently been one of these understood things because when you think about it or the way it's sort of passing to Fable is that the loyal, the faithful dog who's waited 20 years for his master to come home and his master's returned and he looks at him and glad that he's returned, the faithful dog can then die. But it's actually, that isn't spelled out in the poem. Is it that sort of idea of that the dog has been waiting in this sense that the faithful hound is a later projection on that. And also that the dog has certainly suffered through them from the passage of time, that the way he's described he's sort of old and filthy. Yes, the dog has suffered both through the past passage of time and also through the absence of Odysseus. So in the case of Argos I think it's a bit made very explicit that in certain ways the house synethika might seem like it's doing fine, they still seem to have plenty of animals to eat and wine to drink. But it's a sign of certain areas of the house are completely neglected. And of course the idea that there are people who don't want him to come back and the danger he's walking into that there's the and the contrast is explicitly made in the poem. When Agamemnon gets home from the war he's murdered in his bath and that's the and so there is that sort of the danger that Odysseus and there is this explicit contrast right between Agamemnon's careless return from the war and Odysseus is speaking back in. Both the narrator and Odysseus himself repeatedly referring to the bad Norstorce of Agamemnon and comparing contrast the good Norstorce that Odysseus wants to get for himself. So Agamemnon came back from the war and his wife Platinum Nostra was not very happy to see him because she already had accepted one of her suitors as just this and they plotted together and killed him in the bath as you say. And that prototype of what happened to Agamemnon is also used to put pressure on telemacus. Because Arrestes came back and took revenge for the murder of his father. So there's an idea that telemacus needs to be somehow like a preemptive Arrestes and take revenge even before his father was dead and that Odysseus needs to be like a preemptive Agamemnon defending himself and slaughtering the suitors before they slaughter him. So if Odysseus were to arrive as himself he couldn't be sure of the kind of reception he'd get. But by arriving as a stranger and as a guest there is he can expect a certain or hope to expect a certain kind of treatment and this the nature of host guest relationships is really important throughout the whole poem isn't it as the way that Odysseus is received by the many different people and God to the people? Absolutely yes and also the way telemacus has been received on his various different journeys. So part of how the poem sets up what does it mean to be a traveler or go visit multiple different homes, multiple different communities is that it's an exploration of guest host relationships and in what context is it possible to have a peaceful visit to a different community? Of course the Trojan War was an unpeaceful visit to a different community but then the story of Nostos is about. So what would it be like if on the journey home it's not constant replication of the Trojan War in every place that the Greeks stop along the way? What if we have a different model and what does that model look like of stopping in a in a far and place and getting something but also giving something? The relationship of guests and hosts is called Zenia from which we get xenophobia and linguistically it's also related it also connotes being a stranger. So there's an idea that there are particular kind of strangers that you need to welcome into your house, offer wine, offer change of clothes, offer a bed for the night, also offer help on the on the journey home and exchange stories with and then that will somehow form a bond of a bond of connection or networking that will then last across different generations. Yeah, sorry to say about with the Cyclops that when I mean it's not just that he eats them which would be bad enough but it's the fact that their guests and his in his home and his cave he's he's eating his guests which is yes but it's complicated right because they were not invited in. They didn't like knock on the door of the cave and say hello we are strangers can we come in and get a get a drink which would be the polite thing to do right. Instead they invade his home without asking and start helping themselves to his food and drink which is exactly what the suitors do right so they're uninvited guests and so the poem is then also exploring so what do you do if you have a guest you don't want? What's the right thing to do? Is the right thing to do to eat them or slaughter them or are there alternatives at alternative ways to get rid of the unwanted guest? I mean I guess that the the various magical hosts all have things wrong with them as hosts right I mean Calipso is a host to his ideal except that she doesn't help him with the journey home until she's absolutely forced to do so. Cersei is a great host except that she turns the guests into animals but apart from that she's he's wonderful yes so Cilla and Carrebus are instead of providing their host with a drink they treat the host as the drink they drink they drink him up or Carrebus eat some drinks him up Cilla as well as the potential guests whole the sirens kind of overdo it with the entertainment aspect of hosting that entertaines her so long the guest never goes home. I think also part of what happens in the in the book 22 is that we seem to have been in the world of zania of guest host relationships majority of the poem and then exploring of how can that those relationships be taken to the limit and is it still a guest host relationship when they're getting to these weird and kind of inhospitable cultures. But then in book 22 it seems as if maybe we're back on the battlefield and it's actually not about etiquette anymore at all. Oh there were also that Odysseus arrives disguised as a guest but really he's the host that's the kind of you thought it was one category. The wrong names are being applied and so we have this repeated question of what is his name? Is his name actually? Is his name Basileus? Is he the king or is his name guest or nobody? He shows up as if he's nobody but he's actually not nobody at all. And he's not there's also a I think crucial moment when Odysseus has an encounter with a real life homeless old beggar who's loitering around on the threshold of the the house or palace and begging for scraps and Odysseus gets to fisticuffs with him and beats him up and humiliates him. And it seems as if we're supposed to be rooting for yes we should beat up the guys who show up wanting just handouts. So there's this sort of complexity or incoherence to the idea that we should welcome strangers. We should welcome strangers of a particular class where there's another category of stranger who are actually slave people and or people who are sort of inherently poor and there are different obligations or lack of obligations for for characters who are not protagonists or not framed as protagonists. And that sense of specialness or exception that Odysseus thinks he's entitled to and which the poem thinks he's entitled to is also there in the episode of the sirens isn't it? He's the only one who actually gets to hear their song that everyone else in the ship has to block his ears with with wax. But Odysseus gets lashed to the mast and actually gets to hear them. So he gets to hear them. Yes. The rules don't apply to him. Yes and I mean of course there's questions about him. He chooses which rules apply to him. If the others did get to hear him, would they hear the same song or would they hear different songs? The song that Odysseus gets to hear seems to have a lot of bad Odysseus and he's sort of wonder would everyone get the song about Odysseus or would they get songs with their own names inserted into it? Yeah, over the sirens not be arranged in them. Although there is the one he unplugged his ears and dies. They want the audience, didn't they? I call poets too. And he disguises himself to his wife Penelope as well. And that Margaret Outwood in her novel The Penelope Act imagines that Penelope recognizes him straight away but goes along with the pretence because you know. And is that reading present in the Odyssey? Is it there? The possibility that she recognizes him straight away or is it fairly clear that she she doesn't? And then again, why should she? She hasn't seen him for 20 years. It's not clear how long they were married before he even went away. I mean we're told that Athena turns her mind aside and so I think she doesn't have to be stupid and obviously she's not stupid. She's a very clever woman. She doesn't have to be stupid to be susceptible to the power and manipulativeness of Athena who's definitely doesn't want at least an explicit conscious recognition between the husband and wife too early because it doesn't fit in with her plans to maximize the glory for her protege. Scholars argue about when exactly does she recognize Odysseus? I mean Margaret Outwood is certainly not the only person to think maybe she recognizes him before she acknowledges it. I think the poem certainly suggests that Penelope feels some kind of connection to this particular ragged old stranger that she hasn't felt all the other layabouts who've shown up in the intervealing years. But does that mean she exactly, consciously, definitely knows that it's Odysseus? I'm not sure that it does necessarily, especially given that we're also told explicitly Athena stops stopped her or blocked her mind in certain ways. Should we listen out to the passage from book 19 where Odysseus is lying to another person? Yes. So Penelope's lack of recognition, if there is a lack of recognition, is molded not just by Athena but also by Odysseus who tells her some very, some bad face lies about who he is and emphasizes that he isn't Odysseus but at the same time seems to play around with his points of similarity with Odysseus. His lies were like the truth and as she listened she began to weep. Her face was melting like the snow that Zephya scatters across the mountain peaks, then Eurus thaws it and as it melts the river swell and flow again. So were her lovely cheeks dissolved with tears. She wept for her own husband who was right next to her. Odysseus pitied his grieving wife inside his heart but kept his eyes quite still without a flicker like horn or iron and he hid his tears with artifice. She cried a long, long time. So Odysseus and Penelope test one another when they reveal themselves don't they because when he does she doesn't believe him right away or she says all right well maybe you are Odysseus but and then she sort of sets him a test a trap to see if it's really him about the magic bed which you mentioned earlier. Yes so Odysseus slaughtered the suitors who've been hanging out to her asking Penelope and even after all that Penelope refuses to do an explicit recognition and welcome home handy to Odysseus. Athena gives him a lovely bath and yes another makeover so he's looking great and then Telamika says you're holding out too long mom and Odysseus says we're going to know each other by secret signs there's going to be a different point of connection between between himself and Penelope so he sort of knows that she's going to be setting him some kind of test and the recognition with Penelope is something which in which she's going to want to test her own model of reality and model of their marriage as well as him testing it so she sets him the test by saying to the enslaved women pull out the bed from the bedroom and make a bed for this guest of ours outside the bedroom and that's a trick because the bed is supposed to be an immovable piece of furniture because one of its bedposts is a tree that's growing right the way through the house it's not the kind of bed you can pull out if the bed were movable of course that's then also symbolic of could this marriage actually be lasting 20 years or has the bed been being moved around all the time has she been sleeping with the suitors is is it possible that in fact she wasn't waiting with memory only of him so that's about the question of what's been happening in the mean time so she's yet she appears she's testing him but she's also demonstrating her loyalty to him she's demonstrating her autonomy right when she's demonstrating she could move the bed and she could have stepped around right and she's saying that in fact this is I think it's also part of why why he responds with rage that he's angry at the possibility which is in fact a real possibility she has choices yeah again it's all very unclear how deliberate everything is but she pornography arms him by the the test all right she says all right enough of this I will marry whoever can take a dish as his bow and shoot the array through these hollow acts heads with the holes in and there's that whole question of what are these axes with the holes in and where are the holes yes but that has that and it's his a no one apart from a dish is can string the bow and then there's a question is that because it's about strength or is it because it's a compound bow that needs to be bent the counter intuitive way in all the rest of it he can turn it because he's a much turning sort of hero he can twist something it's a twisty implement so pornography sets it all up and you also by doing this is arming him she's then providing him with his bow so that when he can pass the test and then throughout his cloak and so I'm Odysseus and then he's armed and the suit is a knot and he can absolutely yes so she she you're right that she she is the one who suggests the test and many people think that there were alternate versions of the myth in which penalty and Odysseus plotted the whole thing together and that she took a much more active and conscious part in the whole revenge scheme and the and the Odyssey version seems to show traces of the possibility that they could have worked together on this and they could have been the pair of them working to kill the suitors and the Odyssey seems to both have an awareness of that possible narrative tradition and also mostly excluded and mostly exclude Penelope from active part or at least conscious part in the massacre of her suitors and that massacre is there an implication that it's that it's justice or is it merely revenge or or should not say merely revenge is it revenge that the these men who are hoping to replace him he's reestablishing himself as the head of this family as they have the king of this island and not just this baron island but of his kingdom he's reclaiming this and in a simple sense if he's going to be king he has to kill his rivals to do that yes but it always but is there some sense in which he's also exacting justice from a position of to a more than one I don't know if I'm more like grand doesn't sound right but from a but is he exacting the justice of this? Yes I mean he certainly presents it that way when he reveals who he is start of book 22 to the suitors which is the in some ways the most horrifying of the series of recognition scenes Odysseus explaining who he is and I'm with Odysseus and I'm now now I'm going to kill you he presents it that absolutely he's he's supporting the justice of Zeus which blesses the rights of of hosts and doesn't like it when people invade other people's homes without asking. It's a violation of the norms of hospitality. And even though he did it himself with the Cyclops, it's actually absolutely not okay and not moral, not right. And these people have invaded his home. And it's also framed in certain phrases that suggest in a way the suit is like being cannibals because they're eating his livelihood. So because they're cannibals, it's okay to kill them. And they're dehumanized in his eyes and he presents them as these dehumanized Cyclopian or cannibalistic characters who are violated the norms of hospitality also by not being nice to Odysseus when he was in disguise. They were bullying and horrible and drunk and they threw things at him. So it's revenge for that or it's justice for that. And there's a way that maybe the slippage between what is just and what is revenge. I'm not sure exactly how clear that distinction is. I mean, there's an idea of restoring a kind of balance so decaying in Greeks suggests an idea of cosmic or moral balance and that there's payback. And in a way, it goes back to the whole beginning of the Trojan War, the violation of the norms of hospitality by a suitor, Paris, who was seizing somebody else's wife without asking. That started some trouble. Odysseus is then going to do the same thing as in the Trojan War saying, no, you can't get somebody else's wife without asking. I'm going to kill you if you do that. And I'm going to avenge the gods of hospitality's use and the goddess of marriage era. I mean, at the same time, I think we're also shown other sides which complicate that narrative. We're also shown that at least one of the suitors has a bad feeling and wants to get away from the house and Athena makes him stay. So from Athena's perspective, it's not about justice exactly because it's not about if we're going to do a careful assessment of exactly how bad are each of the bad guys. And if they're not so bad, let's not have them be killed. Instead, it's-- let's kill as many people as possible because then we look really good. And we look really powerful. And our name is as much in neon lights as it could possibly be. And he also goes beyond, doesn't he? Because he doesn't only kill the suitors and the scene which seems to be going sort of far too far. And we talked last month about Achilles sacrificing 12 Trojan boys on Petroctus's funeral pyre. And there's an echo of that. And that Odysseus kills or has killed in 12 enslaved women who betrayed him as he sees it with the suitors. Yes, I mean, if I think if you frame it as they've betrayed him, that suggests they're being punished, right? It suggests that it's a payback for something that the other person has done. And I think that's certainly how Odysseus frames the slaughter of the suitors. In the case of the enslaved people, the 12 enslaved women and the one enslaved man, Pantmelatius, who get killed by telemacus on Odysseus's orders, I do think it is framed that they've done something wrong. I think it's framed that they've belonged to the wrong people. And so it's part of the process of cleanup after the massacre. Odysseus orders the enslaved women to clear up the fun at show and scrub the floors and make the palace look exactly as if 20 years haven't passed because it's so beautifully fresh and tidy. And you wouldn't know anyone was there except Odysseus. But then there's still the question of, there are still people in that house who remember the earlier inhabitants and who are also collusive with the other inhabitants in that in the case of the women, they had sex with the other inhabitants. And in the case of the man, they served and fetched animals for the suitors. So those people who have the wrong memories, even though Odysseus says very explicitly to the suitors, you had sex with these women by force. He's not suggesting the women out of their own absolutely free, free well did something. But the problem with them is that they taint his full ownership of the household and they taint the possibility of him having the total high status and honor that comes with total possession. - And so we have another reading, now the last reading of the description from Book 22 of Telemachus. - Yes, so Odysseus has, whereas he's done most of the earlier killing himself, he delegates this presumably less important set of killings to Telemachus, so this is Telemachus' big opportunity. And he does the killing in a slightly different way from the way his dad instructed, which one could see as a sort of growing up to adulthood and decides not to hack the life out of them with swords, but instead use a different instrument to kill them. And also not get any blood on the nice clean floors. - Showing initiative, Telemachus insisted. I refused to grant these girls a clean death since they poured down shame on me and mother when they lay beside the suitors. At that, he wound a piece of sailors' rope around the rotunda and round the mighty pillar stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground. As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap, they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime. Just so the girls, their heads, all in a row were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long. Then the men took Melanthius outside and with curved bronze cut off his nose and ears and ripped away his genitals to feed raw to the dogs. Still full of rage, they chopped his hands and feet off then they washed their own. - And is there a sense in which Odysseus brings the war home with him? - He's been at Troy, seen all these horrors, performed all these horrors, but also which bring great glory. It's hard to hold onto that aspect of it, but it is there. And then, so as a, he's a traumatized war veteran who comes home from everything he's seen and experienced and he brings all that into his house. - He brings all that into his house. So I mean, I think the passage about the killing of the enslaved people is interesting partly because it seems like it's very much a not-military killing. I mean, and so we have that inset similarly in which the women are compared to birds caught in a trap who want to go back to their nest, who want some kind of nostos. From their perspective, Odysseus is nostos, means the opposite of a nostos, that in so far as they ever had a home, they're never gonna get to it. Now, but you're right that we talked before about how Odysseus seems to have all this multiplicity and multiple different selves. And he seems to come back in Book 22 as the warrior of the battlefield that he seems to have what in the Iliad you would call an Aristaya, a moment of performing greatness on the battlefield by killing multiple, multiple people. Odysseus gets that in Book 22 of the Odyssey. He gets that killing spree, which shows how many people he can kill and therefore how great his own name is. He brings the war home. And even then, so he's come home. He's had his Aristaya, he's killed all the usurpers and the sutures usurpers in his house. He's reunited with his wife. But then it's the only Book 23 and there's the poem is an open. And there's a sense that you're in the same way that he's got back to Whitaker in Book 13, but that's one implication of the poem that getting home is a continuous process. It's not, and then Odysseus came home and there's no place like home or the cafe ever after that. It doesn't seem to be very clear. There seem to be so many different points of closure. I mean, the passage I just read in a ways about closure. It's about tying the rope around the neck, closes this possible open orifice, cutting off the limbs, cuts off the possibility of something else, some other action that this body could perform. And then we have multiple other points of closure. We know that critics and antiquity, at least some of them thought, the poem should surely end in Book 23 with the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. They get back into that lovely olive tree bed. It's great, that's the end. But that's not the end of the poem as we have it. We then have these multiple other points of connection. But 24 takes us first to then what happened afterwards in the underworld with the dead suitors complaining to the dead veterans, the Greek veterans of the Trojan War, and bonding over the fact that they've all been killed now. And then we have another point of closure with Odysseus encountering his poor old father, Laertes, in the orchard, which seems to take him back to a very different self, the self who takes care of the trees, takes care of the estate, remembers the names of all those trees and can take care of the peaceable kingdom. But then the last, maybe not the final scene of closure is Odysseus, Laertes, and Tlamacus together for the first time on the battlefield, slaughtering all the fathers and kinsmen of the people they've killed in the palace. And it seems as if there's probably never going to be an end to the killing, unless the day X Markina steps in. So Athena swoops in and stops Odysseus from continuing the massacre. But without Athena's wrapping up with the narrative, it seems if War could continue forever. - Emily Wilson, thank you very much. - Thank you so much.