Free Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay Page B

“boredom” that somehow grows to unendurable proportions. Tennyson captured this boredom in the opening lines of his poem
Ulysses:
    It
little profits
that an
idle
king
By this
still
hearth, among these
barren
crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I
mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That
hoard,
and
sleep,
and
feed,
and
know not me.
[Emphasis added.]
    So, in part just to see what happens, Odysseus has his men settle down to dine on the giant’s stored food and wait. Who are the “lawless brutes” here? Homer has made the point just a few dozen lines earlier that they have plenty of stores in their ships and have just gorged themselves on wild goats; these men are not starving. Necessity is not driving them. No learned commentator on the Cyclops episode has claimed that the customs of the ancient Mediterranean permit uninvited strangers to walk into someone’s home in his absence and eat up his food. In fact, a refined version of this same misconduct has occurred earlier in the epic, in Books 1 and 2, when Penelope’s infamous suitors back in Ithaca eat her, Telemachus,
and
Odysseus himself out of house and home. Over and over, we are given to understand that the suitors deserve the death that Odysseus rains down on them in the climactic Book 23 for eating his supplies uninvited. 5
    Polyphemus the Cyclops returns and tidies up some domestic chores, at first not noticing the intruders. And like a householder returning forthe evening, he locks his front door: Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave when Polyphemus deftly plugs its entrance with a rock so big that twenty-two wagon teams could not budge it. When finally he discovers them,
    â€˜Strangers!’
he thundered out, ‘now who are you?
Where did you sail from, over the running sea-lanes?
Out on a trading spree or roving the waves like pirates,
sea-wolves raiding at will, who risk their lives
to plunder other men?’
    (9:284ff, Fagles)
    Fitzgerald translates the last words even more bluntly: “Or are you wandering rogues,
who cast your lives like dice,
and ravage other folk by sea?” 6 [emphasis added]. Because Homer has put these words in the mouth of a brute, it is easy to overlook that this is
exactly
what Odysseus and his crews have become—men “who cast your lives like dice, and ravage other folk.” Odysseus has indulged in
atasthaliai,
irresponsible, wanton recklessness, leading his men into it, rather than holding them back. We have already seen that war smoothes the way to criminal conduct after the war. One twentieth-century sociologist credits Erasmus of Rotterdam in the fifteenth century with being the first to notice this. 7 I’d say it was first shown by Homer in the
Odyssey.
C UNNING
    They are well and truly caught. Odysseus, at least, “deserves” it within the moral code of the
Odyssey.
But two by two seized at random—supper, breakfast, and supper—six of his twelve men pay the price, brains dashed out like unwanted puppies, and eaten raw.
    When the Cyclops falls asleep after his first meal of shipmates, Odysseus’ great
thumos,
his fighting spirit prompts him to take his sharp sword and stab the sleeping giant in his liver. But he restrains himself when he realizes that heroic revenge for his eaten shipmates—the angry resort to
biē,
force—would leave him and his ten remaining men to starve and thirst to death behind the enormous door plug. When the path of force,
biē,
is blocked, Odysseus does what Achilles would never do in the
Iliad:
he calls upon
mētis,
craftiness. The tricks and deception he uses to get out of the monster’s cave are as famous as they are entertaining:
    His scheme is to blind the Cyclops with a fire-hardened stake, prepared while the giant is out with his flocks the next day, and to escape by clinging underneath the livestock when the blinded Cyclops lets them out to pasture the morning after that. To lull the