Reading Troy — chapter 53 of 74 · Odyssey, Book 3

Odyssey, Book 3 — Telemachus at Nestor's House (Day 3 of the Telemachy; tenth year after Troy's fall; the beach at Pylos and the palace of Nestor)

The sun comes up out of the lovely sea and into the brazen firmament. Telemachus's ship has run all night and lands at Pylos in the morning. The whole population of Pylos — nine companies, five hundred men in each — is gathered on the beach, sacrificing nine bulls to Neptune, the dark-haired earth-shaker. Athena-as-Mentor leads the prince forward. Nestor's youngest son Pisistratus comes to meet them, takes their hands, sets them on soft fleeces beside his father, gives them shares of the entrails and a cup of wine. He hands the cup first to the visitor he takes for the older man — but it is the goddess, and she silently approves his good manners by praying first.

Nestor, the old horseman, asks the strangers their business. Telemachus, his courage stiffened by Athena, says he comes for any word of his father, who he hears was Nestor's friend before Troy. Nestor warms at the name. Ah, the years on the plain — Achilles, Ajax, Patroclus, my own son Antilochus, all dead; and Ulysses, your father, was a man I never saw equalled for cunning of any kind. Two of you, when we conferred, were always of one mind. Yet I do not know what became of him after Troy fell. The fleet split at Tenedos: Menelaus's half sailed at once, the rest stayed with Agamemnon to placate Athena, who was angry with the Greeks for Ajax's sacrilege at her shrine. We who left took different paths home. I came straight to Pylos and saw none of the others on the way.

He turns to the great cautionary tale: while you Greeks were at Troy, Aegisthus was at home in Mycenae seducing Clytemnestra. He killed Agamemnon at the welcome-feast — as a man slaughters an ox at the manger — and ruled seven years. In the eighth, Orestes came from Athens and killed him. Therefore, my boy, do not stay long from home: leave nothing in the suitors' way. And remember Orestes — winning glory and being a song among men yet to come. Telemachus answers: I wish the gods would give me power so to take vengeance on the suitors. But, says Nestor, who can match wits with the gods? Go now to Menelaus in Sparta. He has only just come back from Egypt and may know more.

Athena reveals herself: she flies up as a sea-eagle, "a vulture of the sea." The Pylians cross themselves; Nestor, recognising the daughter of Jove, promises her a heifer with its horns gilded. They go in to a great feast in his halls. Telemachus is bathed and oiled by Nestor's youngest daughter Polycaste, "as if he had been a god." In the morning the heifer is brought; Laerces the goldsmith hammers fine gold leaf onto her horns; Nestor's six sons hold and slaughter her, the wife Eurydice and Nestor's daughters wail the ritual cry, the women take charge of the cooking, the thighbones are wrapped in fat and burned with libations.

After meat and wine, Nestor commands a chariot harnessed for Telemachus. Pisistratus drives. The two boys go all day across the plain of Pylos — the chariot's bronze axle and the manes of the horses — and at sunset reach Pherae, where Diocles son of Ortilochus gives them guest-supper. The book ends with them sleeping in his house, ready to drive on to Sparta at dawn.

Analysis

Chapter 0053 — Analysis

Nestor the surviving Iliadic veteran

The Odyssey at this point is, among other things, the Iliad's veterans' reunion. Nestor was the old horseman of the Greek camp twenty years ago — the one whose long-winded paradigms (the boar hunt, the Calydonian war, the youth-glories) Iliad 11 and 23 made famous. He has reached old age, lost his son Antilochus (to Memnon in Posthomerica 2), gone home, sacrificed, ruled. He is the perfect first informant for Telemachus because he gives the news the prince came for and gives him social training. The bath, the meal, the chariot, the guest-supper at Pherae — the textbook of xenia unspooling. Telemachus arrives a boy who can call an assembly; he leaves Pylos a boy who has been bathed by a king's daughter and driven a war-chariot.

Pisistratus and the etiquette of the cup

Athena-Mentor smiles when Pisistratus offers the cup first to the older of his two visitors. The prose registers it lightly — she liked his good breeding — but the moment is the Odyssey's quietest set-piece on what hospitality requires. The right son, in the right house, has been raised to give the cup to the elder visitor (because the elder is the visitor of higher status), and to do it without prompting. Antinous and Eurymachus, sons of comparable houses, in book 2 throw goblets at beggars and laugh. The Odyssey is constantly testing young men through cup-handling.

The Aegisthus paradigm, second telling

Jove told the Aegisthus story in book 1; Nestor tells it here at length, with the seven-year reign and Orestes the avenger; Menelaus will tell it again in book 4; Agamemnon's own ghost in book 11; Agamemnon again in book 24. The Odyssey assumes its audience is exhausted at the killing of Aegisthus and intrigued at how each teller frames it. Nestor's version focuses on Clytemnestra's initial resistance — Aegisthus had to coax her, isolate the loyal bard, place him on a desert island to die — and on Orestes as a positive moral example. Telemachus is being given his template. Notice that this is the only version of the story that mentions Clytemnestra resisting; book 11's Agamemnon-ghost-version will be unforgiving.

Athena as sea-eagle

Athena leaves the feast by becoming a phēnē — the Latin Vulgate gave us "vulture," Butler gives us "vulture of the sea," but a phēnē is more nearly an osprey or sea-eagle. The Iliad's gods on departure simply vanish; the Odyssey's Athena reveals herself in dramatic shape-changes, here and again at book 22's slaughter, where she becomes a swallow on the rafters. The bird-form is theologically purposeful: Athena's bird, the owl, would not have suited a daylight, oceanic departure; the phēnē is her improvisation, and Nestor's recognition of her by the bird-omen is the right reading — exactly the kind of pious literacy Eurymachus refused in book 2.

The sacrifice of the heifer

The heifer-sacrifice next morning is one of Homer's set-piece ritual descriptions — a manual of how the rite was performed in the eighth century BCE for the eighth-century audience: the gilding of the horns by Laerces the smith, water and barley brought by Aretus, the prayer, the axe-stroke by Stratius and Echephron, the women's ritual cry (ololyge), the slitting of the throat by Pisistratus, the bleeding-out, the wrapping of the thighbones in fat (the gods' share), the libation of wine onto the burning fat, the tasting of inner organs, the carving of the rest, the meat on five-pronged spits, the meal. Butler renders the whole sequence flatly and economically. Lattimore makes it ritual; Wilson makes it strange. This is the most extended sacrifice description in the poem; it precedes Telemachus's departure for the next stage, marking the boy as one whom Athena has demanded honour for.

Butler's relaxed Nestor

Butler's prose is at its best with Nestor. Nestor in the Greek is famously digressive — his speeches in the Iliad are paradigm-stacks separated by kai gar pote ("for once upon a time"). In Butler, Nestor sounds like a slightly garrulous Edwardian club-man recalling the war. The effect is more intimate than Lattimore's exalted Nestor or Fitzgerald's stately one, but it costs the Greek's formal grandeur. The trade is the trade of the entire Butler.

What to watch for

• Pisistratus, here introduced, will travel with Telemachus through book 4 and 15 and is the model of a younger best friend.
• Antilochus dead and mourned — the Iliad's character carried into Posthomerica 2's death-by-Memnon.
• The Aegisthus paradigm: third of six tellings. Track the variants.
• The sacrifice as the template against which the suitors' butchering of Odysseus's own animals (book 20, the omens) reads as desecration.
• Athena's bird-departure: counterpart of her swallow in book 22.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0053 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

Book 3 is the Odyssey's first dense field of backward reference. Nestor names the Iliad's roster as he mourns it: Achilles, Ajax, Patroclus, his own Antilochus. Each name pulls a body of narrative. Achilles' death was the matter of Posthomerica 3; Ajax the Greater's suicide after the Judgement of Arms was Posthomerica 5; Antilochus's death by Memnon was Posthomerica 2; Patroclus died in Iliad 16, mourned in 18 and buried in 23. Nestor's "many a brave man perished there" is a one-line summary of the cycle's losses. The quarrel between Agamemnon and Menelaus at Tenedos belongs to the lost epic Nostoi, which the Odyssey assumes its audience knows. Ajax the Lesser's sacrilege — raping Cassandra at Athena's altar during the sack — is the matter of Posthomerica 13's sack of Troy and the cause of Athena's wrath against the returning Greeks: this single off-page act splits the fleet here. Nestor's role itself is Iliadic — the same character, the same prolixity, the same paradigm-teaching, twenty years older. The sacrifice of nine bulls to Poseidon is Greek practice, and Iliad 1 closed with a hekatomb to Apollo by exactly the same procedure.

Forward echoes

• Nestor's Aegisthus story is the second of six tellings within the Odyssey. The variation matters: here, Clytemnestra is unwillingly seduced; in book 11, Agamemnon's ghost will call her the wickedest of women; in book 24, Agamemnon and Achilles will compare her to Penelope as polar opposites. The Odyssey is asking the audience to read variants.
• Athena's sea-eagle departure is the Odyssey's first divine theophany since book 1; the next will be at book 13, where she sheds the Mentor disguise on the Ithacan beach and laughs with Odysseus.
• Pisistratus, introduced here, will accompany Telemachus to Sparta in book 4 and back as far as Pylos in book 15; he is the Odyssey's portrait of the perfect younger comrade — the figure Patroclus might have been if Achilles had a different fate.
• The bath by Polycaste — Telemachus oiled and dressed by a king's daughter, "as if he had been a god" — is the type-scene that will repeat for Odysseus on Scheria (Nausicaa, books 6–8), and inverted in book 19 when the wandering "beggar" is washed by Eurycleia and the scar betrays him.
• The wider cycle: Nestor's narrative compresses the lost Nostoi; Diocles of Pherae will host Telemachus a second time on his return in book 15. Nestor's son Antilochus is the structural mirror of Patroclus — best friend whose death drives the hero's grief; the figure Quintus expanded into a major Posthomerica subplot.
• Forward beyond Homer: Aeschylus's Oresteia (458 BCE) takes Nestor's "Orestes the avenger" model as its tragic raw material — and explicitly darkens it. Aeschylus turns Clytemnestra into a force of nature and adds the Furies. Nestor's clean Orestes-as-model becomes the morally fraught Orestes of the Oresteia. The Odyssey here gives Aeschylus his plot.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0053 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Telemachus — arrives at Pylos, bathed by Polycaste, learns the cycle's news from Nestor
• Athena — "Minerva"; in Mentor's form, then reveals herself as a sea-eagle
• Nestor — old horseman of Pylos; narrates the Greek nostoi and the Aegisthus paradigm

Mentioned / off-stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; Nestor's friend at Troy, fate unknown
• Agamemnon — murdered at his welcome-feast by Aegisthus
• Clytemnestra — seduced by Aegisthus during Agamemnon's absence
• Menelaus — only just returned from Egypt; Telemachus's next host
• Achilles — among the Iliad-dead Nestor mourns
• Patroclus — Iliad-dead
• Ajax Greater — Iliad-dead
• Ajax Lesser — sacrilege at Athena's shrine caused her wrath, splitting the fleet
• Antilochus — Nestor's son, killed at Troy (Posthomerica 2)
• Poseidon — "Neptune"; receives the nine-bull sacrifice on the beach as Telemachus lands
• Neoptolemus — alluded to by Nestor among the nostoi

Non-cast named figures: Pisistratus (Nestor's youngest son, Telemachus's companion); Polycaste (Nestor's youngest daughter, gives the bath); Eurydice (Nestor's wife); Laerces (the goldsmith who gilds the heifer's horns); Aretus, Stratius, Echephron, Thrasymedes, Perseus (Nestor's other sons performing the sacrifice); Diocles son of Ortilochus at Pherae (the night's guest-host); Aegisthus (named, off-stage); Orestes (the avenging-son paradigm).

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.