Reading Troy — chapter 56 of 74 · Odyssey, Book 6

Odyssey, Book 6 — Nausicaa on the Shore (Day 32 of the poem's main action, tenth year after Troy's fall; the city and shore of the Phaeacians on Scheria)

While Ulysses sleeps in his bed of leaves, Athena slips through the night to the bedchamber of Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous of the Phaeacians. The princess is asleep with two maids, the doors closed though there is no need for closing them. Athena takes the form of Nausicaa's friend, the daughter of the sea-captain Dymas, leans over the bed, and chides her: the wedding-day approaches; the best young men of the Phaeacians are courting her; tomorrow take the wagon to the river and wash the family linen — your father needs clean robes for the council, your brothers for the dance. With that the goddess slips away to Olympus.

Nausicaa wakes, marvels at the dream, and goes to her father in the chamber where he is dressing for council. She asks for the mule-cart. She mentions her father's robes, her brothers' linen — not the wedding. Alcinous understands what she does not say; he orders the wagon yoked. Her mother fills the food-basket with delicacies and a kid-skin of wine and a golden flask of oil for the bathing. Nausicaa takes the reins, the maids ride and walk behind, and the mules clatter down the road to the river-mouth.

At the washing-pools they tread the clothes in the running water with much laughing rivalry, lay them on the shingle to dry in the sun, bathe themselves, eat lunch by the bank, then unveil and play ball — and Nausicaa sings to keep the rhythm, like Diana with her bow on Taygetus or Erymanthus among her nymphs, taller than them all and the loveliest, though all are lovely. As they finish and are folding the dry clothes for the journey home, Nausicaa throws the ball wide; a maid misses it; it splashes into a deep eddy of the river, and they all cry out together.

The cry wakes Ulysses. He sits up in his thicket and debates — are these wild nymphs of the springs, or the voices of speaking women, or savages? He breaks off a leafy bough to hold over himself for decency, and emerges like a mountain lion that goes out in wind and rain, eyes burning, to take sheep or oxen from the fold — even into the stout farmhouses he will go, his belly drives him. He is naked, crusted with brine, his hair stiff with salt. The maids scream and bolt along the foreshore. Nausicaa alone holds her ground; Athena has put courage in her knees.

Ulysses calculates: clasp her knees in the formal supplication, or speak at a distance? At a distance — touching her would be wrong. He delivers the most exquisite address in the poem. Are you a goddess or a mortal? If a goddess, you are Diana for sure. If mortal, blessed are your father and mother and the brothers who watch you dance — but most blessed of all the man who one day takes you home as bride. I have never seen such a thing of beauty — only once a young palm-tree shooting up by Apollo's altar at Delos. Yesterday I came off twenty days on the sea, the wind drove me from Ogygia. Have pity. Give me a rag to wrap, point me to the town. He ends with a blessing on her future marriage — for there is nothing better than husband and wife of one mind together in a house.

Nausicaa, composed, answers like a queen: you do not look like a worthless man; Jove gives wealth and poverty as he pleases; you are welcome here, you shall have clothing and food, the Phaeacians are a god-fearing people. She calls back the maids — strangers and beggars are sent by Jove, do not run — orders them to give him clothing and oil, and points him to a sheltered fold of the river to wash himself. He washes the brine off; the maids leave him a tunic and mantle; Athena pours grace upon his head and makes him taller and broader and his hair fall in close-curling rings like hyacinth.

He sits down on the shore, and Nausicaa says to her maids what she will not say to him: I wish a man like this would be my husband, and stay here willingly. She gives him food and drink, then explains the protocol he must follow: walk behind the wagon till they near the town, then drop back to the sacred grove of Athena outside the walls and wait there till she has reached the palace — for she will not have the Phaeacian gossips see her bringing a stranger home through the marketplace. When you come into the palace, she instructs, pass straight by my father and clasp the knees of my mother Arete; if she takes a liking to you, you will see Ithaca again. The book ends with Ulysses in the grove at sunset, praying to Athena to make the Phaeacians take pity on him — and Athena hearing, but not yet showing herself, afraid of her uncle Neptune, who was still in his wrath at Ulysses.

Analysis

Chapter 0056 — Analysis

The most charming book of the Odyssey

Book 6 is the book everyone remembers fondly. Even readers who find the wanderings overlong come back to the river-mouth at Scheria, to the laundry-game, to the lion-simile, to the encounter with the princess. The book is famous because it is the Odyssey's clearest moment of comedy in the literary sense — recovery from danger into civility, threat resolved into manners, a salt-crusted naked man meeting a young princess and finding himself in a fairytale. The arc is wholly different from book 5's elemental violence: where Poseidon raised the storm with cosmic fury, here the worst thing that happens is a ball thrown wide.

Nausicaa and the marriageability dream

Athena's intervention is wonderfully indirect. She does not appear to Ulysses; she appears to the princess of the country where he has washed ashore, plants the dream of marriage in her mind, and lets Nausicaa do the rest. The dream sends Nausicaa to the shore at the exact hour the ball will be thrown wide and wake him. Nausicaa never knows she is being used. Even her unspoken thought to her father (the wedding-day approaches) is absorbed into the more decorous request (the linen needs washing). She has good manners; she does not ask for what she wants directly. Alcinous, the good father, hears it anyway. The Odyssey trusts its young woman with a degree of interiority unusual in Greek literature: we know what Nausicaa thinks, what she half-says, what she will say only to her maids — I wish a man like this would be my husband.

The lion simile, and what it knows about Ulysses

The lion simile when Ulysses steps out of the bushes is one of the Odyssey's most studied. A mountain lion that goes out in wind and rain, eyes burning, to take sheep or oxen — even into the stout farmhouses he will go, his belly drives him. The Iliad uses lion similes for warriors in combat; the Odyssey uses one here for a naked starving man approaching a girl. The transfer is half comic, half threatening. The maids' panic is fully justified by the simile; Nausicaa's standing-firm is the bravery the moment requires. Most importantly, the simile knows what Ulysses is: a predator driven by need, who will enter a stranger's house and take what he must. The Odyssey will end with the hero killing one hundred and eight men inside a house, his belly drives him. The simile of Book 6 is the gentle preview.

The supplication speech and the palm-tree at Delos

Ulysses's address is one of the great set-pieces. He invents the rhetorical convention of refusing to clasp the knees so as not to give offence — and then performs the entire supplication with words alone. The structure is exemplary: a complimentary opening (goddess-or-mortal), a memorable simile from his own travels (the palm-tree at Delos seen years before, an image of slender beauty rising new from the ground), a brief autobiography (twenty days at sea, Ogygia), a focused request (clothing, direction), and a generous closing blessing for her future husband. He gives her her own marriage as a parting gift. The Greek for the marriage-blessing — homophrosyne, like-mindedness of husband and wife — becomes the Odyssey's central marital ideal, the thing that defines the bond Ulysses has with Penelope and that Nausicaa is being primed to want.

Butler's prose and Lattimore's hexameter

The supplication speech is one of those passages where translation makes a real difference. Butler's prose is competent: I have never seen such a thing of beauty — only once at Delos, where I saw a young palm-tree shooting up by Apollo's altar. Lattimore's hexameter version is more measured: at Delos once I saw a slim young palm-tree shooting / up at the side of Apollo's altar — I went there once. Pope and Fitzgerald give it lyric grace; Wilson (whose iambic pentameter is the most recent canonical English Odyssey) renders the wonder with new directness. Butler's prose registers the content of the moment without quite catching the music. The palm-tree image works in any translation because it is grounded in something specific: a memory of a real tree at a real shrine, used to praise a real girl.

The bath and the divine grace

Athena's enhancement of Ulysses after the bath is a key moment in the poem's interest in transformation. She made him taller and broader, his hair fell in close-curling rings like hyacinth. The simile of the workman gilding silver tells us this is the Odyssey's view of how beauty is added to the world — by an artisan's care, by polish over a sound underlying form. The same enhancement will recur at the bath in book 8 (when Demodocus sings Troy), at the bath in book 19 (when Eurycleia recognises the scar), at the bath in book 23 (before the recognition by Penelope). Bathing is the Odyssey's primary ritual of re-becoming.

What to watch for

Homophrosyne — like-mindedness — the marital ideal first named in Ulysses's blessing to Nausicaa; the criterion against which his reunion with Penelope will be measured at book 23.
The grove of Athena outside the walls — a sacred space where the hero is held in suspense between sea and city, in which all the recognition-deferrals of the second half of the poem begin.
Arete the queen — named here but not yet seen; Nausicaa's strategy of going to the mother first will prove correct in book 7.
The Phaeacian self-description — we live apart on a land's-end jutting into the sea, no other people come near us; we trust in our long oars and our swift ships — a portrait of a people on the threshold between this world and the next.
The lion simile as preview of book 22 — the predator entering the house his belly drives him into.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0056 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The encounter with Nausicaa is the first in a sequence of recognitions-deferred that will define the second half of the poem; backward in the cycle it reaches to two earlier moments. First, the Telemachy's hospitality scenes (book 3 with Nestor, book 4 with Menelaus) all turned on a young man being asked his name and lineage only after he has been bathed, dressed, fed, and seated — the rule of Phaeacian hospitality is exactly the Pylian and Spartan rule, and Nausicaa is teaching Ulysses how to receive what she knows the polite stranger should receive. Second, the kledon of Helen at Sparta — Helen who recognised Telemachus on sight — is reversed: Nausicaa does not recognise the stranger and never will. She thinks she has met a man washed up by Jove. The Odyssey's hero, for the first time since book 1, is in a country that does not know him.

The lion simile rhymes with the Iliad's frequent lion similes for Achilles, Hector, and Diomedes — the predator entering the fold — but transposed from battlefield to encounter with a girl. The supplication speech rhymes with the embassy to Achilles (Iliad 9) inverted: there a man is offered everything and refuses; here a man begs for almost nothing and is granted everything. The grove of Athena outside the walls is the structural double of the grove of Calchas-and-the-snake at Aulis (Iliad 2) and of the wood at Aricia in later Italian myth — a liminal sacred space between sea and city, world and the world.

Forward echoes

Nausicaa's marriage-hint is the first of three near-marriages Ulysses must decline: Calypso behind him (immortality), Nausicaa here (a princess and a kingdom), and Circe ahead (a goddess and her island). The Odyssey defines its hero by the women he does not marry.
The Phaeacian palace at the close of this book opens onto books 7–13, the longest single sojourn in the poem and the frame inside which Ulysses tells his own wanderings.
Arete the queen, named here, will be the first of three powerful figures whose acceptance Ulysses must win at the palace: Arete first (book 7), Alcinous second (book 7), the bard Demodocus third (book 8).
The grove of Athena is the type of every later sacred grove in the Mediterranean tradition: Virgil's grove of the Golden Bough at the entrance to Avernus (Aeneid 6); the grove of Diana at Aricia that Frazer made famous in The Golden Bough; the dark wood in which Dante opens the Commedia.
The bathed and re-gilded Ulysses is the first of four ritual rebirths through bathing: here for Nausicaa, in book 8 before the games, in book 19 with the recognition scar, in book 23 before Penelope.
The lion-driven-by-belly simile is reactivated at book 22 when the predator finally enters the house his belly drives him into: a hundred and eight suitors in the megaron, the lion at last loose in the fold.
Nausicaa herself has the strangest afterlife. Samuel Butler (this very translator) wrote The Authoress of the Odyssey in 1897 arguing that Nausicaa is the poet — that the Odyssey was composed by a young woman of Trapani who put her self-portrait into book 6. Few scholars believed him; the book is still read.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0056 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

Odysseus — "Ulysses"; wakes salt-crusted, supplicates Nausicaa from a distance, bathes, follows the wagon to the grove of Athena
Nausicaa — princess of the Phaeacians; takes the wagon to the river, holds her ground when the maids flee, answers the supplication, instructs Ulysses how to enter the palace
Athena — "Minerva"; sends Nausicaa the marriageability dream, gives her courage at the river, enhances Ulysses after the bath
Alcinous — king of the Phaeacians; grants Nausicaa the wagon, named but off-stage

Mentioned / off-stage

Poseidon — "Neptune"; named at the close as the still-wrathful uncle Athena is wary of
Calypso — named: Ulysses says the wind drove him from Ogygia
Zeus — "Jove"; named in Nausicaa's speech (he gives wealth and poverty as he pleases; strangers are under his protection)
Apollo — invoked in the palm-tree at Delos image
Penelope — unnamed but implicit in the homophrosyne blessing

Non-cast named figures: Arete (queen of the Phaeacians, named here but seen first in book 7); Nausithous (Alcinous's father, deceased founder of the Scherian colony); Dymas (a Phaeacian sea-captain whose daughter's form Athena takes for the dream); Diana / Artemis (in the simile of Nausicaa among her maids on Taygetus and Erymanthus); Leto (Diana's mother in the simile); the unnamed river-god of the previous book, still implicit in the safe estuary.

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.