Free Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay

little impaired by geographic scatter. I have personally witnessed the beneficial, even lifesaving power of the social support that veterans can gain through Internet communities, and shall expand on this in Chapter 18.
    So Captain Odysseus drives his men away from the silky embrace of the addicting Lotus, and gets his flotilla back out to sea. The sullen sailors pull away from Lotus Land, but they have no clue where they are. The dope dealers of Lotus Land were recognizably human, but on their next landfall, they encounter monsters.

5 Cyclops:The Flight from Boredom
    After a mile or two I said to Boanerges [“Son of Thunder,” the name Lawrence had given his motorcycle], “We are going to hurry” … and thereupon laid back my ears like a rabbit, and galloped down the road…. It seemed to me that sixty-five miles an hour was a fitting pace … but often we were ninety for two or three miles on end, with old B. trumpeting ha ha like a war horse…. [In Oxfordshire, where traffic moved at about thirty miles per hour] Boa and myself were pioneers of the new order, which will do seventy or more between point and point…. Boa was round the next corner, or over the next-hill-but-two while they were sputtering.
    â€”T. E. Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1926 1
    In popular culture the Cyclops is the part that stands for the whole of the
Odyssey.
It’s what shows up in the Saturday morning cartoons. Oceans of ink have drowned continents of paper explaining this episode. Homer lays it on thick, with suspense, marvels, clever twists, gore, and gross-outs. Not only does the Cyclops snatch up pairs of Odysseus’ shipmates, bash their brains out across the floor, and munch them down raw, but at one point he even barfs up undigested pieces of eaten Greek. Like a stage magician, Homer controls our gaze with stunning gestures of one hand, while the real action is in the other hand in plain sight. What mostly concerns us here is the conjurer’s
other
hand.
    Phaeacian Court
    Raid on Ismarus
    Lotus Land
    Cyclops
    King of the Winds
    Deadly Fjord
    Circe
    Among the Dead
    Sirens
    Scylla and Charybdis
    Sun God’s Cattle
    Whirlpool
    Calypso
    At Home, Ithaca
“L AWLESS B RUTES”
    The Cyclops is adventure number three that Odysseus recounts to the Phaeacian civilians. It comes after the plundering of Ismarus, where his flotilla lost about one man in ten when the natives counterattacked, 2 and as the end point of their flight from the sweet oblivion of Lotus addiction. These themes of random fighting, loss of friends (after the war is over!), and forgetfulness are fresh when the flotilla is carried by the winds to the “land of the high and mighty Cyclops, lawless brutes” (9:119f, Fagles). Odysseus tosses off a
few
more disparaging remarks about Cyclopes and then describes making camp on an island just offshore. He leaves his squadron and takes his own ship and crew across the narrow water to
    probe the natives over there.
What are they—violent, savage, lawless?
or friendly to strangers, god-fearing men?
    (9:194ff, Fagles)
    At the time, Odysseus the naval officer had no reason to know anything about where the wind had blown him, even though as he relates the tale to the Phaeacians, Odysseus the storyteller knows exactly what he faces: giant cannibals. But in the context of the story, it would seem a reasonable reconnaissance that he hazards. Yet Odysseus goes on to tell us that his “bold heart” (
thumos
) prompted him to bring along a large skin of especially potent wine, because
    â€¦ I’d soon come up against some giant …
a savage deaf to justice, blind to law.
    (9:239f, Fagles)
    What’s going on here? He’s the captain of his own ship and commodore of a flotilla of twelve. He has told us repeatedly how sorry he is that not one of the six hundred or so men he was responsible for made it home alive, but it was their own damned fault … or