12.327-363

This pattern appears earlier, in the Aeolus episode just before the Greeks arrive at Circe’s island (10.1–79). Other similarities repay attention: like Thrinakia, the island of Aeolus has a magical quality, reflecting the inhabitants’ special status with the gods. Aeolus controls the winds as an agent for Zeus, while divine nymphs look after the herds for Helios. And in both cases, the transgressions of the Greeks interfere with elemental forces in the universe.

Aeolus’s outburst, when Odysseus asks for help a second time, seems somewhat harsh in the circumstances:

"ἔρρ᾽ ἐκ νήσου θᾶσσον, ἐλέγχιστε ζωόντων: 
οὐ γάρ μοι θέμις ἐστὶ κομιζέμεν οὐδ᾽ ἀποπέμπειν 
ἄνδρα τόν, ὅς κε θεοῖσιν ἀπέχθηται μακάρεσσιν: 
ἔρρε, ἐπεὶ ἄρα θεοῖσιν ἀπεχθόμενος τόδ᾽ ἱκάνεις."

"Away quickly from this island, most shameful creature! 
It is not sanctioned for me to help on his way 
a man who is so hated by the blessed gods. 
Away, I say! This return means you are hateful to the gods!"

Odyssey 10.72–75

That the crew gave in to the ordinary human failings of envy and resentment does not seem to merit this condemnation of their captain. But the stakes here transcend the ethical realm of human behavior. By unleashing the winds and creating chaos, the sailors disturb something in the regular processes of nature, undermining Aeolus’s divinely sanctioned role as guardian of order on the sea. All the Greek sailors except those on Odysseus’ ship then die at the hands of the Laestrygonians. The disaster on Thrinakia disturbs another kind of order. There are 350 cattle and 350 sheep in the herds, numbers that are never supposed to be changed, by birth or death. The animals are sacred to the deity whose journeys across the sky measure out the days and months, and as we have noted, thinkers as early as Aristotle have seen the number of animals in each herd as reflecting the days of the year. The crew’s attack, then, could be seen as an attack on time itself and as a consequence everyone but Odysseus dies. In each episode, the price for Odysseus falling asleep and failing to control his crew triggers a descent into chaos on a potentially cosmic scale. We will revisit the implications of these parallel events for the overall structure of Books 5–12 in a broader discussion below.

Convinced by Eurylochus, who declares that he would rather drown than starve (350–51), the crew raids the cattle of Helios. The preparations that precede the meal include familiar language (359–61), but the crew’s dire situation forces some creativity in the ritual gestures that usually accompany a feast: instead of sprinkling grain over the meat, they drape leaves; for wine, they substitute water. While these changes seem reasonable enough in a naturalistic sense, symbolically they mark yet again the dangerously transgressive nature of the feast.

The ill-omened sacrifice of divine cattle had a second life in early Greek literature, in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, a poem from the 6^th century BCE. On the day of his birth in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Central Greece, Hermes displays his astounding divine powers by inventing both the lyre and the method—known to future Boy and Girl Scouts—for starting a fire with friction, then stealing the cattle sacred to his big brother Apollo. The work is one of four longer extant hexameter poems probably composed between 700 and 550 BCE, each with a story or stories about a particular Olympian deity. The style of all these poems resembles that of the Iliad and Odyssey to varying degrees, but each closely enough to suggest that these works were part of a tradition of hexameter poetry that spread across the mainland of Greece and the coast of is what now Turkey between the 8th and the 6^th centuries BCE. The Hermes hymn is the latest of these narratives, perhaps dating to sometime in the early to mid-6^th century.

To what in the Odyssey might the hymn poet have been responding? The central act of transgression has an entirely humorous tone in this later work. The baby god uses clever tricks to escape being caught in the act of cattle theft, walking the herd backwards, wearing reversed sandals of his own invention. Though he does sacrifice twelve head of cattle, unlike the crew members in the Odyssey he does not eat any of them. (The ritual meaning of the sacrifice is obscure, though killing twelve from the herd as part of a plan to gain recognition among the Olympian gods seems significant.) Divine retribution in the hymn takes the form of Apollo tracking the baby down in his cave on Mount Cyllene and hauling him off to Olympus. The exchanges between Hermes and Apollo, in the cave and later on Olympus, highlight the precocity of the infant as opposed to his stolid big brother. Zeus finds the baby amusing and declares a truce, which in reality is a triumph for Hermes, who has had as his goal to gain recognition his father Zeus on Olympus for himself and his mother, who have been languishing in obscurity in Arcadia.

The most significant traits that Odysseus himself shares with Hermes are those of the trickster, a figure found in folktales from all over the world. We will learn in Book 19 that Odysseus is the maternal grandson of Autolycus, famous for his skill in thievery and clever oaths, qualities that the god Hermes bestowed on him (19.395–98). Later tradition makes Autolycus the son of Hermes, tying Odysseus yet more closely to the god. Certain features of the trickster paradigm are especially relevant to Odysseus in the Odyssey. The trickster is always an outsider, always transgressive in some way and usually a subversive force. Hermes is a typical trickster in that, as the god of boundaries, he is necessarily transgressive. In Greek literature and myth, he is the guide of souls to the Underworld, the agent for crossing the most permanent of thresholds. In the hymn, he crosses over all kinds of boundaries, from childhood to mature mastery in one day, from Arcadia to Olympus. He drags the divine cattle of Apollo out of their pasture and by killing twelve of them, brings them across the boundary between immortal and mortal.

The trickster always has the potential for effecting change by penetrating worlds usually closed to him and shaking up the regular order of things. Hermes, by entering the magical world of Calypso in Book 5, thwarts the nymph’s plan to keep Odysseus with her, out of human time. Likewise, Odysseus, every time he enters a new place as an anonymous stranger—including Ithaka, where he gets inside the palace disguised as an old beggar—carries the potential for change. In fact, we could say that he is the principal agent of permanent change in the poem. When the Phaeacians return Odysseus to Ithaka on their ship, they are punished by Poseidon, who turns the ship to stone in the harbor and threatens to bury their city under a mountain (13.128–87). Polyphemus, who had been living a settled life on his own, is rendered helpless when Odysseus blinds him (9.407–14).

In general, we would expect the trickster to show up when the centrifugal elements of Odysseus’s character are prominent, the restless, rootless wanderer who seeks out new experiences. In the cattle of the sun episode, this alignment is altered. It is the crew, who by transgressing against the injunction of Helios, imperils the return to Ithaka. Odysseus, by trying to enforce the divine imperative, appears in his centripetal persona, working to get back home.

Further Reading

Austin, N. 1975. Archery at the Dark of the Moon, 137. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brown, N. 1948. Hermes the Thief. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Hyde, L. 1998. Trickster Makes This World, 203–225. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Reinhardt, K. (1942) 1996. “The Adventures in the Odyssey.” In Reading the Odyssey, edited by S. Schein, 99–102. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 83–90. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.