8.46-82

We know that the long-awaited return of Odysseus to Ithaka is coming, and our expectation adds an undercurrent of urgency. The poet has us right where he wants us now, and proceeds to tease us, delaying the hero’s departure for over 2500 verses.

Once the ship is in the water, Alkinous summons everyone to the feast. The bard is led in with much ceremony and settled in his silver chair. Once filled to their satisfaction, the guests sit back for the concert, which is to feature the “glorious deeds of men,” (κλέα ἀνδρῶν, 54), songs celebrating the heroic adventures of men like Achilles, Agamemnon, or Odysseus. Demodocus will be a significant part of what transpires in the royal palace. His role in the poem puts him in two overlapping categories, as someone who makes music and as a storyteller. Both are central to the poem’s meaning.

There are two types of music in the Odyssey, either the songs of bards like Demodocus or Phemius, the singer we meet in Ithaka during the poem’s opening scenes (1.153–55; 325–44), or the mysterious music made by female characters (see essay on Book 5.43–91). The narrative songs of bards recount the lives of heroes, agents of civilization, as the Greeks understood that project. In this perspective, human civilization is the masculine product of imposing limit on the power of extra-human forces in the universe, usually portrayed as embodying disorder. Thus, the Olympian regime is the result of Zeus defeating Typhoeus, a storm god, and Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi is founded on the rotting body of the monstrous serpent, Pytho. When Demodocus sings, he celebrates by implication the orderly and just society of the Phaeacians. Phemius’ songs, by contrast, play against the evident disorder in Ithaka with Odysseus gone (1.325–59).

The second kind of music in the poem comes from singers like Calypso and Circe, whose voices seem to have a mysterious power to control other creatures (1.59–74; 10.221–24). This power is not in the service of human order. On the contrary, the sound blurs the clear boundaries that demarcate human experience and can lure heroes from their appointed tasks. The most dangerous example of subversive music is the Sirens, who call men to their deaths with seductive singing. Their art is especially nefarious, as they appeal to men with the promise of imparting knowledge about the Trojan War, a heroic project if ever there was one, but in the end offer only oblivion (12.166–200). When Odysseus first lands on the beach at Scheria, he hears the voices of Nausicaa and her maidens playing:

"ὤ μοι ἐγώ, τέων αὖτε βροτῶν ἐς γαῖαν ἱκάνω;
ἦ ῥ᾽ οἵ γ᾽ ὑβρισταί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι,
ἦε φιλόξεινοι καί σφιν νόος ἐστὶ θεουδής;
ὥς τέ με κουράων ἀμφήλυθε θῆλυς ἀϋτή:
νυμφάων, αἳ ἔχουσ᾽ ὀρέων αἰπεινὰ κάρηνα
καὶ πηγὰς ποταμῶν καὶ πίσεα ποιήεντα.
ἦ νύ που ἀνθρώπων εἰμὶ σχεδὸν αὐδηέντων;
ἀλλ᾽ ἄγ᾽ ἐγὼν αὐτὸς πειρήσομαι ἠδὲ ἴδωμαι."

Oh no! What sort of people are these, whose land I’ve reached?
Are they arrogant, fierce, or lacking in justice?
Or kind to strangers, with intelligence like the gods’?
That’s the voice of girls wafting around me
or nymphs, who haunt the steep summits of the mountains
and springs of rivers and the grassy meadows.
Am I near people who speak my language?
Come now, I’ll see for myself.

Odyssey 6.119–26

The girls’ voices drifting down around Odysseus (ἀμφήλυθε,122), carry the same power to blur edges that Calypso’s name (“I will smother”) commemorates. The music of Demodocus would appear to be safe for Odysseus to hear, though it makes trouble nonetheless, as we will see.

Demodocus is also a storyteller, an art form even more central to the Odyssey’s meaning than music. Everywhere we look in the poem, we see the power of stories. The principal storyteller is Homer, orchestrating his vast and intricate design, but within that edifice, many others hold forth, Phemius, “Mentes,” Nestor, Menelaus, Helen, Demodocus, Eumaeus, Theoclymenus, Penelope, and the master of the form, Odysseus. Between these two levels, the poet and his characters, there is yet another story being told, if we believe Zeus:

"τέκνον ἐμόν, ποῖόν σε ἔπος φύγεν ἕρκος ὀδόντων.
οὐ γὰρ δὴ τοῦτον μὲν ἐβούλευσας νόον αὐτή,
ὡς ἦ τοι κείνους Ὀδυσεὺς ἀποτίσεται ἐλθών;
Τηλέμαχον δὲ σὺ πέμψον ἐπισταμένως, δύνασαι γάρ,
ὥς κε μάλ᾽ ἀσκηθὴς ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται,
μνηστῆρες δ᾽ ἐν νηὶ: παλιμπετὲς ἀπονέωνται."

"My child, what kind of word has escaped the barrier of your teeth?
Haven’t you yourself arranged this plan,
that Odysseus would return to punish these men?
Contrive to send Odysseus back—you can do it—
so he arrives safely in his own fatherland,
and the suitors struggle back to port."

Odyssey 5.22–27

Athena has been complaining that the gods are doing nothing to release Odysseus from Calypso’s clutches. In answer, Zeus is essentially saying that she has already arranged for him to succeed in his mission. To put it another way, there is another story being told that has already been composed by Athena, the heroic return of her favorite. The tension in the poem between the goddess’s story and the wider world that Odysseus encounters on the way home is a major source of energy in the poem.

Demodocus first sings a song about something that appears nowhere else in Greek epic, a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus at a banquet of the gods, which delights Agamemnon because it has been prophesied by the oracle at Delphi and from which follows some kind of catastrophe for Greeks and Trojans. The song and its meaning in the context of the banquet at Scheria are obscure at best and have prompted much speculation from scholars about where it might fit in the epic tradition. For our purposes here, what is important is the effect that the story has on Odysseus. His reaction is part of an intricate web of associations that depend on the kind of repeated narrative structures that characterize Homeric poetry.

Further Reading

Mackie, H. 1997. “Song and Storytelling: An Odyssean Perspective.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 127: 77–95.

Nagler, M. 1977. “Dread Goddess Endowed with Speech.” Archaeological News 6: 77–85.

Pucci, P. “The Song of the Sirens.” Arethusa 12: 121–132.

Tracy, S. 1990. The Story of the Odyssey, 50–54. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 27–28. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wohl, V. 1993. “Standing by the Sthamos: The Creation of Sexual Ideology in the Odyssey. Arethusa 26: 23; 34.