For Odysseus to Die a Happy Death He Must Depart Again and Plant What in the Earth?
Last calendar month, the 7th Armoured Brigade, the "Desert Rats", arrived at Army camp Bastion in Helmand: the terminal major deployment to Transitional islamic state of afghanistan earlier the UK pulls out its gainsay troops at the end of side by side year. Britain'south wars, for now, are coming to an end. But what does that ending hateful for the soldiers coming dwelling house? David Finkel, author ofThank You for Your Service, a new account of the travails of the returning warrior, puts it brutally: it means coming "out of one war into some other".
Homer's Iliad is the starting time and greatest poetic account of the beginning blazon of war. But it is the Odyssey that takes on the 2nd kind: the war of the homecoming.
The Odyssey is a poem that nosotros tend to remember as the hero's colourful, salt-caked adventures on the high seas: his encounters with witches, nymphs and cyclopes, his journey to the land of the dead, his shrewd and quick-tongued and fast-witted outsmarting of the terrors in his path every bit he strives for a decade to reach his habitation after the sack of Troy. He drags his crew bodily away from the island where the inhabitants gorge themselves on the memory-wiping, pleasure-giving lotus; he withstands the ruinous song of the Sirens, who long to lure him to his death, by having himself lashed to the mast by his crew, whose ears he has stopped with wax; he outwits the glamorous enchantress Circe, who turns his men into pigs; he steers his ship between the maneating, many–headed Scylla and the deadly whirlpool Charybdis. He is the original unlikely survivor, the homo who always struggles free of the car crash and walks clear of the wreckage as the flames curl out: the latest iteration of the type, which runs through storytelling from primitive Hellenic republic to Hollywood, is Sandra Bullock's graphic symbol in Alfonso Cuarón's blockbuster, Gravity.
But, as Aristotle put information technology in the Poetics, these are "episodes". The essence of the story is that of a veteran combatant who, after a long absence, must detect his fashion back into a household he finds threatened past outside forces and dangerously altered.
He is at starting time unrecognisable to his married woman (he has come dorsum "a different person" – literally, in that he has disguised himself and causeless a imitation proper noun, just military spouses will understand the metaphor of the warrior utterly inverse by war). The necessary process of recognition and reintegration is accomplished, merely simply violently, painfully. Then the Odyssey speaks urgently to our times. It did, besides, in the post-Vietnam era, when the psychologist Jonathan Shay, who worked with veterans of the conflict, used the epic in his book Odysseus in America as the overarching metaphor for the postcombat warrior's psychic traumas.
The Odyssey invites usa to ask: can soldiers ever, truly, return dwelling house? Will they "recognise" their family, and vice versa? Tin they survive not just the state of war itself, but the war's aftermath? Will they, in some dread way, bring the state of war dwelling with them? The Odyssey says: you thought it was tough getting through the state of war. Now, see if you can get through the nostos – the homecoming.
The invisible, interior wounds of veterans have long been recognised. Ben Shepard, in his book A War of Nerves, has charted their diagnosis, from the "shell shock" of the offset globe war to the "nerve bug" of the second, through to the naming of mail service-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by American psychiatrists in the troubled aftermath of Vietnam. Information technology is now estimated that 20%-thirty% of the two one thousand thousand US soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have come home with mail service-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic encephalon injury (TBI). "Low, feet, nightmares, memory problems, personality changes, suicidal thoughts: every war has its subsequently-war," Finkel writes, "and so information technology is with the wars of Iraq and Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, which accept created some 500,000 mentally wounded American veterans."
Sing to me, Muse, of that incessantly cunning human
who was blown off course to the ends of the world, in the years
later on he plundered Troy. He passed through the cities
of many people and learned how they thought, and he suffered
many bitter hardships upon the high seas
equally he tried to save his ain life and bring his companions
back to their dwelling. Simply however bravely he struggled,
he could not rescue them, fools that they were – their own
recklessness brought disaster upon them all...
The first line of the Odyssey, here in Stephen Mitchell'due south newly published translation, lands on "man": in the original Greek information technology is "andra" – man – that is the very outset word of the epic. The Odyssey is an intensely man story. It is Odysseus' intelligence and higher up all, his capacity to endure, that finally sees him reinstalled on his throne, reunited with his married woman and son.
The verse form is as total of twists and turns as the questing heed of its hero. Dissimilar the Iliad, which is a straightforwardly linear narrative, telling of the rage of Achilles and the killing of the Trojan prince Hector, theOdyssey is conveyed through flashbacks and narratives-within-narratives, and in a range of exotic, sometimes supernatural, locations. Along the verse form's dizzying pathways we are constantly reminded of what this story might have been if Odysseus' intelligence and self-control had been a degree meaner.
In the first few books of the verse form, at that place are frequent references to some other homecoming from Troy – that of the Greeks' victorious commander-in-master, Agamemnon. This story inserts itself again and over again into the early passages of the Odyssey: how Agamemnon came back to his kingdom, and how his wife Clytemnestra's lover, Aegisthus, murdered him. And then how Orestes, Agamemnon'southward son, avenged his father by killing both his mother and her lover. The insistent intrusion of this story into the Odyssey fulfils twin roles. For Odysseus' son Telemachus, information technology acts as a prompt: can the young man, unschooled in war, become the kind of hero that Orestes was – the true son of his male parent? Just it also works as a alarm for all that might go wrong for Odysseus. It tells u.s. this: unless you lot play things right, you lot'll exist destroyed at home – even though y'all won the war.
Odysseus is no fool. He does not return to his kingdom ostentatiously, as Agamemnon did. Fittingly for the warrior who invented the Trojan horse, who is skilled in subterfuge and armed services intelligence, he sneaks in, disguised in rags. He goes not to his own palace, just to the cottage of Eumaeus, a swineherd. He does not reveal his identity, even to the loyal old homo. Then, posing as a beggar, he slips into his house, at once spying on the suitors who swarm around Penelope, and testing his wife and household's loyalty.
Penelope is indeed stiff and true: she has kept the suitors at bay for a decade. In Finkel'due south volume there is a heartrending story of a war widow who, though she keeps her husband's ashes close, is at some level convinced he is alive and nearby, preparing to come up back dwelling house, but biding his time; she waits patiently, loyally. It is a kind of inverse Penelope story; it reminds me of Zachary Bricklayer'southward dazzling novel of Homeric what-ifs, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which unwinds skeins of alternative narratives, releasing counterstories as if they were somehow already implicit in the epic (Odysseus returns to find his wife remarried, or dead; Achilles is a golem fashioned by Odysseus, and and then on).
What happens side by side in the Odyssey is this. Penelope, under increasing pressure to choose a husband from amidst the suitors, sets them a challenge. Whoever tin string the great bow of Odysseus, left behind for 20 years, and shoot an arrow through the 12 axe heads that Telemachus sets out, shall win her as his bride.
In turn, the suitors try the task, and fail. Odysseus, wrapped in filthy rags, the butt of the suitors' antipathy, stands upwardly to attempt the feat. Hands, he strings the bow and flies an pointer, swift and shrill as a eat, through the axe heads. And then, without a beat, he takes another arrow and switches his aim to i of the suitors' ringleaders, Antinous, who is tilting a goblet to his lips. Odysseus gets him right through his exposed neck: in one side, out the other, and the blood fountains forth. And then the bloodbath begins – or rather, a battle, the war brought literally dwelling. The remaining suitors become their hands on weapons. Odysseus, aided by Telemachus, engages them. The begetter and son are vastly outnumbered: only they have a god on their side. Athene, in human disguise, weighs in. Soon the not bad hall is a charnel house.
Afterwards, Telemachus orders the disloyal maids to clean upward the bodies and the gore. Then he takes them outside and hangs them. They twitch helplessly in their death throes, similar thrushes in a snare. Shay, in his Odysseus in America, reads the episode as a kind of fantasy or wish fulfilment: it is warrior's rage vented on the civilian who has stayed comfortably backside, an eye on his married woman. In Finkel's book there is a veteran who, after an injury, has no sensation or motion on his left side. Out and near, he wears a specially printed T-shirt. On the front it reads: "What take you done for your country?". On the back: "I took a bullet in the head for mine" – a gesture of suppressed fury if ever there was one.
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In the Odyssey, people tell each other stories well-nigh the war. Penelope hears the bard Phemius singing most how the other Greek war leaders found their way home subsequently the sack of Troy, but she can't conduct it and asks him to end: it is as well brutal a vocal when her own human is still unaccounted for. When Telemachus, prompted by the goddess Athene, leaves Ithaca and goes in search of his father, he arrives at the court of Menelaus and Helen: Menelaus tells him the tale of Agamemnon'southward return, a story so grievous that all of the listeners, each remembering his own war losses, weeps. When Odysseus himself ends upwards in the land of the Phaeacians, his last adventure before he finally reaches his homeland, he conceals his true identity. Entertained at the royal court, he asks the blind bard, Demodocus, to sing of the exploits of the Greeks at Troy. He does so (in the belatedly Robert Fagles' translation):
but smashing Odysseus melted into tears,
running down from his eyes to moisture his cheeks…
equally a adult female weeps, her arms flung round her darling husband,
a man who fell in battle, fighting for town and townsmen,
trying to beat the day of doom from dwelling and children.
Thus the great warrior's remembered hurting is made equal to that of the war widow.
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Telling stories about the war is also one way of understanding the nature of Greek tragedy, the fine art course that matured in Athens some 200 years after the Homeric epics were written downward. The earliest playwright whose works survive complete is Aeschylus. His trilogy, the Oresteia, showtime performed in 458BC, is an expansion of the story of Agamemnon'due south render, taking its cue from the Odyssey. Reading Homer, you meet how the poet opens the door to the tragic class – over half of the poem'due south lines are in direct speech and the scenes that describe the performances by bards such as Demodocus and Phemius advise that epics would have been performed to an audience, with music, as function of an evening'south feasting and entertainment.
Like the Oresteia, many of the works of the tragedians are sequels or prequels to the stories of the Trojan state of war, tying upwards the epics' loose ends, spiralling out from their stories to go down narrative byways of their own making. Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, for instance, tells the story of how Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter to ensure a fair wind to ready his fleet on course for Troy. HisTrojan Women tells of the fate of Hecuba and Andromache, enslaved after the war by the victorious Greeks. In Sophocles' Ajax, the hero is enraged that the god-forged armour of (the now dead) Achilles is ancestral to Odysseus, not to him. He vows to kill the Greek leaders – just is sent mad by Athene, and massacres livestock instead of men, before committing suicide.
Information technology is no coincidence that this concluding drama has, over the past weeks, been staged in London, rewritten for our times as Our Ajax past Timberlake Wertenbaker. Suicide is now every bit threatening to soldiers equally bombs and guns. Finkel's book includes an account of a meeting of the Suicide Senior Review Group, a regular gathering of acme United states of america army officers to examine the previous month'southward shattering litany of soldiers' self-shootings, hangings, overdoses and plunges from bridges. A report published this February by the Section of Veteran Affairs found that, in 2010, 22 Usa veterans killed themselves every solar day, while in the UK more soldiers and veterans killed themselves in 2012 than died in combat in Afghanistan.
The causes of war, the collateral damage of war, the ghastly aftermath of war, the devastating impact of state of war on the cocky: this is Greek tragedy'south stock in merchandise. The first audiences of these plays were, as well, steeped in war. In the 480s BC, Athens and Sparta came together to head a pocket-size, shaky alliance of Greek urban center-states and withstood an invasion past Persia – though not before Athens had been burned to the ground, twice. In the years post-obit the victory, Athens pursued a policy of ambitious imperial expansion and overseas intervention, culminating in the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war with Sparta in 431, which lasted, on and off, until 404.
Athens' army consisted of its citizens. None was untouched by state of war. Even that about pacific of philosophers Socrates had served in the Athenian army and – we learn in Plato's Symposium – saved the life of Alcibiades at the battle of Potidaea in 432 BC. The City Dionysia, the festival at which the plays were performed, included a parade of the children whose fathers had been killed in combat. The playwrights themselves were militarily embroiled, in one manner or another: Aeschylus fought at Salamis, the decisive naval boxing of the Farsi wars; his brother, according to Herodotus, was killed in it. Sophocles took high part as a general. Euripides, it was later claimed, was born on the day of the battle of Salamis itself, and his plays have been interpreted every bit responses to the fraught, bloodsoaked events of the war against Sparta: the civilian massacres, the grievous loss of men and morals.
Thus the tragedies provided a communitarian context for telling stories nigh conflict and its effects. According to Edith Hall, professor of classics at King'southward Higher London, this direct expertise gave Greek authors the ability to discuss "the cost of state of war in terms of the mental health of combatants" with a "frankness and sophistication from which we can learn a peachy deal in the third millennium". The tragedians, she argues, were experts in what we would now term PTSD.
Exhibit A in this statement is Euripides' extraordinary play Heracles Mainomenos – "Heracles Being Mad". Until virtually 2 thirds of the way through the drama, its narrative is rather conventional. Heracles' wife, children and mortal father Amphitryon (the man who brought him up, though the hero is the son of Zeus) live in fear for their lives; their enemy is a usurping tyrant, Lycus. Heracles has been absent, fighting and performing his 12 labours. Now he returns and, reunited with his loving family, prepares to save the day.
Except a goddess called Lyssa appears and causes Heracles to lose his mind. The hero turns on his wife and children, supposing them to be his foes. He uses his bow against his commencement child, then clubs the next to death. Equally his wife tries to relieve the tertiary, he kills them both with a unmarried arrow. The episode passes: Heracles becomes aware of what he has done, and is utterly broken.
Who is Lyssa? She is madness. Not a generic madness, for Greek authors punctiliously identified varieties of matted minds. For instance, the ecstatic mania sent by Dionysus is different from the hallucinations sent past the Erinyes, the Furies who torture Orestes afterward his matricide. Lyssa, according to Hall, is "personified combat-craziness": the madness of the berserking soldier. Lyssa can, Hall has written, "attack arbitrarily, force entry into the body fifty-fifty of a superhero, send him into a wild state with physical symptoms of derangement, terrify him, wreck his cognitive skills, and make him destroy the things he loves the well-nigh". Lyssa is animalesque: she might be dog-faced, or likened to a snake-haired Gorgon. Unleash the dogs of state of war, and you unleash Lyssa. When Heracles is sent mad by Lyssa, he becomes "Gorgon-eyed" and "like a balderdash"; he "shakes his wild-eyed Gorgon face".
Poet Anne Carson's translation of part of ane of Heracles' last speeches (in her Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides) captures the link betwixt the violence in his heroic life (the labours, the wars) and its dreadful eruption into the domicile:
All those labours,
what tin I say? Those lions.
Those typhons.
Those giants.
Those centaurs.
Those wars.
Then the hydra with her hundred heads snapping.
And down to hell to go the threeheaded dog.
And now, absolutely last labour.
I kill my children.
I end my house in evil.
At that place are uncanny and disturbing echoes of this kind of domestic fury in Finkel's volume. One wife keeps a secret diary of her husband'south outbreaks of rage, charting how a once polite and loving human being descends into a screaming tyrant ("I'm going to suspension every knuckle of your consciousness") before she flees their home with her kid. Of one veteran, he writes: "He has a immature daughter who was in the family truck one day when he all of a sudden went haywire, punched the rearview mirror, shattered the windshield, grabbed [his wife] by the meridian of her head, shook her dorsum and forth, and screamed, 'I'm gonna fucking kill you.'" Another man chokes his married woman in his sleep; he wakes up and has no memory of the attack, but her neck is bruised and sore.
Long-enduring, always-devising Odysseus manages to fulfil the last great quest, the terminal labour that defeats even Heracles: he is able to return safely domicile. Penelope is the key. She is his match: a woman of wiles, long-enduring, just similar her hubby. In a ruse worthy of Odysseus himself, she tricks her suitors: she will brand a decision, she says, when she has finished weaving her begetter's shroud. Every day, she weaves. And every nighttime, she unravels.
After the massacre of the suitors, Odysseus reveals his identity to Penelope. But she does non recognise him, yet – or feigns non to. Telemachus berates his female parent – how can you lot be and so hardhearted, when he's been away for 20 years? Odysseus smiles. Get out u.s. solitary together, he says.
Penelope orders the marital bed to be brought out on to the terrace. Odysseus is furious. Who could move my bed, he asks. Impossible: it is carved from a living olive tree. (A wonderful prototype: the marital bed that grows and lives, rooting down through the house.) Now, at last, Penelope tin truly believe it'south him: no 1 else on earth, bated from his one-time nurse Eurycleia, knew nigh that immovable olive-tree bed.
Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel
when they grab sight of the land – Poseidon has struck
their well-rigged ship on the open body of water with gale winds
and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape, swimming,
struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shore,
their bodies crusted with common salt simply buoyed up with joy
as they plant their feet on solid ground again,
spared a mortiferous fate. So joyous now to her
the sight of her married man, brilliant in her gaze,
that her white artillery, embracing his cervix
would never for a moment allow him go ...
And then is Penelope'southward bliss, in Fagles' translation, conjured. The poet likens her to a shipwreck survivor, merely every bit her married man has actually been, over and over over again. When a tearful Odysseus was listening to Demodocus' stories of the Trojan war, his grief was compared to that of a war-widowed adult female who flings her arms effectually her fallen hubby. So are the experiences of these two, man and wife, intertwined, fabricated the same by the poet. In that location is recognition of the importance of this – the equality of experience and of pain – among the long-enduring wives in Finkel's volume. One in particular identifies the possibility of healing in her husband'south coming to see that "he could tell her anything most the war, anything at all. That she wanted to hear it. That she could take it."
At the end of the poem, Odysseus and Penelope go to bed, they loosen their limbs in dear, and tell each other stories about the war.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/30/odyssey-soldier-afghanistan-military-homer