A man, resourceful but forced into so many wanderings from the time he sacked the sacred stronghold of Troy—sing me his story, Muse. There were many people whose towns he saw, whose minds he took the measure of, and many miseries he suffered at sea, sick at heart, while trying to earn his own life and a way home for his shipmates. But there was no saving those shipmates, determined as he was; they were undone by their own reckless acts. With no more sense than infants they fell on the cattle of the sun god Hyperion and ate them. The god robbed them of the day—their day of homecoming. Start anywhere, goddess, daughter of Zeus, and tell the story again for us.
‘Young men, my suitors, even though godlike Odysseus is dead, be patient, eager though you may be for this marriage, until I get this cloak finished; I don’t want to leave loose ends that would make my work unravel. It’s a burial cloth for the warrior Laertes, for the sorrowful time when the dread fate of death will lay him low. I would rightly be held in disgrace by any Achaean woman in the land if a man who had attained such wealth were left to lie without a shroud.’ She spoke those words, and the manly hearts within us were persuaded. So every day she was weaving her vast web, while every night, by the light of torches she had set beside her, she was undoing it again. For three years she got away with this trick and fooled the Achaeans, but as the seasons came on and on and we were into the fourth year, one of the women who knew all about it told us, and we caught her in the act of unweaving the splendid tapestry. So finally, against her will, she finished it under compulsion.
“You gods are a hard-hearted bunch! You take the prize for jealousy. You just can’t stand it when goddesses openly take men to bed with them, especially if one of them wants to keep him as her own lover. That’s how it was that time when Dawn, with her rosy fingers, took Orion for herself; you gods who live at ease got so upset that finally the chaste goddess Artemis left her golden throne on Ortygia to visit death upon him with the painless shafts of her arrows. And it was the same way when Demeter, with her lovely hair, gave way to her passion for Iasion and lay in loving embrace with him in a soft plowed field; Zeus wasn’t unaware of it for long, and visited death on him by throwing a flashing thunderbolt. And now it’s the same way again, and you gods can’t stand it that I’m with a mortal man. I rescued him when he was perched all alone
She found him sitting on the beach, his eyes unceasingly wet with tears and his sweet life flowing out of him along with them as he mourned for his homecoming. He no longer found any pleasure in the nymph, and though he still slept with her every night in her hollow cavern, it was by necessity; he was an unwilling partner, she a willing one. But every day found him sitting on the rocks and sands of the beach, racked to his soul with sobs and groans and grief, gazing out across the endless barren sea as the tears poured out from his eyes.
As he spoke these words, godlike Odysseus crawled out of the bushes; with his strong hand, he broke off a leaf-covered branch from the thick woods so he could shield the skin around his male loins. He stepped forward like a lion raised in the mountains and confident of its strength; it may be rain-drenched and windswept as it goes prowling, but it has fire in its eyes as it stalks the cattle or the sheep or hunts down the wild deer, or when its belly’s urgency drives it even to go inside a thick-walled pen and make an attack on the flocks. So too was Odysseus ready to go among the fair-haired maidens, naked as he was, for need was on him. He was a frightening sight to them, befouled with brine, and they scampered off along the sandbars, some one way, some another. The daughter of Alcinous was the only one who stood her ground, for Athena put courage in her heart and took fear from her limbs.
This was the song sung by the singer famed far and wide. But Odysseus melted in tears, and each tear that escaped his eyelids would wet his cheek. Just as a woman wails as she crouches over her beloved husband, who lies fallen in front of his city and people, where he tried to keep off the ruthless day from his town and his children, and as she watches him dying and gasping she drapes herself around him and shrieks aloud, while the men behind her strike her back and shoulders with their spears, and lead her off into slavery and a life filled with toil and sorrow, her cheeks ravaged with the most piteous grief—just so was Odysseus shedding one pitiful tear after another from his eyes.
“Those were my words, but his pitiless heart answered not a word. He just jumped up and snatched up my shipmates in his hands; holding two of them up at once like puppies, and bashed them against the ground, and their brains splashed on the earth, staining the floor of the cave. Then he tore them limb from limb and made himself a supper of them; he ate them the way a lion feeding in the mountains would, leaving nothing behind, devouring the entrails, the flesh, and the bones full of marrow. We cried aloud and raised our hands to Zeus as we stood there watching the cold-blooded cruelty of his deeds, our spirits powerless to prevent them. But when the Cyclops had filled his gigantic belly by eating human flesh, and washed it down with a drink of whole milk, he lay down to sleep in the cave, stretched out full length among the sheep.
‘Cyclops, you asked me to tell you my glorious name, and I’ll tell you straight out. Then you can give me a gift of friendship, just as you promised. My name is: Nobody. Nobody is what they call me. My mother and father and shipmates—they all call me Nobody.’
“Those were my words, and he answered right back with a pitiless heart: ‘Okay, then; I’ll save Nobody to eat last among his shipmates, and eat the others first. That will be my gift of friendship for you.’
“Who are you among men? Where do you come from? Where are your city and parents? I’m astounded that you drank these drugs and aren’t under their spell. No other man who’s drunk them has ever been able to resist these drugs from the first moment they passed the barrier of his teeth; you must have a mind in you that’s witchcraft-proof. You’re Odysseus! You’re the resourceful one the god who appears in a flash was always telling me about; the god with the golden wand told me such a man would show up here on the way back from Troy with his sleek-hulled black ship. Come on, put your sword back in its sheath, and let’s both of us go up to our bed; we’ll make love, and in each other’s arms we’ll get over all this distrust we both have.’
“Those were her words, and as I brooded inwardly upon them, a desire rose in me to embrace the soul of my departed mother. Three times I reached for her as my heart prompted me to hold her close, and three times she flitted from my arms like a shadow or a dream, and each time the pain in my heart grew sharper. And I spoke to her in words that went as straight as winged shafts:
“‘My mother, why won’t you hold still while I’m trying to hug you, so that even in Hades’ realm the two of us might wrap our arms around each other in loving embrace and comfort ourselves with chill mourning? Or is this just some phantom that the imperious Persephone has called up for me, to draw still more groans from my grief in my frustration?’
‘Don’t give me that facile consolation about death, Odysseus, with your shiny words. I’d rather be on earth and do menial labor for another man, even a man with next to nothing himself, who’s barely scratching out a living, than be the ruler who holds sway over all the withered, wasted dead. But come, tell me the story of that glorious son of mine; did he follow in my footsteps to become the preeminent man in the war, or not? And tell about the irreproachable Peleus if you’ve heard any news of him; does he still hold honor among the multitudes of Myrmidons, or do they look on him with disdain in Phthia and all through Greece now, because old age has him tied down hand and foot? For I’m not there under the bright rays of the sun to be a help and support to him the way I once was to the Argives, defending them on the wide plains of Troy by mowing down hordes of the enemy’s best men.
“‘Over here, far-famed Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans. Bring your ship in here and listen to the soft sounds of our duet. No man has ever kept his black ship going and passed by this place. They all stop to listen to the sweet sounds that come from our lips. Then they go their way filled with joy and knowing much more. We know everything that happened on the wide plains of Troy. We know the grind the gods put Argives and Trojans through. We know everything that happens on the wide bountiful earth.’
All forms of death that can come to wretched mortals are abhorrent, but to die of starvation and meet one’s doom in that way is the most pitiful. Come on then, let’s round up the best cattle Helios has and use them to hold sacrifices to the immortals who inhabit the wide heavens. And if we ever get back to our native soil on Ithaca, the first thing we’ll do is build a sumptuous temple to Helios Hyperion and fill it up with an abundance of splendid offerings dedicated to him. If he bears any grudge over his long-horned cattle, and wants to destroy our ship on their account, and the rest of the gods go along with him on it, I’d rather come to the end of my life all at once by swallowing a wave than have my life squeezed out in a lingering death on a desert island.’
With these words, he went on into the pleasantly situated palace, and went straight through the hall into the midst of the illustrious suitors. But as for Argos, the fate of black death took hold of him, as soon as he’d seen Odysseus once more in the twentieth year.
Imagine a man at a vast blazing fire, flipping a paunch filled with fat and blood over and over in his impatience to get the sausage roasted all the more quickly; that’s exactly the way he was tossing and turning as he plotted ways and means of getting his hands on those suitors, lost to all sense of shame, though he was only one against so many. Then Athena came down from the heavens and drew near him, her form like that of a woman, and stood over his head and spoke her words to him:
“Sleepless yet again, you who are ill-treated by fate beyond all other men?
That’s the way the suitors talked. But soon resourceful Odysseus was finished holding up the great bow and looking over all of it, and then, just as a man who’s expert at using a lyre to accompany a song will easily stretch a string to fit around a new peg, fastening a cord made of sheep-gut strands well twisted from both ends, so now, without the slightest exertion, Odysseus strung the great bow. And holding it in his right hand, he tried out the bowstring, and it sang beautifully under his touch, like a note sung by a swallow.
Then resourceful Odysseus stripped the rags off his limbs and leapt up onto the broad threshold with the bow and the quiver full of arrows in his hands, and he spilled out the sleek arrows right there in front of his feet and spoke out among the suitors: “This contest has been decided, once and for all, and now I’ll find out if I can hit another target—one on which no man has ever yet scored a hit—if Apollo grants an answer to my prayer.”
As he spoke these words, he took a rope made for a dark-prowed ship and fastened it to a tall pillar, and then looped it over the round tower, stretching it taut high up where no one could reach the ground with her feet. Just as, when long-winged thrushes or doves that are coming in to roost plunge into a snare that’s been strung among the bushes, and find themselves in a hateful resting place, so too did the women hold their heads in a row as nooses were slipped around all their necks so they could die as miserably as possible. They flailed their legs a little while, but not very long.
Those were the words she spoke to test her husband. But Odysseus burst out in anger at his shrewd and faithful wife: “Woman, this is a gut-wrenching thing for you to say! Who moved my bed to a different place? That would be a hard thing to do, even for someone with expert skill, unless a god himself came in and easily moved it any other place he wanted. But among mortals, there’s no man alive, not even in the prime of life, who could make it budge, because there’s a great secret in the construction of that bed. I and no one else did the work.
And welcome as the sight of land is to swimmers whose well-built ship Poseidon has wrecked at sea after it was hard-pressed by the wind and swollen waves, and a small remnant of survivors has escaped the foaming sea and swum to shore with the brine thickly crusted all over their bodies as they set their feet joyfully onto land and out of danger, just as welcome now to her was her husband as she feasted her eyes upon him, and there was absolutely no way her white arms were coming off his neck.