Book

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e-wax your ears, untie yourselves from the mast; in this piece I’ll be harking back to The Odyssey, first written down circa 750 BC. The book, the physical text I’m working from, is my Penguin Classics paperback, revised edition from 1991 (which is when I embarked on A-Level Greek), as translated by E.V. Rieu then updated by his son D.C.H. Rieu in consultation with P. Jones. They’re super-scholarly, which makes it surprising that the page headers throughout Book 19 (and only Book 19, out of the 24 books, of around 600 lines each) misspell the title of the work as The Oddyssey. I think it’s a typesetting error, this strange reduplication of the “d.” Or a stuttering, an echo.

On opening the cover, the first, verso page gives the authors’ biogs, and explains, “The Greeks believed that The Odyssey was composed by Homer. In our ignorance of the man, his life and his work, we are free to believe it or not”—not a bad approach, to take towards this and indeed every other book.

I was revisiting The Odyssey because I had some scars from playing football, and I wanted to compare and contrast with exactly how Odysseus got the damage on his leg—he has a wound, which, as I’ll outline below, is an important plot-point. The headline story of The Odyssey most people know—post-war adventures and return—but the level of detail and odd-ness is less familiar; I’ll go into some of it here. The whole work, which began in an oral tradition, has a complex structure, full of loop-backs, prophecies, and stories-within-stories. But by the second half this has calmed down somewhat, and there’s a straightforward third-person narrative, explaining what happens now that Odysseus has arrived home in Ithaca after ten years fighting at Troy, and ten years adventuring back. With such a long absence, and suitors infesting his palace, he feels it would be more prudent not to reveal himself straight away. So what does he do?

Odysseus’s claims

He’s come home, twenty years on and in disguise as a beggar; various people ask him who he is, and he gives a range of answers. To his son Telemachus he admits his true identity. Telemachus demurs, “You are not my father, you are not Odysseus; some divine power is playing me a trick to make my grief all the more bitter.” But they work it out.

In the conversations before and after this, Odysseus takes a different tack, declining to say accurately who he is. First he meets Eumaeus, a faithful swineherd, and to him, Odysseus claims to be a Cretan, Castor’s son, who’s been shipwrecked at Thesprotia in north-west Greece. “It was there,” explains in-disguise Odysseus, “that I heard of Odysseus. The King told me that he had entertained and befriended him on his homeward way and showed me what a fortune in copper, gold and wrought iron Odysseus had amassed. [. . . ] He added that Odysseus had gone to Dodona to learn the will of Zeus from the great oak-tree that is sacred to the god, and to discover how he ought to approach his own rich island of Ithaca after so long an absence, openly or in disguise.” There’s a ship on stand-by, just ready to bring Odysseus home, in-disguise Odysseus tells Eumaeus. So this is a story that Odysseus confects—that he has heard that Odysseus is soon to be coming home, from Dodona.

The third person Odysseus talks to is his own wife, Penelope, and when pressed, he offers her a similar story, saying that he is Aethon, from Cnossos in Crete. In this role, he goes one up on his previous claim to have heard of Odysseus; he says that he’s even met him, long ago, when Odysseus first set off for Troy, but was storm-blown to Crete and had to stay there twelve days.

This pretend-Aethon consoles the distraught Penelope, saying, as in the previous tale he spun for Eumaeus, that the Thesprotians are about to send Odysseus back, laden with riches. “This very month,” reports Aethon, “Odysseus will be here, between the waning of the old moon and the waxing of the new.” He’s just popped out; he’s gone, says Odysseus for a second time, “to Dodona to find out the will of Zeus from the great oak-tree that is sacred to the god.”

The sceptical Penelope fears that “Odysseus will not come home nor will you secure your passage from here; for we have no leaders of men like Odysseus (if ever there was such a man).” And this aside is heart-breaking, with the element of doubt, an encroaching sense that perhaps the man she has remembered and longed for, for so long, never really was. The persistence of memory is going very shimmery, here.

Truth-adjacent

These stories, while sleightful, are close to the truth—Odysseus has been deposited home by a friendly king on whose shores he was shipwrecked, at Scherie. He is just close to a full return, and unsure about concealment or disguise. It’s just that Odysseus steps back a person, he detaches himself and pretends to be, not the man he really is, but someone who only encountered him. He’s claiming a role here as an evangelist, precursor, harbinger. He duplicates or stutters, setting up a little distance between himself—in disguise, in the flesh, on Ithaca, actually talking now—and the in-story character of Odysseus, the described Odysseus whom his listeners receive, whose arrival is imminent.

He’s done something similar before in Book 9, tricking Polyphemus the Cyclops by claiming that his name is not Odysseus but Οὖτις, that is, “outis,” or, “no-one.” So when his neighbours ask why he’s shouting in agony, Polyphemus tells them that “No-one has blinded me.” And they, not great readers of context and tone, think, well that’s all right then.

It’s Borgesian, or J.L. Borges is Homerian, in setting up this overlap, displacement, eventual collision, between a person telling a story, a person in a story, whoever tries to escape and ends up clashing straight into the character they fled or were all along. Think, for example, of “Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth” of 1949, “a wanderer, who, before becoming no one in death, would recall once having been a king, or having pretended to be a king.” This is the opposite of Odysseus, pretending not to be his kingly self, so that he can return again better, re-return. In a way he is projecting another body through narrative: there’s him here speaking, but he claims there is somebody else, too. He uses linguistic displacement to doppleganger himself.

Place and prophecy

All this instability and complexity of identity is interesting, but I was also caught by one of the geographical details in the story. What’s this place that twice Odysseus in disguise claims that the actual Odysseus (who’s fictional; it’s just a cover story he’s telling his swineherd and his wife) has gone to? It’s Dodona.

Internet research tells me that Dodona is the site of much archaeological inquiry into its history as a religious site from the second millennium BC. There’s a current focus on a huge collection of lamellae, or little lead oracular tablets, dug up in the 1930s, onto which were written, in many languages, questions for Apollo to answer. Such as, “Aristomachos asks whether he should sail out and work with Straton.” I’d be more worried for Straton, whose lamella asks, whether he will get back the money he has lent Aristion. Someone else, unnamed, just asks, “If I will win the dispute.” Fragments of story and poetry, in the prayers and questions.

Less materially, my Everyman A Smaller Classical Dictionary (1937 version with a wine-dark cloth cover) explains that Dodona is: “the most ancient oracle in Greece, situated in Epirus; founded by the Pelasgians, and dedicated to Zeus. The responses of the oracle were given from lofty oaks or beech trees. The will of the god was declared by the wind rustling through the trees, and in order to render the sounds more distinct, brazen vessels were suspended on the branches of the trees. These sounds were interpreted in early times by men, but afterwards by aged women.” The wind rustles through the oak and beech trees (and there are wind chimes, but these are deeply annoying, so I, being “free to believe it or not,” will ignore the suggestion of their presence), and the priests interpret this message from the god into human words. This is a beautiful idea.

It’s a slightly different technique to how they did things at Delphi, the later, rather more famous oracular centre in Greece. Here, the Pythian priestess would sit on a tripod over a thin chasm, and breath in intoxicating vapours. The Smaller explains, “the words which she uttered after exhaling the vapour were believed to contain the revelations of Apollo. They were carefully written down by the priests, and afterwards communicated by hexameter verse to the persons who had come to consult the oracle. The oracle is said to have been discovered by its having thrown into convulsions some goats which had strayed to the mouth of the cave.”

I propose that life would be greatly enhanced if we revived many of these traditions—tripping goats, communicating in hexameter verse, listening to older women’s interpretation of noise—and all the other ancient world modes of prophecy and seering: looking at the flight patterns and the in-sky behaviour of birds, the running-around paths of birds when they come out to eat grain, the livers of birds when you chop them up.

At the exchange

Is there an equivalent now, in our modern, media age? An echo, a duplication that struck me was an instance from television’s Twin Peaks, created by D. Lynch and M. Frost between 1990 and 2017. This epic work contains 48 episodes (the same as the number of books in the Iliad and Odyssey combined), 48 episodes of around 55 minutes each. It’s a modern-day Odyssey about identity, war, and double lives, about whether a person can recover their proper body and come home safely, after two decades. And it contains a brilliant snippet of dialogue from Episode 1, broadcast in 1990, in which Lucy, a switchboard operator at the sheriff’s office, wants to put through a call to the visiting FBI agent. She says, “Agent Cooper, I’ve got a call for you from a Mr Albert Rosenfeld, it sounds like long distance. It has that . . . open air sound, you know, where it sounds like wind blowing, like wind blowing through trees.”

Coop takes the call, though it’s not Apollonian prophecy wanting to talk to him, but Albert, a cynical but endearing pathologist. What’s Lucy hearing—is it a quality of the voice, being distorted as it comes, or is it the noise of the information conduit itself, the sound of the inside of the phone lines, the long, internal echo of the wires? All messages have content then distance; signal and noise. We want the communication to come through, and sometimes it does, by speaking. Messages and verbal reports keep on arriving, made more interesting by various degrees of interpretation, interference, or downright lies.

The information that has come through to me, in the course of thinking about these artworks, is that Dodona appears to be the birthplace of listening hard for the message. This would be good in itself. But the story complicates, because while it’s the place Odysseus on Ithaca twice tells people that Odysseus has gone to for prophecy and will shortly be returning from, to be precise, it isn’t. He says that he, another he, has gone to get advice from the wind whistling through the trees, but he’s not actually doing that; he hasn’t gone to Dodona. There isn’t a message being translated for him, converted from the wind through the trees into guidance on how to proceed. He isn’t there listening; he’s already home. The oracle’s instruction was only a story, in a story.

Scars and self

But if the spoken and received word is unreliable, unstable, there’s one more mode of revelation for Odysseus. After his conversation with Penelope, Odysseus-as-Aethon is offered a bed for the night, and his old nurse, Eurycleia, undertakes to wash his feet. While she’s doing this, she recognises a scar on his leg, above the knee, and the story tracks back to explain how, as a boy, Odysseus went to visit his grandfather, who took him hunting for a mighty boar on the slopes of Parnassus. He did spear and kill the boar, but it gored a long flesh-wound into his leg, which healed to give the scar that Eurycleia now touches and recognises. From it, she instantly knows that this is Odysseus who has returned.

This detail, this twist in the revelation, has nothing to do with voices, listening, story-telling. But it’s lovely. Does it tell me what I wanted to know, give me insight into my own scars and travels? Not really. It has set me thinking about how much of our understanding—of the self, of others—comes from words, articulation, and how much comes flooding back through a physical encounter with a marking from the past. Sometimes no oracle, interpretation, or conveyance was needed. Not a lot of reading; just a touch.