There are a few epithets[1] commonly used to describe Odysseus in Homer and beyond. “Long-suffering Odysseus” is perhaps the most notable. It occurs at least 34 times in the Odyssey. The exact phrase is polutlas dios Odysseus (“much-enduring, noble Odysseus”). [2] The Greek doesn’t fit well into English idiom, so modern translators tend to elide dios (“godlike, noble”) and emphasize polutlas (“having borne much, much-enduring”). Thus we arrive at the romantic phrase of “Long-suffering Odysseus.” Now, why is this epithet so important?
Perhaps the most heinous form of suffering the hero faced was when Hera sent Mania (“Madness”) to him in his sleep, and he awoke in this delusional madness, throwing his own children on a makeshift pyre and slaying his wife, Megara. This event led to Herakles’ most famous accomplishments. The so-called Labors of Herakles were, in fact, a form of penance the hero performed for the (involuntary) murder of his wife and children. He sought advice from the Pythia (Apollo’s priestess at Delphi), and she gave him the following prophecy:
[Herakles] was purified by Thespios, and going to Delphi, he asked the god where he should settle. The Pythia then for the first time called him by the name Herakles; up until then he had been called Alkeides. She told him to settle in Tiryns and serve Eurystheus for twelve years. She also told him to accomplish the ten labors imposed upon him and said that when the labors were finished, he would become immortal. (Library of Apollodorus) [3]
Hera’s persecution of Herakles is what makes him a hero. Indeed, in Apollodorus’ account (above), the hero’s name is changed to reflect the role of the goddess in his suffering which leads to his fame or glory: Herakles = Hera + kleos (“the glory of Hera”). Without Hera to dog Herakles, to cause him to suffer from his birth to his death, the hero would not have accomplished the numerous heroic exploits that make his story worth telling. While Herakles is certainly superhuman, his plight, his struggles as a mortal thrust into a battle of wills between forces beyond his control (the enmity between Hera and Zeus) is a metaphor for the human condition. The suffering of Herakles, like that of our hero, Odysseus, is a magnification of the suffering in everyday human life. Even without the persecution by Hera of Herakles or by Poseidon of Odysseus, the Greeks viewed humanity as being born to struggle and suffer then die. This dim view of human life is regularly held in contrast to that of the gods in Greek myth.
There is one more example of this that I would like to explore: Hesiod’s “Five Ages of Man,” a section from the Archaic poet’s Works and Days. In this myth, the poet chronicles the five different “ages” of mankind on the earth: golden age, silver age, bronze age, heroic age, and iron age. The ages are listed in chronological order and are assigned depreciating values of metals. The golden age was first and was better than the silver and so forth down the line to the iron age. Hesiod writes as a person living in the iron age. This is what he has to say of the state of human existence for himself and his audience:
I wish I had nothing to do with this fifth generation,
Wish I had died before or been born after,
Because this is the Iron age. Not a day goes by
A man doesn’t have some kind of trouble.
Nights too, just wearing him down. I mean
The gods send us terrible pain and vexation.
Still, there’ll be some good mixed in with the evil
And then Zeus will destroy this generation too. (Hesiod, Works & Days) [4]
Life in the Iron Age is difficult. Indeed, it is defined by suffering. Humans spend most of their time growing into their bodies (childhood) and whittling away in infirmity (old age). Only a small portion of their time is spent in the prime of life. Hesiod contrasts this Iron Age existence to life in the Golden Age where humans are born into the prime of their lives. They do not grow old or infirmed but simply and peacefully expire after living significantly longer than their counterparts in the Iron Age. The lesson in the “Five Ages,” Herakles, and here with Odysseus is the same: to be human is to suffer. Life is suffering. And those who endure the most emerge the greatest of heroes in Greek mythology.
When we first “see” Odysseus in Book 5, it is through the eyes of Hermes, whom Zeus has sent to order Calypso to send Odysseus on his way from her island, where he has been her guest for 7 years. Hermes entered Calypso’s cave, “But Hermes didn’t find the great hero inside. / Odysseus was sitting on the shore, / As ever those days, honing his heart’s sorrow, / Staring out to sea with hollow, salt-rimmed eyes” (5.84-86). The reader’s (or audience’s) first glimpse of Odysseus is that of a man who has suffered much and continues to suffer. However, like Herakles and humanity described in Hesiod’s Iron Age (discussed above), Odysseus endures. As Apollo states in Iliad Book 24.49, “The Fates put in mortal men the heart of endurance,” that they might not be irrevocably broken by the sorrows and suffering of mortal toil.
“Zeus wants you to send him back home.
Now.
The man’s not fated to rot here far from his friends.
It’s his destiny to see his dear ones again
And return to his high—gabled Ithacan home.”
The relationship between Zeus, Fate (or the Fates), and mortals is clear and consistent in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In both epics, Zeus is fully aware of the destinies of mortals, and he works in conjunction with the Fates to ensure that those destinies occur. The most telling of such moments in the Iliad is Book 16 in which he ponders aloud the possibility of rescuing his own mortal child, Sarpedon, from his destined death at the hands of Patroklos:
“Fate has it that Sarpedon, whom I love more
Than any man, is to be killed by Patroclus.
Shall I take him out of battle while he still lives
And set him down in the rich land of Lycia,
Or shall I let him die under Patroclus’ hands?” (Iliad 16.471-75)
This was, of course, a rhetorical ploy on the part of the poet, giving him occasion to highlight the importance of fate and dying to humans in general and warriors in particular. It also highlights Zeus’ role as the steward of Fate. When Zeus sends Hermes down to Calypso with orders to send Odysseus on his way, he does so not only as an autocratic monarch asserting his will and power over others, but as the caretaker of the world who ensures that Fate, the ordering principal of the universe, comes to fruition. Calypso would attempt to alter Odysseus’ fate, thus push back against the justice and order of the universe represented by Zeus’ relationship with the Fates:
I loved him, I took care of him, I even told him
I’d make him immortal and ageless all of his days.
Yet to make a mortal man ageless and immortal is to deny his fate and, in fact, to make him a god. Let us consider Hera’s response when Zeus proposed rescuing Sarpedon in Iliad 16:
“Son of Cronus, what a thing to say!
A mortal man, whose life has long been fixed,
And you want to save him from rattling death?
Do it. But don’t expect all of us to approve.
Listen to me. If you send Sarpedon home alive,
You will have to expect other gods to do the same
And save their own sons – and there are many of them
In this war round Priam’s great city.
Think of the resentment you will create.
But if you love him and are filled with grief,
Let him fall in battle at Patroclus’ hands,
And when his soul and life have left him,
Send Sleep and Death to bear him away
To Lycia, where his people will give him burial
With mound and stone, as befits the dead.” (Iliad 16.477-91)
The order of the cosmos is maintained, in large part, because Zeus aligns himself with the Fates. This same alignment also maintains the distinction between gods and men. Hera’s argument is that if Zeus were to ignore the “laws” of Fate, then the other gods would do so as well, and the result would be chaos. Zeus would be no better than his forefathers, Ouranos and Kronos, who sought to change or bend fate to their own selfish desires just as Zeus and the other Olympians would do in order to rescue their mortal children. Instead, Hera argued the point that Zeus already knew to be true, mortals are born to die, and so they must. There are ways in which they must be treated, and that is “with mound and stone as befits” those who are destined to die. Thus humans receive honor in their proper place within the cosmos. Calypso’s expressed desire to make Odysseus “ageless and immortal” is a direct challenge to the rule of Fate that Zeus presides over in Homeric literature. Even Zeus was not above it. Nor can Calypso turn her mortal lover into a god.
Calypso left her cave once Hermes departed to Olympos. She finds Odysseus much as Hermes had seen him at the start of Book 5:
She found him sitting where the breakers rolled in.
His eyes were perpetually wet with tears now,
His life draining away in homesickness.
The nymph had long since ceased to please.
He still slept with her at night in her cavern,
An unwilling lover mated to her eager embrace.
Days he spent sitting on the rocks by the breakers,
Staring out to sea with hollow, salt-rimmed eyes. (150-57)She found him sitting where the breakers rolled in.
His eyes were perpetually wet with tears now,
His life draining away in homesickness.
The nymph had long since ceased to please.
He still slept with her at night in her cavern,
An unwilling lover mated to her eager embrace.
Days he spent sitting on the rocks by the breakers,
Staring out to sea with hollow, salt-rimmed eyes. (150-57)
Odysseus pines away with homesickness, but he continues to submit to the goddess, pleasing her every night between the sheets. This interaction, along with what follows, is yet another way in which the poem reinforces Homeric/Archaic ideas of piety and the role of humans in the greater cosmos. This is a parallel metaphor to that of the lessons involving xenia that I discussed in Book 1 and which will feature prominently in later Books. In both cases, there are certain uncontestable truths or values regarding what it is to be human. In the case of xenia, the tension is between being civilized (human) or savage (animal). In this instance, however, the important distinction is the relationship between human (civilized) and god (divine, beyond human understanding). In other words, Odysseus’ desires are irrelevant. Respect the god. She wishes to sleep with him, and he does so. But their relationship to this point seems rather callous, or at least, I have portrayed it that way. This idea about knowing one’s place as a human being in the cosmic order (situated between gods and animals) finds a far more poetic expression as their conversation continues.
Calypso brought Odysseus inside her cave, conspicuously seating the hero “in the chair which moments before / Hermes had vacated, and the nymph set out for him / Food and drink such as mortal men eat” (195-98). In other words, Homer juxtaposes the fundamental differences between Odysseus the mortal man who eats cooked meat and drinks wine on the one hand, to Hermes the immortal and ageless god who eats ambrosia and drinks nectar on the other. Then Calypso addresses Odysseus:
“Son Laertes in the line of Zeus, my wily Odysseus,
Do you really want to go home to your beloved country
Right away? Now? Well, you still have my blessings.
But if you had any idea of all the pain
You’re destined to suffer before getting home,
You’d stay here with me, deathless –
Think of it, Odysseus! – no matter how much
You missed your wife and wanted to see her again
You spend all your daylight hours yearning for her.
I don’t mind saying she’s not my equal
In beauty, no matter how you measure it.
Mortal beauty cannot compare with immortal.” (202-13)
There are two important takeaways to emphasize in this
speech, and we will take them in the order they are delivered. Firstly, Calypso
taunts Odysseus with the promise of great pain and suffering if she were to
grant his desire and send him off to continue his trek home to Ithaca. Odysseus,
she says, is “destined to suffer,” and that suffering is contrasted with the
option of remaining with Calypso on her island, “deathless.” Humans, who grow
old and die, are doomed (fated) to suffer. Indeed, to grow old and die is the
supreme form of suffering in contrast to a divine existence of agelessness and
immortality, which Calypso offers. Surviving Archaic epic (Homer and Hesiod)
consistently reinforce this contrast between mortality and suffering on one
hand, and immortality and the absence of pain on the other.
Secondly, Calypso compares herself to Odysseus’ mortal wife,
Penelope. Calypso is more beautiful, regardless of the criteria used to judge
the quality, than Penelope, because “Mortal beauty cannot compare with
immortal.” The logic of Calypso’s statement can be derived from a similar
sentiment as that which underlies the first point of her speech: the contrast
between ageless and immortal gods to mortal humans who live only a short
portion of life in their prime. It also serves to reinforce the ever present hierarchy
of the Homeric world which the gods sit atop, firmly above humans. What is
perhaps more interesting than this rote statement of fact is Odysseus’ reply:
“Goddess and mistress, don’t be angry with me.
I know very well that Penelope,
For all her virtues, would pale beside you.
She’s only human, and you are a goddess,
Eternally young. Still, I want to go back.
My heart aches for the day I return to my home.
If some god hits me hard as I sail the deep purple,
I’ll weather it like the sea-bitten veteran I am.
God knows I’ve suffered and had my share of sorrows
In war and at sea. I can take more if I have to.”
In one short riposte, Odysseus prostrates himself before the
deity, showing the presence of mind that fled Agamemnon in Book 1 of the Iliad when he foolishly ignored the opinions of his warriors when he refused to
ransom back Chryses’ daughter and thus failed to show respect to Apollo.
Odysseus restates the importance of Calypso’s agelessness and immortality,
conceding that no human could hope to compete with that. Furthermore, Odysseus
reinforces the Homeric view of what it is to be human, and that is to suffer.
As Apollo stated in Iliad Book 24, the gods put in human hearts the
ability to suffer and endure, for suffering is part and parcel with mortality.
In so many words, Odysseus has stated that he is a human being. He knows his
place. He knows to be human is to suffer. He knows he will die. He strives only
to be the best human he can be. In refusing Calypso’s entreaties to stay with
her, Odysseus overcomes the temptation to circumvent or change his fate. If I
might make a Lord of the Rings analogy, this would be akin to Gandalf or
Galadriel being offered the one ring by Frodo and refusing to take it, for with
it they would gain godlike power, but it would also corrupt them, and
fundamentally change their essences (into pawns of “the enemy”).
In any case, Calypso sees Odysseus on his way, and before
the Book is out, our hero’s rickety raft has been wrecked at sea, and with the
aid of a sea nymph, he washes ashore on an unknown island at night and burrows
under fallen leaves beneath a pair of trees in blessed sleep.
[1] An epithet is an adjective or descriptive phrase expressing a quality characteristic of the person or thing mentioned. Oxford Languages via Google.
[2] πολύτλας δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς . Perseus Project Word Study Tool. Each word is a clickable individual link analyzing the part of speech as used in a specific line from the Odyssey with LSJ and other lexicon links. These words are used in stock phrase, so their parts of speech are always the same.
[3] Apollodorus. Library of Apollodorus. Stephen M. Trzaskoma (trans.). In Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation 2nd Ed. Hackett (2016).
[4] Hesiod. Works & Days, Theogony. Stanley Lombardo (trans.). In Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation 2nd Ed. Hackett (2016).
