What Odysseus Teaches Us

Wolf Tivy opens The Students on a rumor of Homer. There is a movie. They are not going to talk about the movie. They are going to talk about the real thing. He has brought Stephen Pimentel back to read the Odyssey as a guide to a modern situation, to a civilization, not as a costume drama.

The first thing, Pimentel says, is to read it. If the film does any good, let it drive people to the text. Pick up a good translation. He likes Richmond Lattimore. Fagles is often great too. Read it for yourself. Do not trust an adaptation.

Nostos after the wreck

People say the core is nostos, the return home. That is not wrong, Pimentel says, and it is easy to take too literally. It is not only the physical fact of being away and coming back. It is rebuilding after a civilizational wreck. The fall of Troy and its aftermath sit in the same weather as the Bronze Age collapse. Tivy fills in the boats: Greeks raiding the Asian coast, Odysseus speaking of Egypt, cities burned in a few years, the people in ships the Egyptians called Sea Peoples. The Greeks “won.” Homes collapsed anyway. Agamemnon came home and was murdered by his wife’s lover. Odysseus’s household holds out a little better, and takes longer. Civilization is collapsing in Ithaca too.

Agamemnon’s warning

The Iliad is before the fall, the Odyssey after. Agamemnon is the shadow that binds them. He is already dead when the second poem starts, and he is everywhere in it. Zeus names his fate in book one. Athena mentions him. A character mentions him to Telemachus. The shade appears to Odysseus and warns him. The message is always the same. Agamemnon came home, was killed by Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover, and was avenged by Orestes — the story Aeschylus would write centuries later, already old in Homer. Don’t let this happen to you. Some readers ask why Odysseus could not just announce himself and negotiate. The text is clear, Pimentel says. He would have been killed. He has to sneak home, pick his moment, and kill the suitors. Athena has already told Telemachus to emulate Orestes and not sit waiting.

So the return is not a change of address. It is the restoration of order to a household and a kingdom, personal and political at once. The virtue the job requires is metis: practical intelligence under duress. People call Odysseus a liar. In most of those cases he is navigating forces stronger than he is. He is not flashy. He does not march around complaining. He hides his power level, puts pieces in place, and only then makes the display good. Telemachus, at the beginning, does the public thing first. Athena has him state the just case: you are abusing the household, eating our food, desecrating the memory. It fails. Visible sovereignty, Pimentel says, is a good thing when you can make it effective. If you have been displaced, you may not want the display until you can.

Metis and the house

Tivy brings the poem into the present and then they both do. Order in the household feels upside down. Institutions are inert, sometimes hostile. Metis is what you need when you decide how to expose yourself to them. Violations of hospitality feel current. People have compared the situation, Tivy says, to mass immigration, and to the Minnesota Somali fraud of some months back: guests abusing the house, a cry for retribution. Pimentel hears the parallel. This is their comparison, drawn on the show, not a finding of the poem. They put it down and go back into the story.

Attacks on agency

The obstacles are attacks on agency. Calypso offers immortality, which is the temptation to leave history — to stop being a player in the human world. Odysseus turns it down, after seven years. He wants his wife, his son, his father, his kingdom, and the chance to rebuild them. The Lotus-Eaters offer forgetfulness. Forgetting who you are and where you came from is annihilation. A human being has no identity except that web of relations. The cattle of Helios, named already in the prologue, are the men doing to a god what the suitors do in Ithaca: eating what they have no right to eat. The divine order of xenia and the human order are the same order. Gods in these stories arrive as beggars. You feed the stranger before you know him.

The Cyclops inverts xenia. Odysseus invokes guest-right; Polyphemus eats the men. Then Odysseus fails metis. He cannot resist the boast, the name, the echo of Achilles’ glory. Polyphemus curses him to Poseidon. One slip buys the extra years of suffering. Without it, Tivy says, there would be no story.

Circe is the other kind of intelligence. The men hear her singing and take a brew of wicked drugs; they are turned into pigs, or that is the report. The story is third-hand. Odysseus tells it in Phaeacia. He did not see it. One man stayed outside, panicked, and ran back. Hermes meets Odysseus on the path and shows him the moly plant — not the later drug, a much older word. Learning the physis, the nature, of the plant, he understands how not to be trapped. It is one of the early uses of phusis we have: things have stable natures, not only plants but animals and, later, humans. Intelligence over magic. Fitting, Pimentel says, that it is Odysseus and not Achilles or Agamemnon who first understands it.

Then the Phaeacians. He washes up a naked wreck, seaweed and salt, and Nausicaa treats the beggar well and recognizes a king. Identity is restored; they send him home. Kingliness is not in the trappings. Telemachus is recognized the same way at Sparta, and perhaps at Pylos: posture, bearing, speech. He does not look like a peasant. Some people claim Nausicaa is Homer’s self-insert, or that Odysseus is making up the wanderings in the hall. Pimentel will not reduce it to a cynical lie. Odysseus is telling, and making, his own story — not at one hundred percent, because there are other people, gods, storms, and death. He has chosen that. He will keep navigating.

The slaughter and the stop

The return is the part adaptations usually cannot bear. He locks the doors, strings the bow, slaughters. He does not have all the slave women killed, Pimentel notes, only those who collaborated with the suitors. He rebukes a servant who laughs at the bodies. This is no occasion for glee. Retribution was needed to restore order; there is nothing gleeful about it. Another generation of men from the town is gone. These people were set on his death. With Telemachus, himself, and a handful, it was the force required to take the palace back. One of Homer’s hard messages, Pimentel says, is that retribution is sometimes part of justice. It is not always wrong, and justice cannot always be served without it. It must not run unbounded. The families of the dead gather for a feud, and the gods step in and say enough. Peace now. Retribution serves the restoration of order. It must not become the next generation’s war.

Homer is normal

What does a young man take from that, in a broken house? A call to seriousness, Pimentel says. Engagement. Practical intelligence in unfriendly rooms. Do not shout your name from the boat. Memory is the other theme. You cannot restore what you do not remember. For Odysseus that memory is wife, son, father, the dead, the kingdom. Tivy adds the liberal arts: the works that make you free because they restore a memory of who you are. Great men read the past. Napoleon studies Caesar’s battles. Cortés compares himself to Achilles and Alexander. They have more in common with one another than with their contemporaries. If you accept an account of yourself written by people who cut you off from that memory, you are weak. If you have it, you are hard to move.

Do not be afraid of Homer’s strangeness, Pimentel says. The strangeness may be a distant memory of home. You are the strange one. Homer is normal. Homer is the return to normalcy — a particular normalcy, Tivy says, the normalcy of great agency. The Odyssey is that return. You make it by picking up the real book.