12.397-425

The long, exciting journey home ends for the crew with this grim simile. As the poem’s opening lines foretold, their lack of self-control finally catches up with them. Odysseus notes their fate but expresses no particular sadness over it, even though we might see reasons for him to feel some remorse for the times when his curiosity cost lives. Odysseus is the right hero for this story, emotionally closed off from others, relentlessly self-disciplined, ready to lie at any time to anyone if it will give him leverage over others. The rhetoric of the poem always urges us to valorize any act, no matter how callous, that ensures the survival of its hero. Emotional entanglements are only a hindrance in this perspective and the crew members become interchangeable with the suitors, immature men who are unable to control their impulses and die for it at Odysseus’s hands. We may think of the Iliad, with its many violent, graphic deaths, its heroes vaunting cruelly over their victims, as the darker of the two Homeric epics. But that poem, for all its violence, bends finally toward forgiveness, compassion, and healing, forces rarely present in the Odyssey or its hero.

We might be surprised to find that part of this dramatic shipwreck, with all its vivid relevance to the particular place in the story, appears again, almost verbatim, in a false tale that Odysseus delivers in Book 14 to Eumaeus, describing a shipwreck off Crete:

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ Κρήτην μὲν ἐλείπομεν, οὐδέ τις ἄλλη 
φαίνετο γαιάων, ἀλλ᾽ οὐρανὸς ἠδὲ θάλασσα, 
δὴ τότε κυανέην νεφέλην ἔστησε Κρονίων 
νηὸς ὕπερ γλαφυρῆς, ἤχλυσε δὲ πόντος ὑπ᾽ αὐτῆς. 
Ζεὺς δ᾽ ἄμυδις βρόντησε καὶ ἔμβαλε νηῒ κεραυνόν: 
ἡ δ᾽ ἐλελίχθη πᾶσα Διὸς πληγεῖσα κεραυνῷ, 
ἐν δὲ θεείου πλῆτο: πέσον δ᾽ ἐκ νηὸς ἅπαντες. 
οἱ δὲ κορώνῃσιν ἴκελοι περὶ νῆα μέλαιναν 
κύμασιν ἐμφορέοντο: θεὸς δ᾽ ἀποαίνυτο νόστον

Odyssey 14.301–9

Lines 301–4 replicate 403–6 in our passage verbatim, with one small change: Κρήτην μὲν (14.301) replaces τὴν νῆσον (12.403). The next eight verses in Book 12, describing in detail how the ship is destroyed, do not appear in Book 14. Then the parallels resume, with 14.305–9 echoing 12.415–19, again with one small change to accommodate the differing circumstances: ἅπαντες (14.307) replaces ἑταῖροι—the shipmates in the beggar’s false tale are not his companions, only fellow travelers.

Comparing these two passages offers a window into the mysterious creative process whereby Homer builds his story, using repeated traditional words, phrases, or larger narrative units to compose scenes that are unfailingly fresh in their context. In Book 12, we witness the final obliteration of Odysseus’s crew, men who have been with him since Troy. The horrific events in 12.407–15 vividly mark this terrible conclusion. In Book 14, such detail is not necessary for the story to be exciting to the beggar’s audience of one. Likewise, the identical language in the two passages has a different impact in each. The darkness that falls on Odysseus and his crew in Book 12 is the crescendo of a long series of potentially obliterating events, stretching back as far as Odysseus’s suffocating existence on Calypso’s island in Book 5. In the beggar’s tale, which we know is false, the story is merely entertainment to get the two men through the night. We do not care about the lost sailors because we’ve been told they are not real.

Alone again, Odysseus lashes together the keel and mast and floats onward in the storm. The South Wind picks up and he is carried back toward Skylla and Charybdis, establishing the circular rhythm of the story here, foreshadowing the “return” to Calypso. This time through, he avoids Skylla, but Charybdis swallows his makeshift boat, one last encounter with the dark, suffocating forces he has faced all along the way. He escapes that oblivion by clinging like a bat to a tree trunk jutting out over the whirlpool. The unusual simile Odysseus uses to measure how long he has to wait for the timbers to surface breaks through the magical folktale milieu we have been in for most of the adventures, perhaps signaling imminent the arrival back on Ithaka, a world far removed from sucking whirlpools and alluring Sirens.