Reading Troy — chapter 54 of 74 · Odyssey, Book 4

Odyssey, Book 4 — Menelaus and Helen at Sparta (Days 4–6 of the Telemachy, with intercut return to Ithaca; tenth year after Troy's fall; the palace of Menelaus at Lacedaemon, and the hall of Odysseus at Ithaca)

The chariot of Pisistratus rolls into Lacedaemon on the second day. A double wedding-feast is on: Menelaus is marrying his son Megapenthes to a girl from Sparta, and his daughter Hermione to Neoptolemus the son of Achilles. The two boys are bathed, oiled, and seated. Menelaus, looking on his immense bronze and gold and amber, wishes he had a third of it and his comrades alive again; he mentions Odysseus by name as the one he most regrets. Telemachus weeps into his cloak. Helen comes down — like Diana with her gold spindle — with her silver work-basket of dyed wool, and at the first glance names Telemachus as Odysseus's son.

She drops nepenthe into the wine — a drug from Polydamna, wife of Thon of Egypt, that "puts away sorrow for that day, though a man's mother and father had died and his brother been killed before his eyes." Then the entertainment begins: each of them tells a story about Odysseus. Helen first: how Odysseus disguised himself as a beggar, scarred his own body to look the part, and sneaked into Troy as a spy — I alone recognised him, I bathed and anointed him, I swore not to tell, he killed many Trojans on his way out and came back with information. Menelaus answers: but I remember the Wooden Horse. We sat inside it crammed in the dark. You, Helen, walked round it three times calling each man's name in the voice of his own wife. I and Diomedes and Odysseus were inside; we two would have called out, Odysseus held our mouths shut till you went away. Helen's "voices of wives" story is the more disturbing of the two — the suggestion that even at the moment of the Horse she was somehow doubled.

Telemachus and Pisistratus stay the night, and the next day Menelaus tells the long tale of his Egyptian nostos. Twenty days becalmed on the island of Pharos off the Egyptian coast, his men starving. The sea-nymph Eidothea took pity, told him to ambush her father Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. Hide under fresh seal-skins; Proteus counts his seals, lies down to sleep; seize him then. He will become lion, serpent, leopard, boar, water, tree — but hold him through every change. The four men did so. Proteus, beaten, prophesied to Menelaus: Ajax the son of Oileus drowned on the Gyrean Rocks for his boast against Neptune; Agamemnon was murdered by Aegisthus at his welcome-feast — listen, even now your brother's body lies unburied or under a hostile roof — and Odysseus, weeping, sits on the island of the nymph Calypso, with no ship and no crew. As for you, Menelaus, the gods will send you to the Elysian fields, because you have Helen and are the son-in-law of Jove.

Menelaus weeps for Agamemnon, sailed home, raised a barrow for his brother in Egypt. Now he offers Telemachus a chariot and three horses; Telemachus politely refuses — Ithaca is too rocky for chariots — but accepts a silver mixing-bowl with gold rim that Phaedimus king of Sidon once gave Menelaus.

Cut to Ithaca: the suitors, learning Telemachus has sailed, are appalled and afraid. Antinous proposes an ambush with twenty men on the rocky isle between Same and Ithaca to kill him on his return. Penelope hears from the herald Medon that her son is gone and that the suitors mean to murder him. She collapses, refuses food, calls on her dead husband and her absent boy. Eurycleia confesses she has known of the voyage all along. Athena, in pity, makes a phantom in the shape of Penelope's sister Iphthime (wife of Eumelus) which slips through the bolted door, stands at the head of the bed, and reassures her: Telemachus has Athena's protection. Penelope wakes comforted. The book ends with the suitors at sea in the ambush ship, anchored in the strait, lying in wait for the boy returning.

Analysis

Chapter 0054 — Analysis

The longest book of the Telemachy

Book 4 is the longest book of the Telemachy and the structural climax of its first arc. Everything builds to Menelaus's Proteus narrative, which gives Telemachus what he came for: news of his father. Odysseus is alive. He is on the island of the nymph Calypso. He weeps for home. The Telemachy ends on this purchased certainty. Book 5 will open by showing us, at last, the man Proteus described.

The double wedding as backdrop

The opening wedding-feast is structurally pointed. Hermione, Helen's daughter, is being married to Neoptolemus son of Achilles — the man who killed Priam in Posthomerica 13 and Aeneid 2, the brutal half-divine boy whose later reign in Epirus will form the dark backstory of Aeneid 3 (where Aeneas finds Andromache as Pyrrhus's slave and then widow). The Odyssey passes the marriage in two lines but it is the cycle's hinge. Megapenthes, Menelaus's son by a slave-woman, is being married off in parallel. Menelaus and Helen have no legitimate male heir — even fifteen years after Helen's return to Sparta, the war's damage to her body is unspecified but felt; Hermione is the daughter she left ten years old. The wedding-feast functions like a still photograph of post-war Sparta: rich, busy, hollow.

Helen and her nepenthe

The introduction of Helen is one of the Odyssey's most unsettling small moments. She enters spindle in hand, bright, beautiful, hospitable, and immediately drugs the wine. The nepenthe — Greek "no grief" — is a drug from Egypt that suspends mourning. The narrator's gloss that under it a man could watch his own family die and feel nothing is darker than usually noticed; this is what makes the storytelling competition possible at all. The Trojan War is the wound between Menelaus and Helen, and the only way they can speak of it together is with a drug. Helen's story of meeting disguised Odysseus in Troy and bathing and anointing him is told as proof of her constant pro-Greek sympathies; Menelaus's story of the Wooden Horse, in which Helen walks round the horse imitating the wives' voices to draw the heroes out, is told as a corrective: she was working both sides. They tell their stories side by side, smiling, in the nepenthe afterglow. The marriage is preserved and the war is unprocessed.

The Old Man of the Sea

Proteus is the Odyssey's most concentrated metafictional figure: a sea-god who, if caught, tells the truth, and who tries to escape by becoming every shape in succession. He is the model the poem then borrows for Odysseus himself: polytropos, the man of many turnings, who arrives on Ithaca disguised, who shifts identity (Aithon, Cretan beggar, son of Castor) seven times before book 23. The wrestling-the-shapeshifter scene is the Odyssey's emblem of how truth is got out of narrative: by holding on through the metamorphoses until the shape stops changing. Milton in Paradise Lost book 3 will give Proteus a cameo; Wordsworth's "Great God! I'd rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn / ... / Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea" makes the Old Man modernity's emblem of the lost numinous; Joyce's "Proteus" in Ulysses is the third episode, Stephen Dedalus alone on the strand thinking about metamorphic perception.

The fates of the Greek heroes, telegraphically

Proteus's prophecy is the Odyssey's most compressed summary of the Nostoi. Ajax the Lesser perished on the Gyrean Rocks because, having survived a wreck, he boasted that he had saved himself against the will of the gods; Poseidon split the rock with his trident. Agamemnon was killed at his welcome-feast, the third telling of the Aegisthus paradigm, and here Cassandra dies beside him — the only telling that names Cassandra in this book. Odysseus weeps on Calypso's island with no ship. Menelaus himself will not die: he will be sent to the Elysian fields because he is Helen's husband. The Odyssey, alone among Greek texts, sends Menelaus to paradise — a strange grace given to the inadequate Atrid.

The Ithacan cut

The second half of book 4 is the Odyssey's first sustained cut to Ithaca with Telemachus off-stage. Penelope is given her first long-form sorrow, and the disguised-divine-comforter type-scene (Athena's Iphthime-phantom) is the first of three: Athena as Mentor for Telemachus, Athena as Iphthime for Penelope, Athena as herself for Odysseus at book 13. The chapter ends on the suitors' ambush ship — the first cliff-hanger, suspended into book 5's opening on Olympus.

What to watch for

• Helen's nepenthe: a model for every drug-of-forgetting in literature (Lotos-Eaters next book; Circe in book 10; the wine of Polyphemus in book 9).
• The Wooden Horse, told here only as anecdote — the full sack will not be narrated in the Odyssey but in Posthomerica 12–13 and Aeneid 2.
• Proteus as Odysseus's mirror: the man who tells the truth by being held through every disguise.
• The Iphthime phantom: Athena's first divine appearance to Penelope; she will not appear to her again as a god — only mediated through dreams and signs.
• The ambush ship in the strait: a plot-bomb dropped here, dismantled by Athena in book 15.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0054 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

Book 4 reaches further back into the cycle than any preceding Odyssey book. Helen's narrative of Odysseus disguised as a beggar inside Troy presupposes a Trojan-cycle episode treated more fully in the lost Little Iliad — the same Odyssean reconnaissance is alluded to in Posthomerica 6 and 10. Menelaus's Wooden Horse story is the same incident Quintus narrates at length in Posthomerica 12 (the building of the horse, the boarding) and 13 (the sack); the Odyssey here gives us the inside-the-horse view that Posthomerica does not have. Virgil will adopt Helen's tour-of-the-Horse — calling each warrior's name in his wife's voice — as the founding example of her doubleness in Aeneid 2 and 6. The Proteus catalogue of Greek deaths (Ajax-Lesser's drowning, Agamemnon's murder, Odysseus on Calypso's island) is the compressed Nostoi: the lost cyclic epic the Odyssey is in dialogue with. Ajax-Lesser's drowning for impiety connects directly to his rape of Cassandra at Athena's altar in Posthomerica 13 and Aeneid 2 — the action whose punishment splits the Greek fleet in book 3 of the Odyssey and drowns him here. Cassandra's death beside Agamemnon (named here for the only time in the Telemachy) is the matter of Aeschylus's Agamemnon (458 BCE) and the close of Posthomerica 13.

Forward echoes

• Proteus's prophecy locates Odysseus: the Telemachy ends knowing what the audience knew from book 1 but Telemachus did not — Odysseus is alive, with Calypso, weeping. Book 5 picks up there.
• The ambush ship anchored in the strait between Same and Ithaca is the plot-bomb that the second half of the poem must dismantle. Athena will arrange Telemachus's escape in book 15.
• The Iphthime phantom is the first of the Odyssey's dream-visions to Penelope; book 19's eagle-and-geese dream will be more famous.
• The nepenthe is the type of every later forgetting-drug: Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters, Keats's "drowsy numbness, as though of hemlock I had drunk", Brave New World's soma, Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest.
• Proteus becomes the modern emblem of shape-change: Milton's Paradise Lost 3.604, Wordsworth's "Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea", Joyce's third episode of Ulysses ("Proteus"), and the modern English "protean."
• The Hermione–Neoptolemus marriage is the link between this book and Aeneid 3, where Aeneas finds Andromache at Buthrotum: she had been Neoptolemus's slave-concubine, was given to Helenus when Neoptolemus left her for Hermione, and Neoptolemus was then killed at Delphi by Orestes (who, jilted of Hermione, took her by force). The Odyssey passes the wedding in two lines but it sets up the Aeneid's most heartbreaking minor episode.
• Menelaus to Elysium, here promised by Proteus, is the Odyssey's strangest theological detail: the un-cunning brother of Agamemnon gets paradise, while his cunning ally Odysseus has yet to suffer ten years more. The grace is offered, not earned. Pindar and the elegiac poets pick up the Menelaus-in-Elysium tradition.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0054 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Telemachus — arrives at Sparta, weeps at Odysseus's name, receives Proteus's news of his father
• Menelaus — host; narrates the Wooden Horse counter-test and the Proteus wrestling
• Helen — descends with spindle, drugs the wine with nepenthe, tells the tale of Odysseus's beggar-disguise in Troy
• Penelope — at Ithaca; learns of Telemachus's voyage and the suitors' ambush, comforted by Athena's dream-phantom
• Athena — "Minerva"; sends the Iphthime phantom through the bolted bedroom door
• Antinous — proposes the ambush of Telemachus on his return
• Eurycleia — confesses to Penelope she knew of the voyage

Mentioned / off-stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; located by Proteus on Calypso's island
• Calypso — holding Odysseus, named here for the first time as his captor
• Agamemnon — Proteus narrates his murder by Aegisthus, fourth telling of the paradigm
• Cassandra — named here as dying beside Agamemnon at his welcome-feast
• Ajax Lesser — drowned on the Gyrean Rocks for his boast
• Achilles — named via his son Neoptolemus, marrying Hermione today
• Neoptolemus — Hermione's bridegroom (off-stage); the cycle's hinge to Aeneid 3
• Diomedes — in the Wooden Horse beside Menelaus, Odysseus's hand on his mouth

Non-cast named figures: Hermione (Helen's daughter, marrying Neoptolemus); Megapenthes (Menelaus's son by a slave, marrying); Eidothea (daughter of Proteus, the helping sea-nymph); Proteus the Old Man of the Sea; Polydamna (the Egyptian who gave Helen the nepenthe); Thon (her husband); Phaedimus king of Sidon (gave Menelaus the silver bowl); Iphthime (Penelope's sister, whose form Athena borrows); Medon the herald; Pisistratus (Telemachus's companion); Noemon son of Phronius (in Ithaca, lender of the ship).

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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.