Free A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald by Ralph J. Hexter, Robert Fitzgerald Page A

Odyssey
foreshadows Odysseus’ disguising himself as a beggar to enter his own house. Helen’s reference to her questioning him and his putting her off (IV.270) looks forward to Penélopê’s interrogationof the beggar and Odysseus’ clever verbal parrying in Book XIX . “I knew him” (IV.268), Helen says, and any comparison of her in this episode with Penélopê will raise the possibility that Odysseus’ lady too had penetrated his disguise. (This remains a nagging question in interpretation of
The Odyssey;
see the Commentary on XIX.620–42, XIX.678–99, and XX.69ff.) Helen’s anticipation of Book XIX continues, for, so she claims, she “bathed … and anointed him / … and swore an oath / not to give him away” (IV.271–73). This foreshadows the footbath Odysseus receives at Eurýkleia’s hands, just out of Penélopê’s earshot. (On the momentous importance of this bath, see pp. lxvii-lxix.)
    “An excellent tale, my dear, and most becoming,” responds Meneláos with no little irony (IV.287). Too refined to contradict her openly, Meneláos makes his point by telling a narrative in which Helen appears in a considerably more ambiguous light, and in which her behavior seems to give the lie to the pro-Greek stance Helen attributed to herself in her own story. Meneláos recounts a part of the episode of the Trojan horse, in particular the dicey moment when the Trojans, suspecting the truth, have Helen call out to the horse and imitate the voices of the wives of the Greek heroes in the hope that any soldier inside the horse would give the ruse away. Antiklos is on the verge of doing so, but Odysseus stifles him. Meneláos is presenting Telémakhos with a seductive Helen, parallel to Penélopê, potentially seductive throughout and openly seductive when, with the disguised Odysseus already in her house, and even if she herself doesn’t fully understand why, she appears before the suitors in all her beauty and asks for their tributes (XVIII.200ff.). If the parallels and foreshadowings are less clear here, that may be the point. Penélopê is unambiguously unlike Klytaimnéstra—it is a simple ratio of opposites. Helen is a more complex and potentially more troubling model: like Helen, Penélopê has her hidden depths and surprises. Like Helen, she is not ultimately predictable. And if Odysseus foiled Helen when she tried to negate his ruse of the wooden horse by causing the Greek heroes to identify themselves totheir “wives,” Penélopê evens the score when, in Book XXIII , she tricks Odysseus into confirming his identity as her husband by means of another wooden artifact of his devising: their marriage bed.

MEMORY
     
    I suggested that
The Odyssey
centers its treatment of the passage of time on the theme of fathers and sons, but even though the culture of Homer’s time led him to display issues in terms of generations of
males
, there is no reason for us not to read
The Odyssey
as a poem more justly about generations, about memory and ideals, and about each generation growing into the ideals it claims to have inherited from its predecessors. As we know from our own century, memories, regrets, and ideals tend to crystallize around wars. Earthquakes and other disasters, however destructive, may punctuate the otherwise undifferentiable flow of time more neatly, but wars and other cataclysmic events of some duration (plagues, famines) seem to gather larger swatches of time into a bundle. It is said of certain countries that they suffer from an excess of history. Wars too seem to pull into their wake more than their share of history, as if time were passing by a vortex or black hole—the new Kharybdis of space—and bent toward it. What wars mean to those who fight them is one thing;
The Iliad
is the first and will ever be the supreme poem about war. Its presentation of the heat of battle, of death of comrades in combat, and of siege and sack ring true, say those who have experienced these things. Digging