“There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail”

The quotation is from Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and I remember it from our high school English book. The year before I left our small town to attend university in the city, these words symbolized the idea of seeing the wider world beyond our town, and I copied them out and put them on my bedroom wall.

This week I took Rosemary Sutcliff’s children’s version of The Odyssey out of the library, wondering if it would interest my grandchildren. As I leafed through, admiring Alan Lee’s beautiful illustrations, I realized I’d never actually read the tale, central though it is to the culture that has always surrounded me.

It was interesting, if a bit dismaying, to read about the return of Odysseus (another name for Ulysses). The same old tropes.

To understand the context, we must return to the Iliad, in which Odysseus leaves his wife Penelope and his infant son Telemachus and allies himself with King Menelaus, whose wife Helen has run off with Paris, for the purpose of following the couple to Troy to get his wife back. (Admittedly, this trouble was originally instigated by the vanity of Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and condoned by Zeus, who roped in Paris to choose which of the three goddesses was most beautiful. Following that, Aphrodite took advantage of his cupidity and vanity by bribing him with the promise of power, and a beautiful wife. Apparently the goddess didn’t consider it relevant that Helen was already married to Menelaus.)

But I digress. When the Odyssey begins, Troy (Ilium) is has been vanquished by the Greeks. This tale portrays the return of Odysseus to his waiting wife and son in Ithaca. The journey takes many years, and involves many challenges and delays. On his homeward journey, Odysseus dallies with various women, spending a jaw-dropping seven years as the lover of Calypso. Again, the gods are partly to blame for this delay. Involved since the Trojan war broke out, they interfere only now and again, leaving big messes between these forays of fate. While Penelope waits faithfully for her husband to return, she is besieged by potential suitors, who try to take advantage of her apparent availability by vying for her hand in marriage. Not because they fancy her, but because they want the kingship.

There are many suitors, and few members of the household have remained loyal to Odysseus. Too many even for the Telemachus, now grown to adulthood. “This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle,” says Odysseus in Tennyson’s poem. All very well, but how is the young man (who grew up awaiting his father’s return from Troy) to fight off a hundred bullies singlehanded?

But Odysseus does get back, and the story ends in a classical fashion. Locking the women in their own quarters, Odysseus and his son, with the help of a few faithful retainers, take revenge on the would-be suitors by killing them all. Interestingly, the goddess Athene comes to the aid of Odysseus while this is done. Afterwards, the doors are unlocked and Penelope’s women are summoned to clean up the blood. Success means Odysseus and Telemachus kill all the bad guys. Just like your standard Hollywood move.

What else can we to take from this? In our heroic story, Odysseus leaves his wife and infant son to help out the guy whose wife shamed him by running off with Paris. Penelope has waited at home patiently, raising her son alone and refusing to marry any of the ambitious suitors even when she believes her husband is dead. Once she is certain of her husband’s identity (he returns in disguise), she greets him joyfully and accepts being locked up in the women’s quarters (presumably for her own safety) during the battle. After her husband and son have killed all the suitors and dragged their bodies outside, at his behest, she willingly sends her women out to clean up the mess from the bloodbath.

In the world of the ancient Greeks, the killing of these young men would inevitably have led to a blood feud. It was deemed necessary that the families of the slain should wreak vengeance against Odysseus, for the sake of their honour, so that their names would not “stink in the nostrils” of those who came after. Sadly, it seems the idea of honour (making sure other men didn’t get away with hassling your womenfolk) trumps the proscription against killing. Compare this to modern “honour killings” and other blood feuds like the Troubles in Ireland. As Tommy Sands wrote about the killings of his friends in There Were Roses, “A Catholic would be killed tonight to even up the score. Oh, Christ it’s young O’Malley they’ve taken from the door.”

In The Odyssey, gods and goddesses often step in to influence the outcome of a situation. Early on, Odysseus blinds the Cyclops, son of the sea god Poseidon. In spite of being undetaken in self-defence, this action has consequences far beyond the storms the sea god stirs up to punish the sinner. In fact, on the first night Odysseus is reunited with his wife after two decades, he informs her that he must take another trip, this time by land. As foretold by Tiresias in Hades, he explains, the journey will end in faraway place where he must make sacrifices to atone to Poseidon and thus free himself from the sea-god’s wrath. Through this we glimpse the fatalistic outlook of the Greeks, as well as their idea that wrongs must be atoned for. We also see how once more the wife is expected to wait around while the husband goes travelling on business. This raises the obvious possibility that he’ll indulge in more affairs along the way. The double standard for male and female loyalty is painfully clear. Men are loyal to their comrades at arms and women are either “enchantresses” or patient, faithful and loyal wives.

Though the Greeks deities share human vices including jealousy, anger and violence, they are not all bad. Near the end of the Odyssey, Athene comes between the feuding men and orders them to break off the fighting before more blood is spilled. When Zeus sees that Odysseus still has “the smell of battle in his nostrils,” he flings down a thunderbolt in front of him and Athene once again orders him to stop. Thus with the help of the gods, the reawakened battle ardour of Odysseus is cooled, and peace is restored to the islands.

Meanwhile, back in Troy, Queen Hecuba and her daughter-in-law Andromache must cope not only with the loss of their husbands and sons, but the prospect of being enslaved by their Greek captors. When my daughter was in high school, the drama majors performed Euripides’s Greek Tragedy, The Trojan Woman, and I shall never forget the outstanding performances of the young actors. The teenage girls who played Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra (the prophetess who cursed with foresight, combined with the fact that nobody believes her prognostications) were completely believable as frustrated foreteller, bereaved wives and mothers.

Using ships driven by wind and oar, Odysseus travels from Troy, now in Turkey, and overshoots his home island, visiting parts of what is now Italy, Sicily, Malta and North Africa. On a personal note, I have now seen many of the places mentioned in the tale. Last summer I travelled with my amateur choir to sing in Malta, and we visited the island of Gozo, onetime home of Odysseus’s temporary wife Calypso. Strangely, the tour guide, though she showed us many ancient ruins, failed to mention this bit of lore.

In the end, what can we make of The Odyssey today? The unfortunate behaviours indulged in by the hero are still very much in evidence, which raises the question of whether and how much we’ve progressed as a species.

In closing, our modern people’s propensity for dramatic art, stories and films suggests that the Greek idea of catharsis, releasing our pent-up emotions through the experience of art, is something we moderns still resort to with great regularity.