Captain, my captain

PERSONAL COLUMN SIMON RAVEN

For nearly 3,000 years, the character of Odysseus has enjoyed the undiminished respect both of learned men and of the public at large. The tone of adulation is set by Antenor's de- scription of him in the Iliad: he was an am- bassador of regal presence, we learn, and when he spoke, though he pretended to difficulty in articulation, his words were 'like snowflakes on a winter's day.' When we go on to Shakes- peare's Troilus and Cressida, we find that Odysseus (Ulysses) is now the very embodi- ment of authority and intellect, no longer merely the skilled diplomatist described by Antenor but a statesman in his own right and a weighty philosopher both natural and moral. As for his reputation in our own day, he has received the flattering attentions of everyone from Kazantzakis, the poet, who has made a spiritual study in depth, to the tycoons of Hollywood, who have invested millions of dollars in Odysseus the adventurer. As far as that goes, he is represented not only as a peer- less commander both by land and sea but also as an escaper, cliff-scaler and infighter of Houdinesque resource. All in all, a tradition has grown up in which Odysseus combines the talents and attainments of Sir Walter Ralegh, the great Duke of Marlborough, Francis Bacon and James Bond.

There is, however, just one dissentient voice in all this—the voice of Homer himself. For although Odysseus cuts a creditable enough figure in the Iliad, even a brief glance at the Odyssey, which is, after all, the basic authority on the subject, proves very illuminating. I have recently been re-reading books X to XII of the Odyssey, and here is what I must report.

At the beginning of book X, Odysseus is kindly received by Aeolus, the god of the winds, and spends an entire month in his house eating and drinking and boasting to his host of pre- vious exploits. Despite this insufferable be- haviour, Aeolus makes him a present, when he leaves, of a bag which contains all the winds, so that Odysseus may select and use them at his convenience. However, just as his home port comes into sight, this nonpareil among sea-captains falls fast asleep, leaving the bag unguarded and having neglected to tell any of his sailors what is in it. The sailors assume that it contains gold, which (such is the loyalty our hero has inspired in them) they determine to steal before Odysseus awakes.

'They loosed the wallet, and all the winds leapt forth, and swiftly the storm-wind seized them and bore them weeping out to sea . .

As for Odysseus, when he wakes up to dis- cover what has happened, he simply retreats under the blankets and stays there until, as time goes by, the fleet is blown back to Aeolus's island. There he goes wailing and whining to Aeolus about how it wasn't his fault—and is promptly and very properly sent packing.

He now sails to the land of the Laestry- gonians, where, scenting trouble, he anchors hiq,flagship outside the harbour but lets all his other ships go into it. These latter are at once destroyed by the Laestrygonians, whom we last see happily spearing and eating the crews while Admiral Odysseus ('grieved at heart but happy to have escaped death') up-anchors and sneaks away.

A little later he arrives in his one remaining vessel at the island of Circe. He sends off a recce-party under his subordinate, Eurylochus, and then sits complacently on the beach until Eurylochus comes back to say that his men have been trapped by Circe and turned into pigs. Now at last Odysseus actually does some- thing—which is to say, that he dithers about in the woods until the god Hermes comes to him and explains, in words of one syllable, how he should proceed. With much moaning and groaning, Odysseus obeys the god's instruc- tions and so, through no merit whatever of his own, manages to rescue his men and be- come Circe's lover; after which this dedicated officer allows another whole year to pass in boasting, feasting and fornication:

When at last he rouses himself to go, Circe recommends a visit to Hades, where Teiresias will advise him as to the best way of com- pleting his voyage. There now follows, of course, one of the finest passages in the literature of the world, but even here one is constantly distracted by the sheer ineptness of Odysseus. The first ghost he sees is that of his comrade, Elpenor, who had broken his neck falling off Circe's roof while drunk on the eve of their departure. Although Odysseus is perfectly well aware of this, he at once asks Elpenor what he died of and forces the wretched fellow to recount his shaming acci- dent.

The next ghost to appear is that of Odysseus's mother. Her he rudely keeps waiting because he is impatient to talk to Teiresias, whom, how- ever, he questions in such a sloppy and im- precise fashion that only one really concrete piece of advice comes through--a deadly warn- ing against eating the cattle of Helios. Having (or so one would have thought) laid this very plain injunction to heart, Odysseus consents to talk to his mother, who gives a pitiful account of how his father, Laertes, is living in squalor back in Ithaca. This Odysseus merely ignores, but he decides to embrace his mother and per- sists in his attempt even after he has twice put his hands clean through her. After this ludicrous episode, he sees and speaks with

several more of the illustrious dead, and indeed is just beginning to behave with something like the dignity appropriate to Homer's mag- nificent poetry, when he sees Achilles and makes a bigger ass of himself than ever.

For in answer to Achilles' very reasonable question as to what Odysseus is doing there, Odysseus, after a long and self-pitying ex- amination, congratulates Achilles on being the mighty ruler of the dead—and this although

he very well knows that Achilles, like all the other ghosts, is incapable either of speech or of thought except when primed, as at present, with the blood of a ram and a black ewe. I suppose it is just possible to forgive this piece of stupidity for the sake of the crushing and melancholy retort which it elicits; what one can never forgive is the smug condescension with which Odysseus ticks off poor dead Ajax because that simple=minded soldier still remem- bers and resents the way in which Odysseus swindled him at Troy.

I could go on with this catalogue of Odysseus's absurdities for a very long time, but let us now conclude it. simply remarking that one of the first things Odysseus does after leaving Hades is to disregard the advice for which he went there and allow his comrades to cat the cattle of Helios, with instant and disastrous effect. The point, I think, is taken. If we are to believe Homer, there never was, in all history, a more contemptible, cowardly, incompetent and unmannerly cur than 'glorious Odysseus.' And yet it is Homer who calls him 'glorious,' and glorious he has been considered ever since. What is his secret? How has this slothful and treacherous bounder managed to win the highest esteem, not only of the poet who chronicled his enormities, but of the world in general over the last three millennia?

There can be only one answer. The Odyssey,

despite everything which occurs, despite every calamitous blunder for which Odysseus is responsible and every odious subterfuge to which he resorts, is a Success Story. There is no female he meets who does not imme- diately lie flat on her back, goddesses included.

There is no danger he encounters from which he himself does not emerge, weeping indeed,

but unscathed. He is almost certainly the biggest free-loader on record, consuming, in

book X alone, well over 1,000 free meals,

always with wine of the finest vintage, and re- ceiving large quantities of new suits, particu- larly from his women. True, he loses every one of his men and every vestige of his honour; but on the last page there he is on the throne of Ithaca, roseate with good living and in yet another new suit of clothes, boasting more loudly than ever. If this isn't success, I don't know what is; 'mid so it comes about that a

hundred generations of men—men of affairs and men of letters, men of action and men of money, men of the world and men of the half- world—have vied with each other in admira- tion of 'glorious Odysseus,' a shirking, clowning, leching, lying, hypocritical ponce.