5.1-42

Everything in Books 1–4 bears witness to the terrible cost of Odysseus’s absence from Ithaka. In the poem’s opening scenes, we see the loutish suitors rampaging unopposed through the royal household, eating, drinking, and chasing the maids. Penelope remains cloistered upstairs and Telemachus struggles in vain to take charge. His journey to Pylos and Sparta is meant to help him address his deficiencies by learning about his father, what kind of man Odysseus is, if he still lives, and if so where he might be. Telemachus needs to grow up, either to help Odysseus retake control of Ithaka or to take over himself.

The episodes that follow in Books 5–6 show us how the Greeks’ view of human experience is influenced by the categories of gender as they understood them. By “gender” I mean a cultural construct, organized around the polarity of masculine/feminine, as opposed to “sex,” a biological category defined by male/female. Today we understand that a human being, wherever she, he, or they may fall on the biological continuum, may exhibit both masculine and feminine patterns of behavior. Greek artists also acknowledged this distinction, although sometimes with a different emphasis than ours. As Odysseus makes his way from the island of Calypso to the island of the Phaeacians, we will see that the forces threatening his progress are almost all feminine: mortal women, goddesses, or parts of the natural world that the Greeks associated with feminine power. The first four books of the Odyssey are focused on the disorder that follows from the absence of masculine leadership in Ithaka and the efforts of Telemachus to counter it by consulting masculine authority figures—including, indir.ly through the memories of others, his father. Once Odysseus reappears, his adventures are dominated by his struggle to overcome feminine forces, beginning with Calypso and Nausicaa and continuing through Books 9–12.

Homer signals a strong break in the narrative at the beginning of Book 5. Eos, the goddess of the dawn, rises to mark a new day:

Ἠὼς δ᾽ ἐκ λεχέων παρ᾽ ἀγαυοῦ Τιθωνοῖο
ὤρνυθ᾽, ἵν᾽ ἀθανάτοισι φόως φέροι ἠδὲ βροτοῖσιν·

Dawn rose from her bed, where she lay beside noble Tithonus,
so she could bring light to the immortal gods and to mortals.

Odyssey 5.1–2

The event is a familiar one in Homeric epic, but the phrasing is not. These two lines appear only here in the Odyssey and once in the Iliad (Il. 11.1–2). Much more common is the single verse formula that appears twenty times in the Odyssey:

ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς

Now when early-born, rosy-fingered Dawn appeared

Odyssey 2.1, etc.

Given the many variables that must have influenced a poet’s choices within the traditional style of early Greek hexameter, it would be risky to assume we know for sure why this unusual phrasing appears at the very beginning of Book 5 instead of the much more common single-verse formula. Still, the content of 5.1–2 is particularly suggestive. The story of Tithonus is one version of a common myth about a goddess taking a mortal lover. We will hear more about other examples later in Book 5, when Calypso complains that other deities have been able to keep their mortal lovers, while Zeus is forcing her to give up Odysseus. Homer is tuning our ears for the episode soon to come on Ogygia.

The story of Tithonus does appear elsewhere in early greek hexameter poetry in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, a short poem (293 verses) probably composed around the same time as the Odyssey. We learn there that Zeus has become angry with Aphrodite, because she has forced him to sleep with mortal women. In retaliation, he fills her with the desire for sex with a mortal man, in this case Anchises, a prince of the royal family in Troy and the father of Aeneas. After the tryst, Aphrodite tells the story of Tithonus and Eos: The Dawn goddess goes to Zeus and asks permission to make Tithonus immortal but neglects to ask that he also be ageless. All goes well for a few years, while Tithonus is in his prime, but when the first gray hairs appear on his head, Eos kicks him out of bed and keeps him on a maintenance diet of ambrosia. As old age approaches and he becomes physically feeble, she takes more drastic action, locking him away in a bedroom forever. He is reduced to a tremulous voice, fading away but never dying. Aphrodite tells Anchises this pathetic story as a cautionary tale. If the prince could remain as handsome and desirable as he is now, she would take him for a husband. But she will not ask Zeus to make him stay as he is and so old age, which the gods hate, will eventually come for him as it does for all mortals (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 218–46). For now, we only know that Odysseus is being held against his will by the nymph on her island, not the details of the arrangement (Od. 1.13–17). By introducing Tithonus here, the poet raises the specter of a dismal future for Odysseus, trapped on the island of the nymph, invisible to all who love him and depend on him, wasting away in feeble oblivion but never dying.

Our first stop after Eos rises is Olympus, where the gods are meeting. This divine assembly seems to echo the meeting on Olympus in Book 1 (1.26–95), when Athena’s complaints to Zeus about Odysseus’s captivity on Ogygia lead to a two-pronged campaign: the goddess will go to Ithaka and get Telemachus moving, while Hermes visits Calypso to deliver Zeus’s command that she release Odysseus. As it turns out, we only hear about the first part of the divine initiative in Books 1–4. Book 5 will describe the second.

This latter divine assembly has come in for a lot of scrutiny by classical scholars. Is it the same one as in Book 1? Do the two parts of the divine plan occur simultaneously, though the poet describes their fulfillment serially? Or should we assume that several days pass between the two assemblies? In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, before the work of Milman Parry and others on the oral tradition behind the composition of the Homeric epics, repetition was frequently suspect, a sign of some later, inferior poet adding material to a hypothetical “original” poem. In this case, the suspicion would be that the journey of Telemachus in Books 1–4 was added to an earlier version of the Odyssey, now lost, which began with the material in Book 5. Now that we are inclined to see repetition as a fundamental part of oral poetry, these theories are much less compelling. In any event, we will follow our usual practice in these essays of trying to understand the poem that has come down to us—which is, after all, the only Odyssey we have.

Whatever the antecedents of Books 1–4 might have been, the assembly in Book 5 is integral to the debut of Odysseus in the present poem. Major movements in Homeric epic are usually prompted in some way by the gods. By gathering them a second time, the poet signals a new direction in the plot, while reminding us of the urgency we felt in Book 1 when hearing about the divine response to the chaos in Ithaka. Odysseus’s heroic stature is further marked by the attention that his dilemma draws from the gods. We see a similar narrative pattern at the end of the Iliad, in that case underscoring the importance of both Hector and Achilles there. Lamenting the abuse of Hector’s corpse by Achilles, Zeus sends Iris to deliver two commands, that Thetis tell Achilles to release Hector’s body to Priam and that Priam travel to the Greek camp, accompanied by Hermes, to beg Achilles for his son’s corpse (Il. 24.64–280). In both poems, the hero causes the gods to assemble and act on his behalf, a sure sign of his exalted status: The welfare of the hero becomes part of the destined order of the cosmos that the gods oversee.

The assembly opens with Athena’s plea for the release of Odysseus from the clutches of the nymph Calypso. The goddess is somewhat bitter:

"Ζεῦ πάτερ ἠδ᾽ ἄλλοι μάκαρες θεοὶ αἰὲν ἐόντες,
μή τις ἔτι πρόφρων ἀγανὸς καὶ ἤπιος ἔστω
σκηπτοῦχος βασιλεύς, μηδὲ φρεσὶν αἴσιμα εἰδώς,
ἀλλ᾽ αἰεὶ χαλεπός τ᾽ εἴη καὶ αἴσυλα ῥέζοι·
ὡς οὔ τις μέμνηται Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο
λαῶν οἷσιν ἄνασσε, πατὴρ δ᾽ ὣς ἤπιος ἦεν."

“Father Zeus and all you immortal, blessed gods,
let no one who is a sceptered king now be gentle
and sweet, having righteous thoughts in his mind,
but instead, be always harsh and act severely,
seeing how no one of those he ruled remembers
godlike Odysseus, who was sweet, like a father.”

Odyssey 5.7–12

Athena’s words here recall her reproach of Zeus in the first assembly, where she accuses him of hating Odysseus, who has been a dutiful hero, and leaving him at the mercy of Calypso (1.44–62). The tone of Zeus’s initial response in both cases is indignant:

"τἐκνον ἐμόν, ποῖόν σε ἔπος φύγεν ἕρκος ὀδόντων."

“My child, what kind of word has escaped the barrier of your teeth?”

Odyssey 5.22 = 1.64

In Book 1, Zeus denies that he hates Odysseus, saying that the problem lies with Poseidon, whose son Polyphemus the hero has blinded. Here, his response reveals an important aspect of the poem’s plot:

"οὐ γὰρ δὴ τοῦτον μὲν ἐβούλευσας νόον αὐτή,
ὡς ἦ τοι κείνους Ὀδυσεὺς ἀποτίσεται ἐλθών; "

“Was this not your plan, as you counseled it,
that he would return and punish those men?”

Odyssey 5.23–24

These latter two verses reappear verbatim at the end of the poem, when Odysseus and his family face off against the families of the dead suitors (24.479–80). In both cases, Zeus implies that Athena has already planned out the triumph of Odysseus and can make it come to pass. She has already composed her own story. (See Introduction)

The implication of these verses, that Athena has already arranged for Odysseus to succeed in his mission, is tantalizing, taking us into the thicket of possibilities surrounding the operation of divine will and human choice in the poem—an arresting topic but well beyond the scope of this essay. For our purposes here, another approach might be more useful. The Odyssey is a poem about the power of stories. Odysseus is a master storyteller, but there are many others, Phemius, Mentes, Nestor, Menelaus, Helen, Demodocus, Eumaeus, Theoclymenus, Penelope. Homer suggests that some of the stories in the poem are true, some false, but the flow of stories is constant. We might say that the most characteristic act in the poem is creative storytelling. Zeus’s reply to Athena suggests that behind the story that the poet has received from the muse another artist is at work, who is creating, or perhaps has created, another story inside the Odyssey. The full richness of Odysseus’s character only emerges in the interaction of Athena’s story and its fixed parameters with the more expansive world the poet creates around it. As we encounter the hero for the first time in the poem, Homer lets us peek behind the curtain and see that the story the poem tells is rather more complex and multilayered than we might first suspect.

Zeus now affirms much of Athena’s plan: Odysseus will reach the Phaeacians, who will eventually bring him safely back to Ithaka, laden with loot. Homer does not keep his audience engaged with the prospect of surprise endings: we know how this story will end. Rather, his hold over us comes from his teasing and manipulation of expectations raised by that knowledge. We know Odysseus will get home, but not when and how.

Further Reading

Heubeck, A. J. Hainsworth, and S. West, eds. 1989. A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. I, Books I–VIII, 51–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thalmann, W. 1992. The Odyssey: An Epic of Return, 31–46. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Tracy, S. 1990. The Story of the Odyssey, 28–29. Princeton: Princeton University Press.