4.398–434

The third category aligns him with two other characters who get special attention from the poet, Polyphemus the Cyclops and Eumaeus, the faithful keeper of Odysseus’s flocks in his absence. All three are isolated from others of their kind; each combines fastidious attention to his flocks with a liminal nature that marks the hero’s encounter with them as especially meaningful. Proteus lives part of the time in the sea and part on land in his caves; Polyphemus’s one eye and cannibalism put him outside the pale of human existence; Eumaeus lives out on the edge of the royal estates in Ithaka, apart from the palace and the destructive suitors while maintaining a carefully ordered mini-cosmos, preserving a small residue of Odysseus’s former wealth. The encounter with each figure reveals a vital part of the hero’s nature.

The name “Proteus” would be linked in the minds of Homer’s audience with πρῶτος, and his special powerssuggest something elemental about the god. Within himself, he can encompass the physical universe, living creatures, fire, water. To get the information they want, the Greek sailors must wrestle him, confining his shifting nature. What the poet offers us here is a concrete metaphor for the process that defined for them the making of human civilization, the imposition of form on a the amorphous, ever-shifting energy of nature. Κόσμος, the Greek word for the universe, means “order.” This central act also connects Menelaus and Proteus to a myth that appears in myriad forms throughout the ancient Mediterranean, the culture hero’s conquest of a monster that embodies or fosters chaos, with victory marking the establishment of a new and fruitful cosmic order. Zeus defeats the storm god Typhoeus and founds new divine order on Olympus. Apollo establishes his new shrine at Delphi, the source of divine prophecy for the Greeks, on the rotting corpse of Pytho, an anarchic and disruptive serpent. Gilgamesh the Mesopotamian king of Uruk and his friend Enkidu affirm the former’s civic authority and potency by conquering Humbaba, the monster of the Cedar Forest. When he battles the river god Scamander in the Iliad, Achilles, always hard to confine to a single identity, plays both roles, chaos monster when he clogs the natural flow of the river with Trojan corpses, causing floods, and then culture hero when his divine allies start a back fire that burns the river back into its channel.

The culture hero’s project is a distinctively masculine one, according to the Greeks’ gendered view of human experience, attributing the founding and maintenance of human civilization to males. (Most of what we now attribute to cultural forces and label “masculine” or “feminine,” the Greeks tended to see as the result of biology, something they understood as “natural.” We will use the modern terminology when appropriate.) Women were thought to exist on the border between nature and culture, thus needing to be controlled for human civilization to prosper. Boundaries are masculine, while things feminine tend to spill over, blurring those borders and thus threatening right order. Viewed through this lens, Proteus seems to have access to a reservoir of distinctly feminine power. When Menelaus and his sailors stop him from shifting shape, then, they are performing a fundamental civilizing action, while affirming the masculine origin for and control of the resulting order.  

We may go further: For the Greeks as for us, boundaries create meaning, while infinity is essentially meaningless. The existence of the gods on Olympus does not, for that reason, bear a lot of inspection. Since nothing can ever happen to change them, their lives are, in their own sphere, meaningless. When the poet shows us the gods on Olympus, the tone of the scene is invariably comic, the tryst of Ares and Aphrodite in Book 8 (266–366), for example (see essays on 8.199–249, 8.250–294, 8.294–342, and 8.343–384). If, however the gods are contemplating intervention into the mortal world of death and change, their actions take on enormous significance, as in the divine assemblies in Book 1 (22–112) and Book 5 (1–42) (see essays on 1.1–43 and 5.1–42). Culture heroes can bring new worlds into being and endow them with meaning.

The mission Eidothea envisioned would put Menelaus—metaphorically—in an exalted position, cosmogonic culture hero creating civilization from meaningless disorder. Given what we have seen of Menelaus so far, this role seems an unlikely fit. Rather, as we have said, the poet seems to undercut the various kinds of status that we might accord to the Spartan king, given the expectations that usually accompany the position he holds. His agency in founding and then reconstituting his family and household is muted, depending on the initiative of his older brother. He could not control his wife or his lecherous houseguest, leading to a ten-year war. When we find him ensconced in his opulent royal household after the war, he is no more secure in his position. Helen dominates the encounters he has with her, and their relationship is marked by competition.

The incongruity between appearance and reality that we have seen frequently in the stories about the Trojan War and its aftermath surfaces again here in the poor fit between the mythical grandeur implied by the Proteus episode and the compromised man we have seen so far in the Spartan episode. The issue is tone, the attitude we detect in the poet toward his material. That is, can we explain the discrepancy we see in the portrait of Menelaus as satirical, with the poet mocking Menelaus’s pretensions? This might be the case, but if so, it is a radical departure from Homer’s usual voice, which may invite us to laugh at a character but rarely if ever suggests that we join in ridiculing him or her in this way. The poet will make us wait until we reach Odysseus’s negotiations with the nymph Calypso to grasp the full implications of the puzzling relationship between the two figures.

Further Reading

Nagler. M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 147–152. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 50. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.