Unit 4

English 201:    Masterpieces of Western Literature

Introduction:

The theme for this unit is identity.  In a sense children do not have identity.  They have parents who tell them what to do.  Identity is produced by facing trouble & overcoming it.  These experiences allow us to tell stories that define exactly who we are.  How important is this process?  Homer suggests that this is what life is all about.

Power & Women: AK is 100% male.  OD is not exactly female, but the key to his endurance & success is that he respects people regardless of their power.  He respectfully listens to the advice of little girls: Ino, Nausikaa, the awesome one (Athena) in pigtails.  Athena is herself a manly women.  She wears armor.  Her breasts are covered by the fearsome decapitated head of the Medusa who turns soldiers to stone.  How does she provide mother's milk to Athens?  The major theme in ODY goes in the other direction.  Unrestrained male aggression/power is self-destructive.  Female virtues ultimately produce similar insurmountable problems:

• Moms will not allow their sons to grow into men.
• The spoiled sons grow up to be the vicious gang lead by Antinoos.
• PEN, Antikleia, & Eurykleia are all powerless victims of their vicious children, the suitors.

Polis:This theme concerns the social glue that holds a society together.  It will be explored by Aeschylus as well as Homer.  People sometimes say, "blood is thicker than water," meaning that they feel obligated to defend members of their family regardless of what they may have done.  Three or four centuries after Homer, Athens grew to a city of 40,000.  The question was how to nurture civic friendship so that the polis did not self-destruct into gangs & blood vendettas & casual vandalism.  Who do we want as leader?  A strong man or a ruler "mild as a father" (2.48).  Consider these scenes in the ODY.
     TEL addresses the Ithakan assembly, angry because the leading citizens show no gratitude to OD:
2.48      who ruled among you once, mild as a father
2.68      Where is your indignation?  Where is your shame [dike]?

Frustrated, TEL
2.85      threw the staff to the ground,
            his eyes grown bright with tears.

The problem is that TEL does not possess the power to compel citizens to respect what is right.  One of the suitors contemptuously asks:
2.254    Will this crowd risk the sword's edge over a dinner?

 Now consider what PEN says:
19.356  men's lives are short.
            The hard man & his cruelties will be
            cursed behind his back, & mocked in death.
            But one whose heart & ways are kind -- of him
            strangers will bear report to the wide world,
            & distant men will praise him.

If this is true, why is TEL left in tears while the leading families of Ithaka tolerate the outrageous behavior of the suitors?  PEN's ethic is feminine.  It is out of place & inapplicable to the world of violence addressed by Sarpedon, who sought only the power to survive:
(Iliad) 12.361   the main thing is
                      their fighting power, when they lead in combat!
This is why:
(Iliad)12.359    They are no common men, our lords who rule

Is PEN's ethic adequate to control the problem in her own house?  More than once she faces the suitors, telling them to their face that she knows they plan to murder her son:
16.458    [PEN] spoke directly to Antinoos:
              Infatuate [one who incites a lynch mob],
              steeped in evil! . . . why do you keep forever knitting
              death for TEL?
16.474    It is OD's
              house you now consume, his wife you court,
              his son you kill, or try to kill.

PEN is powerless to do more than invite these men to be ashamed.  Women need men.  The Iliad also illustrated that men need women.  This is no doubt literally true, but again we are being literary.  The first association we make with men (in Homer's world) is power.  Our association with the image of women is mothers, cooks, nurturers, weavers, love -- civilization.  What we want (for the polis) is a marriage between these two.  A ruler "mild as a father" but ready also to execute the criminals who would laughingly destroy civilization.  TEL has been nurtured to the brink of manhood by feminine powers (Eurykleia & his mother PEN), but he cannot be more than a child without a father:
2.65     Expel them, yes, if I only had the power.

OD is not AK.  Like Athena, he is something of an androgyne.  We will see that he embraces feminine values that produce the greatest city in the history of the world, Athens.  (& you thought it was Dallas :) )

Anonymity / Identity: Life in the ancient Greek world may not have been nasty, brutish, & short, but it came to a very stark & inescapable end.  A life of hedonistic pleasure might seem to be an acceptable response or choice, but many of us also think that it seems bovine.  Above all it lack heroics, dignity, & honor.  Infamy might almost be preferable to anonymity.  What could be worse than to have one's identity totally erased so that in a sense it might be said that you never existed?  Only the fate of remaining constrained in your baby blankets by mom, who fears that the world will do you harm.  When we first meet OD he seems to have gotten what we all want: eternal youth & divine sex/pleasure:
5.141    [Kalypso says] I fed him, loved him, sang that he should not die
            nor grow old, ever
& yet OD is weeping over his fate!
5.88    racked his own heart groaning, with eyes wet
scanning the bare horizon of the sea

The crazy guy wants to chuck the life of pleasure & row out to a sea of troubles.  Why?  Because that is what men (human beings) do.  Paradoxically, only in facing our troubles & finding a way out of them do we succeed in creating an identity.  Mom (Kalypso & all the other benign females) can give us everything but that.  & ultimately that is the only thing we want.  MEN's fortune buys him grief.  AK's great power cannot save him from death.  The best we can do in this life is to perform deeds that we do not regret; deeds that we are proud to relate or to recall in that infinitely long night's rest in the next world.

Hospitality: The ODY opens with TEL being irked by the idea that his house was inhospitable to a stranger.  MEN asks:
4.34    Could we have made it home again . . .
           if other men
           had never fed us, given us lodging?

The world of the ODY has progressed beyond the universal violence of The Iliad.  Power is refined into this strange ritual in which I feel powerful enough (or pose that way) to invite you into my house, feed you, treat you like my child.  We humans are all guests of the Olympians.  TEL learns about piety & money because Nestor & MEN are hospitable.  Hospitality is the first rule of morality for city life.  The polis must be inviting.  Why else what anyone choose to live there, to be devoted to it, to defend it?

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