Reading Troy — chapter 57 of 74 · Odyssey, Book 7

Odyssey, Book 7 — Ulysses at the Palace of Alcinous (Day 32 of the poem's main action, evening; the city and palace of Alcinous on Scheria)

Nausicaa drives the wagon back to the palace; her brothers unload the linen and unyoke the mules; old Eurymedusa, her nurse from Apeira, kindles a fire in her chamber and brings her supper. Ulysses meanwhile rises in the grove of Athena and walks into the town, hidden by a fine mist the goddess has wrapped around him so that no Phaeacian shall see him. Athena meets him in the form of a little girl carrying a pitcher, and offers to guide him. She warns him that the Phaeacians do not like strangers; she lectures him about the lineage of King Alcinous; and above all she tells him that he must go straight past the king and clasp the knees of Queen Arete — she is honoured as no other woman is honoured; if she takes your part, you are as good as home. Arete is the king's niece as well as his wife, descended through her father Rhexenor from Nausithous and so from Neptune himself.

Ulysses passes through the palace gates and stands amazed. Butler's prose carries the catalogue cleanly: the walls of bronze with their cornice of blue enamel, the gold doors on silver pillars, the gold and silver mastiffs Vulcan made to stand guard immortal at the threshold, the golden boy-statues holding torches for the evening feasts, the fifty maids grinding grain and weaving cloth so dense that oil will not pass through it, the loom-shuttles flickering like the fluttering of aspen leaves. Beyond the courts the orchard runs four acres: pears and apples and figs and pomegranates and olives, never out of season, one fruit ripens as another flowers, the same west wind brings them all on together; two streams water the garden, one for the king, one for the town. He stands taking it in.

Then he crosses the bronze threshold in his cloak of mist. The princes of the Phaeacians sit at their evening drink-offering to Mercury, the last cup of the night. Ulysses walks invisible through them all and kneels at Arete's chair, his hands on her knees in the suppliant's grip — and at that instant the mist falls from him and he is visible. The hall freezes. He addresses her with the formal supplication: Queen Arete, daughter of Rhexenor, in my distress I implore you and your husband and these your guests — send me home, I have suffered long enough. He withdraws to the hearth and sits in the ashes.

A silence. Old Echeneus, the elder of the council, breaks it. Alcinous, this is not seemly — a stranger sitting in the hearth-ashes. Raise him up, set him on the silver-studded chair, pour wine, let us drink to Jove the protector of suppliants. Alcinous obeys at once, takes Ulysses's hand, sets him in the seat of his favourite son Laodamas, calls for water for the hands and food, and orders Pontonous to mix the wine. The libation goes round. Alcinous dismisses the council with a promise of a greater banquet tomorrow and a planning meeting about the escort; he muses aloud whether the stranger is a god in disguise — the gods do appear to us face to face, for we are close to them like the Cyclopes and the Giants. Ulysses denies it: I am no god. I am a man whose suffering you would not match in any catalogue. But for now, let me eat. There is nothing so importunate as an empty belly.

The council disperses. Ulysses sits alone with the king and queen. Arete, sharp-eyed, has been looking at his clothes — those are mine, my maids wove them. She asks him directly: who are you, where do you come from, and who gave you the clothes? Ulysses answers with the first version of his wanderings — much shorter than the four books to come — beginning at the moment Calypso received him after his ship was struck by Jove's lightning, the seven years on Ogygia, the offer of immortality refused, the raft, the seventeen-day crossing, Neptune's storm, the loss of all the timbers, the two days swimming, the rocks, the river-mouth, the leaves in the olive thicket, and meeting Nausicaa at the wash-pools who gave him bread and wine and the clothes off the washing-pile. He praises Nausicaa as showing more sense than is usual in the young — and adds, quietly, that she alone did not run.

Alcinous, hearing this, gently reproaches Nausicaa for not bringing the stranger straight to the palace. Ulysses defends her: she did tell me to come; I was the one who lagged behind out of awe — every man is sometimes a little touchy. Alcinous, won completely, swears by Jove and Athena and Apollo: if you would stay, I would give you my daughter to wife and a house and lands. He adds at once: but no one shall keep you here against your will; tomorrow we send you home, however far. The Phaeacian ships, he boasts, made the voyage to Euboea in a day when they took the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus to visit Tityus the son of Earth; they will take Ulysses home as easily. Ulysses prays aloud that Jove may bring it about — and that Alcinous's name may live undying among men.

Arete orders the gatehouse bed made up. Maids fold red rugs and woolen cloaks and linen sheets over the bedstead by torchlight, and lead Ulysses to it. He lies down at last in a real bed under a real roof, in a palace whose king has promised him passage home. Alcinous and Arete withdraw to their own inner room. The book ends in the deepest sleep Ulysses has had since Calypso's cave — secure, comfortable, almost domestic.

Analysis

Chapter 0057 — Analysis

The palace as the Odyssey's positive image of civilisation

Book 7 is the poem's longest and most lovingly detailed picture of a well-run royal house. The bronze walls, the gold and silver mastiffs at the threshold, the golden boys with their lit torches, the fifty maids at the loom and the mill, the four-acre orchard where every season ripens at once — none of it is necessary to the plot. It is included because the Odyssey is a poem about households, and Scheria is the model household against which the chaos at Ithaca will be measured. Compare Alcinous's hall to the suitor-occupied megaron at Ithaca in book 17: the same architecture, ruined. Compare it to Nestor's at Pylos and Menelaus's at Sparta in books 3–4: clean, ordered, but military and somewhat dim. Scheria is the most beautiful house in the poem because it is the house furthest from war.

Arete first

The first thing Athena tells Ulysses about the Phaeacian court is to bypass the king and supplicate the queen. If she takes your part, you are as good as home. The Odyssey takes seriously what most of Greek literature ignores: women rule households, and in the right household the queen's word weighs as much as the king's. Arete's first speech is interrogative — she has noticed the clothes, recognised her own weaving on the stranger's back, and asks him directly to account for himself. She is exactly the kind of woman Penelope is, and Ulysses recognises the type at once. The Phaeacian queenship is not a model the rest of the Mediterranean has — Helen at Sparta is decorative and disturbing, Clytemnestra at Mycenae is murderous — and the poem's brief Scherian utopia is gone with the next book. But Arete is a sketch of what Penelope at her best can be: the queen whose competence carries the household.

Athena's mist, and the moment of becoming visible

The conceit of the invisibility-mist is one of the poem's most evocative narrative devices. Ulysses walks through the entire town, into the palace, through the assembled princes drinking their nightcap to Mercury, and only becomes visible at the precise instant his hands close on Arete's knees. The choreography is exact: invisibility allows the supplication to be completed before the supplicant is seen; the falling-away of the mist makes the act undeniable. Athena gives him the perfect rhetorical opening — no Phaeacian has had time to refuse him before he is already in the queen's lap. The image of becoming-visible at the moment of supplication is one the poem will return to: at Eumaeus's hut in book 16 (the dog Argus knows him before the men do); at the recognition by Eurycleia in book 19 (the scar makes him visible to her alone); at the recognition by Penelope in book 23 (the bed makes him visible to her). The Odyssey's hero is always partly invisible, becoming visible to one witness at a time.

The catalogue of the palace as Phaeacian self-portrait

The catalogue of Alcinous's house is also a Phaeacian self-portrait. They are a maritime people who have left war behind — their ships sail by thought (like a bird), their orchards have abolished the seasons, their gods walk among them face to face like neighbours. They are not exactly fairyland but they are at the edge of it. Nausithous, Alcinous's father, moved them from Hypereia to Scheria to escape the Cyclopes; they are a colony, a deliberate withdrawal from the world of violence. This is structurally crucial: the people who give Ulysses passage home are the people who have given themselves passage out of the heroic age. When they put him aboard a ship in book 13 and lay him down sleeping, the ship sails him in one night to Ithaca — and Poseidon punishes them by turning the returning ship to stone within sight of their own harbour. The Phaeacians' last gift to the Odyssey is to sail Ulysses home; their reward is to be exiled from the sea forever. The utopia is closed behind him as he sleeps on the Ithacan shore.

The first version of the wanderings

Ulysses's reply to Arete is the first telling of the wanderings — a compressed seven-year summary that omits everything except the start (Calypso's reception of him after the loss of his ship) and the end (the raft, the storm, the rocks, the river, the leaves, Nausicaa). The full version waits till books 9–12 at Alcinous's feast. This shorter telling does two structural jobs: it gives Arete and Alcinous (and the reader) just enough to make Ulysses's claim plausible, and it sets up the longer telling as performance rather than information. The poem's most famous narrative — Polyphemus, Circe, Hades, the Sirens, Scylla, the Cattle — is a song he sings to a court that has already taken him in. The information is already established; what remains is the music.

Butler's prose against the catalogue

Butler is at his very best in this book. The catalogue of the palace is meant to be enjoyed; flat clean prose registers the gold and bronze and the orchards without elevating them into bombast. He went on and on saying nothing, brooding over what he had seen is the kind of line Butler's Odyssey does well. Pope's couplets force the wonder into rhyme; Lattimore's hexameters add weight; Wilson's pentameter makes it modern. Butler's prose lets you walk through the rooms.

What to watch for

• Arete's recognition of her own weaving on Ulysses's back — the first instance of the poem's recognition-by-token logic that will culminate at the bed of olive.
• The Phaeacians as a one-book utopia: introduced, perfected, dismissed; their ships will be turned to stone within sight of home in book 13.
• The marriage offer from Alcinous — the third refused marriage in three books (Calypso, Nausicaa, here a formal political offer); Ulysses says nothing, lets it pass.
• The bed in the gatehouse — the first proper bed Ulysses has slept in since Calypso; the next one will be the bed of olive at home.
• Mercury (Hermes) as the god of the evening libation — the same Hermes who in book 5 carried Jove's order to Calypso is here being toasted as the god of the closing-day cup.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0057 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The catalogue of Alcinous's palace is the Odyssey's positive answer to the catalogue of Achilles's shield in Iliad 18: where the shield depicts the whole human world in concentric rings (the city at peace and the city at war, the wedding and the murder trial, the ploughing and the harvest, the dance), the Phaeacian palace depicts the city-at-peace as if it had succeeded in shutting the city-at-war out. The orchard where every season ripens at once is the Iliadic shield-image of the harvest, set free of time. Hephaestus the maker of the shield in Iliad 18 is Hephaestus again here as the maker of the immortal mastiffs; the same divine craftsman, the same fantastic competence, redirected from war to peace. The supplication of Arete reaches back to the supplications of the Iliad — Thetis at the knees of Zeus in Iliad 1, Priam at the knees of Achilles in Iliad 24 — and rhymes structurally with both: a vulnerable petitioner at the knees of a powerful figure, the request honoured. Echeneus's intervention rhymes with Nestor's in the Iliadic assemblies: the elder who reminds the king of decorum. And Alcinous's boast that the Phaeacian ships sailed Rhadamanthus to Euboea in a day reaches back into pre-Trojan myth — Rhadamanthus is the just-judge brother of Minos, a hero of the generation before the Trojan War, and his name positions the Phaeacians as carriers of an older Aegean justice the war-poems no longer remember.

Forward echoes

• Arete the queen is the model the poem holds up against Penelope; books 17–23 will repeatedly test Penelope as managing the household, recognising the token, accepting the stranger — exactly the things Arete does in this single book.
• The Phaeacian utopia is closed in book 13: the same ships that take Ulysses home are turned to stone by Poseidon within sight of Scheria, the people exiled from the sea, the utopia sealed. The Phaeacians exist only as the conduit by which Ulysses gets home.
• The bed in the gatehouse is the first bed Ulysses has slept in since Calypso; the next, in book 23, is the bed of olive at Ithaca. The poem keeps account.
• The catalogue of the palace is the model for the most famous catalogue in Roman epic: the description of Latinus's palace in Aeneid 7 — the carved cedar atrium, the trophies, the ancestral statues, the painted ceilings. Virgil read book 7 of the Odyssey carefully when designing his own Italian royal house.
• The marriage offer from Alcinous is the third in a sequence (Calypso, Nausicaa, Alcinous's daughter) that Ulysses refuses by silence rather than speech. In Aeneid 4 Aeneas will face the same kind of offer from Dido and accept it for a season; Aeneas's failure to do what Ulysses does is the moral hinge of the Aeneid's first half.
• The compressed first-version of the wanderings that Ulysses tells Arete is the model for every later "compressed prequel" in epic and novel: the way a hero tells his story in shorthand before being asked for the long version. Aeneas does it twice in the Aeneid (the compressed version to Venus in Aeneid 1, the full version to Dido in Aeneid 2–3); Coleridge's Mariner does it on the wedding-guest's doorstep; Marlow does it on the deck of the Nellie.
• The supplication at the queen's knees is the model for every later supplication-of-the-queen scene: Aeneas at Dido's court in Aeneid 1, Jason at the court of Aietes in Apollonius, every fairy-tale wanderer at every fairy-tale palace.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0057 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; walks invisible through the town, supplicates Arete, tells the first compressed version of his wanderings, sleeps in a real bed at last
• Athena — "Minerva"; wraps him in the mist, takes the form of a small girl with a pitcher, briefs him on Arete's lineage, departs for Marathon and Athens
• Alcinous — king of the Phaeacians; raises Ulysses from the hearth, sets him in Laodamas's chair, swears the marriage offer, promises the escort home
• Nausicaa — off-stage at the palace; gently reproached by her father for not bringing the stranger in directly; defended by Ulysses

Mentioned / off-stage

• Poseidon — "Neptune"; named as the Phaeacian patron deity and as the ancestor of the royal line through Nausithous
• Zeus — "Jove"; named as protector of suppliants; the libation god; sworn by in Alcinous's marriage oath
• Hermes — "Mercury"; the god of the closing-day libation in the Phaeacian hall
• Apollo — sworn by in Alcinous's oath
• Hephaestus — "Vulcan"; named as the maker of the immortal gold-and-silver mastiffs at the threshold
• Calypso — named in Ulysses's narrative; daughter of Atlas; the seven-year captivity

Non-cast named figures: Arete (queen of the Phaeacians, niece and wife of Alcinous, descended from Rhexenor and Nausithous); Echeneus (the elder who breaks the silence after the supplication); Pontonous (the wine-mixer); Laodamas (Alcinous's favourite son, whose seat Ulysses takes); Eurymedusa (Nausicaa's old nurse from Apeira); Rhexenor (Arete's father); Nausithous (Alcinous's father, who led the Phaeacians from Hypereia to Scheria); Rhadamanthus the yellow-haired and Tityus son of Earth (named in Alcinous's boast about the speed of Phaeacian ships); Atlas (named as Calypso's father).

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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.