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is not a life a hero can live. And then he lands on the island of
Phiecia, is drawn slowly back into society.
And we have probably the best known part of the Odyssey, the so called Adventure
Books. These are interwoven tales.
They have some folktale motifs, but we can group them roughly.
And there are three groups of three, interrupted with a trip to the underworld.
And in those three groups of three there are, they're characterized.
Each tale is characterized, I'm sorry, I should say, by a monster or by temptation
or by folly. The monsters are generally identified as
cannibals. And the most famous is certainly the huge
one-eyed monster Polyphemus. The description that Odysseus gives of his
interaction with Polyphemus involves not only xenia and its violations.
I mean, Polyphemus isn't a great host, he starts killing Odysseus's men and eating
them. Odysseus isn't a great guest, he comes in
and starts stealing stuff. But even more than that, there are some
hints of the social reality of the time. The island on which Polyphemus lives, is
described as having a good harbor, plentiful timber, good water supply.
We'll see in a lecture or two that the Greeks are starting to send out colonies
now into the Mediterranean. And this is a perfect site to set up a
colony. But even more important than that, the
cyclops is described as not eating bread, and as not performing sacrifice.
A great french scholar, Pierre Vidal Naquet, has analyzed this.
And he has pointed out that not eating bread means that the cyclops don't do
agricultural labor. And the fact that they don't perform
sacrifice means that they don't recognize the importance of the gods.
These two characteristics, that is, not doing farmwork and not recognizing the
gods, marks the cyclops as inhuman. Even more than does his enormous size and
canabalistic appetite and single eye in the middle of his forehead.
Using cunning, cleverness, Oddyseus and his men blind the cyclops and manage to
escape. But as he's leaving, Odysseus taunts the
cyclops. Up to this point, Odysseus has called
himself. Ootus, no man.
But now he says, you can tell the other cyclopes that the one who blinded you is
Odysseus. Bad mistake, it's a bad point for Odysseus
to claim his identity, because it give the cyclops the opportunity to curse him.
If cyclops called that a curse on no man, of course it wouldn't work.
But the cyclops's father is the great god of earth and sea, Poseidon, and he's
furious. And Odysseus is set a wandering with
Poseidon, Poseidon's rage kind of overshadowing him.
Odysseus also meets temptation in various forms.
Probably the most famous is in the form of the witch, Circe, who turns his men, by
means of a magic potion, into swine. And we could hardly have a clearer
illustration of what I was talking about, in terms of appetite versus intelligence.
Odysseus gets a little bit of divine assistance, manages to overcome Circe.
But she sends him on a quest, and the quest is to the underworld.
This is Book 11 of the Odyssey, and it gives us our first and in many ways, the
most detailed description. Of what life was thought to be like after
one died. It's not hell.
That is, it's not a place of constant torment.
It is instead a place that's cold, it's dark.
And people exist in a kind of shadow form of themselves.
When Odysseus descends to the underworld, he meets some of his former
companions
from the war at Troy. There's Agamemnon, who has been killed by
his treacherous wife, Clytemnestra. There's always a tension in this poem
about what's really going to happen when Odysseus gets home.
That we know, so to speak, what's going to happen.
But the, the poem keeps setting up a counter possibility, that faithful
Penelope might not turn out to be so faithful after all.
And maybe, like, Chlytemestra, wind up killing her hero husband when he finally
shows up. Odysseus also sees Achilles.
And with that same kind of directness that he had shown in the Iliad, Achilles says
to him, what are you doing here? Odysseus says we're on a quest and he
says, you have everything a hero could want.
You have a great reputation. You have fame.
You have clay offs everywhere. You have a son who's carrying on after
you. And Achilles says, don't talk to me so
lightly of death. You get to go back.
And then in one of the most striking sentences in all of the Odyssey, Achilles
says I would rather be a live serf. That is the lowest form of free
agricultural laborer. I'd rather be a live serf than a dead
hero. So much for the heroic code.
And then Odysseus sees Ajax, who had committed suicide after Odysseus had
cheated him out of Achilles armor. Ajax just refuses to talk to him.
Even in the underworld, that help your friends in hurt your enemies, that code
persists. Odysseus also faces instances of folly,
but sometimes manages to follow instructions.
A famous scene has him fill his men's ears with wax.
And he has then tied himself to a mast so he can listen to the song of the sirens,