Odyssey, Book 11 — The Nekyia: Ulysses in the Underworld (Apologoi continuing; the journey to the edge of Ocean and to the house of Hades, in the country of the Cimmerians)

The North Wind Circe sent carries the ship all day to the world's end. They beach where Circe directed: the country of the Cimmerians, who live in mist and cloud, the sun never shines on them, neither when he climbs the sky nor when he turns again, but a baleful night is spread over them always. Ulysses takes the black ram and ewe; Perimedes and Eurylochus help. At the rock where Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus run together into Acheron he digs the trench a cubit each way, pours the libations (honey-milk, sweet wine, water), sprinkles white barley, prays to the powerless heads of the dead, and promises a barren heifer on his return to Ithaca and a black sheep apart for Teiresias. He cuts the throats of the ram and ewe with their heads turned toward Erebus; the dark blood runs into the trench; he and his men stand back. The shades come up out of Erebus, brides and youths and old men weary with suffering and tender maidens whose grief was new on them, and many wounded by bronze spears with the gore still on their armour, a great crowd of them clamouring round the trench with the strange wailing of the dead, and a green fear took hold of me. Ulysses draws his sword and forbids them the blood until Teiresias has drunk.

The first ghost is Elpenor — not yet buried under the earth, for we had left his body unwept and unburied in Circe's hall, the press of work being on us. Elpenor begs in the same tone he used in life: when you come back to Aeaea, do not leave me unburied and uncursed — burn me in my armour, raise a mound on the grey sea-shore for an unhappy man, and on the mound plant the oar I rowed with my comrades. Ulysses promises.

Then comes Anticleia his mother, whom I had left alive when I went to Troy. Ulysses weeps but does not let her drink. Teiresias of Thebes approaches with the golden sceptre in his hand, recognises him, drinks. His prophecy: Poseidon will hold his anger against you for the Cyclops; you may yet reach home, in pain, if you and your crew restrain themselves at the island of Thrinacia and do not lay hands on the cattle and sheep of the Sun, who sees and hears all things. If you spare them, you will reach Ithaca, in evil case, late, alone, in a strange ship — and at home you will find proud men devouring your house and wooing your wife. Kill them, by stealth or in the open. Then take a fitted oar and walk inland, until you come to a people who know nothing of the sea, who do not salt their food, who have never seen a red-cheeked ship or an oar — when a wayfarer meets you and says you have a winnowing-fan on your shoulder, plant the oar in the earth and offer Poseidon a ram, a bull, and a boar. Then go home, sacrifice to all the gods in turn, and death itself will come to you out of the sea, gently, easily, when you are full of years and your people round you in peace. Ulysses asks one thing: my mother sits silent by, and does not know me. Teiresias: whichever of the shades you allow to drink will speak truth to you; the others you turn back. The seer goes.

Ulysses lets Anticleia drink. She knows him at once: my son, how have you come, alive, to this place where the dead are? He answers, then asks her: how did you die, and what of my father, my wife, my son? Anticleia: Telemachus holds the courts in peace, but the lands of his father are eaten away by the suitors; Penelope sits weeping nights and days in the upper chamber and waits; old Laertes lives apart on the farm, sleeping on leaves like a slave by the hearth, refusing to come into the town. As for me — no illness, no slow weakness took me from the light. It was only my longing for you, glorious Ulysses, my care for you, that took the honey-sweet life from me. He reaches three times to embrace her; three times she flits from his arms like a shadow or like a dream. Why, Mother? This is the way of mortals when they die. The sinews no longer hold the flesh and bones together; the strong fire of the funeral pyre destroys these, and the soul flies away like a dream. Go back into the light — and tell your wife what you have seen here.

Persephone then sends up the famous women — the catalogue of heroines, the female mirror of Iliad 2's catalogue of ships. Tyro who bore Pelias and Neleus to Poseidon disguised as the river Enipeus, with a great dark wave arched over the lovers like a mountain. Antiope mother of Amphion and Zethus the builders of Thebes. Alcmene mother of Heracles by Zeus. Megara wife of Heracles. Epicaste (Jocasta) mother and wife of Oedipus, who hanged herself in the high chamber when the gods made all known. Chloris youngest daughter of Amphion of Orchomenus, married to Neleus, who bore him Nestor and Chromius and the beautiful Pero. Leda wife of Tyndareus, mother of Castor the breaker of horses and Polydeuces the boxer, who alive and dead by turns share immortality under the earth. Iphimedeia who bore to Poseidon the two great earth-storming sons Otus and Ephialtes, nine fathoms tall at nine years old, who would have piled Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa to climb to heaven, killed by Apollo before their beards came in. Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne the daughter of Minos whom Theseus would have brought to Athens but Artemis killed her in Dia by Dionysus's testimony. Maera, Clymene, Eriphyle who took gold to sell her own husband. Ulysses cuts the catalogue off: the night is short and I cannot tell all the names of the wives and daughters I saw.

He pauses. The Phaeacian hall is silent under the spell of the tale. Arete speaks first: what do you think of him, my friends? he is tall and well-favoured and his mind is straight; he is my guest, but yours too — let us not send him away with light gifts. Echeneus the elder seconds her. Alcinous declares the gifts will be increased. Ulysses politely accepts and begs to continue.

The second wave of ghosts is the great Greek dead from Troy. Agamemnon comes with the men murdered with him at Aegisthus's feast. He drinks, weeps to see Ulysses living, and tells the full story of his death — he killed me at the feast as you would kill an ox at the manger, my comrades were slaughtered around me like white-tusked swine for some great man's wedding, and the cry of my wife's daughter Cassandra rose above the table as Clytemnestra knifed her at my side, and I could not even raise my hand to close my own eyes. He warns Ulysses: never trust a woman wholly, even your own wife; tell her what serves you and keep the rest dark. Then he praises Penelope: but yours is not such a wife as mine. The daughter of Icarius is a wise one. And asks of his son Orestes: have you seen him? Ulysses has no news.

Achilles comes with Patroclus, Antilochus, and Ajax. Son of Laertes — what greater deed could you do than this, to come living among the dead? Ulysses answers as he believes Achilles will want: no man has ever been more blessed than you — adored in life among the Argives, honoured here as a prince among the dead. Achilles replies with the most-quoted line in the Odyssey: do not put a fair face on death for me, Ulysses. I would rather be a hireling labouring in a poor man's field, a man with no patrimony, than be lord of all the wasted dead. He asks for news of his father Peleus and his son Neoptolemus. Ulysses says nothing of Peleus (he does not know) but tells the truth about Neoptolemus: he came late from Scyros after your death, he sat in the council like a chief of men, and at Troy he never wept and never trembled in his limbs; he was the only one who stood quiet inside the Horse, and at the sack he came away unwounded. Achilles, hearing his son's renown, strides off across the meadow of asphodel taking great steps and rejoicing.

Ajax son of Telamon stands apart, angry at me for the judgement of Achilles's arms. Ulysses speaks to him gently: Ajax, even in death, can you not forget? The Argives mourn you as much as Achilles. Zeus alone is to blame; he had ill-will against the Greek army. Ajax says nothing. He turns and walks off to Erebus with the other dead. Ulysses would have made him answer, but the rest of the dead were on him.

Beyond the meadow Ulysses sees the eternal scenes of Hades. Minos son of Zeus sits on his throne with the golden sceptre, judging the cases of the dead who plead around him. Orion herds the ghosts of the beasts he killed across the meadow with the unbreakable bronze club. Tityus stretched over nine acres of ground, two vultures tearing at his liver for ever for his offence to Leto. Tantalus standing in a pool that recedes whenever he stoops to drink, under fruit-trees whose branches the wind lifts away when he reaches up. Sisyphus shouldering the great stone up the slope to the brow — and at the very top the shameless thing rolls back down again, and he goes after it sweating, dust over his head.

He sees Heracles — that is, the phantom of Heracles, for Heracles himself feasts among the gods with lovely Hebe his wife. The ghost is like dark night, the bow strung and the arrow on the string, the dread baldric across his chest worked in gold with bears and boars and lions, and battles and slaughters and the murders of men. The shades scream round him like terrified birds. He knows Ulysses on sight: unhappy man, are you too living the life I lived, while I lived above ground? I was Zeus's son and I went through harder labours than a man should. Once the brute Eurystheus sent me down here for the dog Cerberus, thinking he could not find anything harder — but Hermes and grey-eyed Athena were my guides, and I got the dog up and out. He goes back into the house of Hades.

Ulysses would have stayed to see Theseus and Pirithous and the other great dead. But the shades come round him in their multitudes shrieking, and a green fear takes him that Persephone will send up the Gorgon's head out of Hades. He runs to the ship, orders his men aboard, casts off the cable. The current of Ocean carries them at first; then a fair wind comes up behind them.

Analysis

Chapter 0061 — Analysis

The first katabasis in Western literature

Book 11 is the foundational descent-to-the-dead in Western poetry. Every later journey to the underworld — Aeneid 6, Dante's Inferno, every shamanic-pastoral underworld scene in the Greek tragedians, Milton's hellscape, Pound's Cantos I (which begins with a direct translation of this book), Heaney's Station Island — flows from this single book of the Odyssey. The architecture is precise. Ulysses does not walk through Hades like Aeneas or Dante. He stands at the edge of Ocean, digs a trench, sacrifices, and waits for the shades to come up to him. The descent is a frontier-meeting, not a tour. Virgil will change the structure in Aeneid 6 (Aeneas walks in, guided by the Sibyl, through specific landscapes); Dante will change it more (the Commedia's entire cosmography); but the Odyssey establishes the basic elements all later katabaseis honour: the prophet who must drink before he can speak, the unburied friend who asks for rites, the unrecognised mother who explains the physics of death, the catalogue of the great dead, the moment of fear that ends the visit.

The three structural arcs

The Nekyia has a three-part structure: prophecy, mothers, heroes. Prophecy is Teiresias — the only seer in Greek literature whose mind remains intact in death, the source of the directions home and the strange far-prophecy of the inland oar. Mothers is Anticleia and the catalogue of heroines — the female dead, organised genealogically as the mothers of the Greek heroic age. Heroes is the second wave: Agamemnon (the failed nostos), Achilles (the kleos that does not console), Ajax (the wound that survives death), and finally Heracles (the labourer who escaped). Each section answers a question Ulysses is silently asking. From Teiresias he learns how to get home and what he will find there. From Anticleia and the heroines he learns the cost of his absence and the genealogy he belongs to. From the male dead he learns what waits for him if he succeeds.

Achilles's line

The most-quoted line in the Odyssey is Achilles's. I would rather be a hireling labouring in a poor man's field, with no patrimony of my own, than be lord of all the wasted dead. The line is one of the most theologically severe in Greek literature: the Iliadic ethic — kleos aphthiton, undying fame, the deal Achilles made in Iliad 9 and 18 — is here renounced by Achilles himself in death. The Odyssey is making a polemical claim against the Iliad. Nostos (return) is worth more than kleos (fame). The man who chose the short glorious life in the Iliad now wishes he had chosen what Ulysses chose. The Odyssey's whole moral structure is briefly visible in this single speech: the poem of return is judging the poem of death and finding it wanting. Achilles's later striding off across the asphodel meadow rejoicing at the news of his son Neoptolemus's renown is the Iliadic ethic's last small victory — he is not, in fact, wholly above caring about kleos; he is moved by his son's reputation. The Odyssey allows him both moves.

Teiresias's prophecy and the inland oar

Teiresias's prophecy is the structural blueprint of everything left in the poem. The Cattle of the Sun (book 12), the suitor-slaughter (book 22), the journey-after-the-poem (the inland oar prophecy) — all three are laid out here in advance. The inland oar is the most haunting detail in the prophecy and the one the poem will not narrate. Ulysses must walk inland with an oar across his shoulder until a stranger calls it a winnowing-fan; there he must plant the oar in the earth and sacrifice to Poseidon. Only then will he be reconciled with the sea-god, and only then will death come for him gently, easily, out of the sea, when he is full of years. The implication is that nostos is not enough — Ulysses must take the symbol of seafaring inland to a land that has never seen it, and only by transplanting it into a non-sea world is he reconciled with the god of the sea. The poem promises and withholds the scene; we never see the oar planted. Dante will pick this prophecy up in Inferno 26 and invert it — his Ulysses sails past the inland reconciliation, refuses the oar-on-the-shoulder, drives his ship into the unknown ocean, and is drowned. The Dantean Ulysses dies because he ignored Teiresias.

Anticleia and the embrace that fails

The three failed embraces of Anticleia are one of the most-imitated moments in literature. The mother flits from the son's arms like a shadow or like a dream. Virgil will rewrite this scene three times: Aeneas trying to embrace Creusa in Aeneid 2 (his dead wife), Aeneas trying to embrace Anchises in Aeneid 6 (his dead father), and the same image with the soul-as-dream simile carried over almost word for word. The Odyssey here also tells us the physics of death: the sinews no longer hold the bones together; the funeral pyre destroys the body; the soul flits away like a dream. This is the earliest sustained account in Greek literature of what happens to the dead, and it is given to a mother explaining herself to a son.

The catalogue of heroines as female canon

The catalogue of heroines is the female counterpart to the catalogue of ships in Iliad 2. Where the Iliad catalogues armies, the Odyssey catalogues mothers. The fifteen heroines named (Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Megara, Epicaste/Jocasta, Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, Eriphyle, and others) are the genealogical foundation of the heroic age: they are the mothers of Pelias, Neleus, Nestor, Amphion, Zethus, Heracles, Castor, Pollux, the great Otus and Ephialtes, and so on. This is the Odyssey's quietest but most consequential claim: the heroic age was made by women. The catalogue would later be expanded as the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (a lost work). It is also the precise model for Aeneas's pageant of future Roman heroes (Aeneid 6.756–886) and Virgil's whole Roman canon.

The intermission as compositional signature

The pause in the middle of book 11, where Ulysses stops the narrative and the Phaeacian court speaks, is the poem's most explicit moment of meta-narrative. Arete praises him; Echeneus agrees; Alcinous offers more gifts and asks for more story. The "intermission" formally marks the Apologoi as performance — Ulysses is conscious he is telling a tale to an audience, and the audience is responding. The device of the audience that listens and is moved to action is the model for every later Scheherazade structure: the king who must keep listening; the tale that wins life by holding attention.

Butler's prose in the Nekyia

Butler's plain prose handles the Nekyia with surprising tact. Achilles's great speech (I would rather be a hireling than king of the dead) is rendered cleanly and without elevation; the line lands. Anticleia's explanation of the soul (the strong fire destroys these and the soul flies like a dream) does not strain. Pope's couplets push the speeches into oratorical music; Lattimore's hexameters give them weight; Wilson modernises with surprising directness. Butler's flat register is closer to translation-as-information; it works here because the content is grief and Butler does not embellish it.

What to watch for

• Teiresias's prophecy as the poem's blueprint — every later episode points back here.
• The inland oar — the prophecy the poem promises and refuses to narrate; Dante's Inferno 26 will invert this absence.
• Achilles's renunciation of the Iliadic ethic — the Odyssey judging its predecessor and finding for nostos.
• The three failed embraces of Anticleia — the foundational image of grief-as-failure-to-touch, rewritten by Virgil three times.
• The catalogue of heroines as the female version of the Iliad's catalogue of ships — heroic age as genealogy of mothers.
• The intermission with Arete and Alcinous — the poem visible to itself as performance.
• The closing fear of the Gorgon's head — the precise moment Persephone's threshold becomes intolerable.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0061 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The Nekyia gathers the entire cycle's dead into one book. Agamemnon's narration of his murder is the third explicit telling of the Aegisthus paradigm (after Athena and Nestor and Proteus's accounts in books 1, 3, 4); but here for the first time the murdered man himself speaks, and the detail of Cassandra cut down beside him is given with a clarity Aeschylus's Agamemnon will later make canonical. Achilles's catechism of Ulysses about his son Neoptolemus reaches forward into Posthomerica 7 (where Neoptolemus is fetched from Scyros, exactly as Ulysses here says he was), Posthomerica 13 (where Neoptolemus kills Priam at the altar), and Aeneid 2 (where Aeneas's narration of the same Priam-killing crystallises the boy's brutality). The line I never saw him turn pale or weep inside the Horse is the foundational note for everything later said about Neoptolemus. Ajax's silent turning-away has its prequel in Posthomerica 5 (the judgement of arms, Ulysses's victory, Ajax's madness and suicide). The Nekyia is the place where the Iliad's and the Posthomerica's dead come back to speak. The catalogue of heroines is the Odyssey's response to the Iliad's catalogue of ships (Iliad 2): warriors there, mothers here, the same poetic technology turned to opposite material.

The first speaker, Elpenor, picks up his death from Odyssey 10 (his fall from Circe's roof) and binds the two books together; his burial in book 12 will close the loop.

Forward echoes

• Teiresias's prophecy is the operating manual for the rest of the Odyssey. The Thrinacian cattle (book 12), the suitor-slaughter (book 22), and the inland oar (never narrated, promised after the poem ends) are all laid out here.
• The Aeneid's book 6 is the most thoroughgoing imitation of the Nekyia in Western literature. The trench-and-libation are replaced with the Golden Bough; the prophecy by Teiresias is replaced by Anchises's pageant of Roman heroes; Anticleia's failed embrace is rewritten as Aeneas's failed embraces of Creusa (Aeneid 2), of Anchises (Aeneid 6.700–702), with the soul-as-dream simile carried verbatim. The Sibyl-as-guide is added; the structure is otherwise Odyssean.
• Dante's Commedia is the largest single Western development of this book; Inferno 26 is Dante's direct response to the inland-oar prophecy — his Ulysses ignores it, sails past the Pillars of Hercules into the unknown ocean, and is drowned for the impiety.
• Pound's Cantos I begins with a direct translation of the opening of Odyssey 11 — And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea — based on Andreas Divus's 1538 Latin Odyssey. Pound makes the Nekyia the foundation of the modernist long poem.
• Joyce's Ulysses Episode 6 ("Hades") is the funeral of Paddy Dignam: Bloom in the carriage to Glasnevin cemetery, the modern Cimmeria, with the dead in their plots speaking only by absence; an Odyssey-11 transposed to a Dublin morning.
• Achilles's renunciation (better a hireling above than king of the dead) is the single line most quoted in classical reception. It is the moment the Odyssey publicly judges the Iliad. The line shapes Stoic and Epicurean thinking about death; Lucretius writes against the Achillean despair-of-death in De Rerum Natura 3.
• The catalogue of heroines is expanded into the lost Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, into Ovid's Heroides, into the medieval Legends of Good Women tradition (Chaucer), into Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris.
• Heracles's phantom — the body in Hades, the true self with the gods — is the first explicit account in Greek literature of a divided self that survives death; the doctrine is taken up by mystery-religion, by Pythagorean and Platonic immortality, and later by Christian distinctions between body and soul.
• The Aegisthus paradigm completes here — three tellings in the Telemachy, one final telling from the victim's own mouth. The poem closes the loop on this exemplum just before turning to its own murder-house climax.
• The Sirens in the next book and the suitors in book 22 will both pick up the Nekyia's question — what is worth dying for — and answer in opposite directions: the Sirens offer death as song, the suitors are killed for refusing to know death is real.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0061 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; the narrator; digs the trench, controls the blood with the sword, meets shade after shade, returns to the ship in fear
• Tiresias — the blind Theban seer whose mind alone is intact in death; gives the master-prophecy of the cattle of the sun, the suitors, and the inland oar
• Agamemnon — meets Ulysses in the Underworld; tells the full account of his murder by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus; warns against trusting wives; asks for news of Orestes
• Achilles — meets Ulysses with Patroclus and Antilochus; speaks the great renunciation (better a hireling above than king of the dead); strides off rejoicing at news of Neoptolemus
• Ajax Greater — stands apart in unbroken anger at the loss of Achilles's arms; will not speak; turns and goes to Erebus
• Patroclus — silent companion of Achilles among the dead
• Antilochus — silent companion of Achilles among the dead

Mentioned / off-stage

• Neoptolemus — Ulysses's report to Achilles: came late from Scyros, sat in council, never wept inside the Horse, came away from Troy unwounded
• Clytemnestra — named by Agamemnon as the killer; the third version of the Aegisthus paradigm
• Cassandra — named: cut down by Clytemnestra beside Agamemnon at the murder-feast
• Penelope — Anticleia's report: weeping in the upper chamber, faithful; Agamemnon's praise: a wise wife, unlike his own
• Telemachus — Anticleia's report: holds the courts; the estates are wasted by the suitors
• Circe — the wind she sent, the ritual she taught, the journey she enabled
• Poseidon — Teiresias's prophecy: still angry for the Cyclops; the inland oar and ram-bull-boar at last reconcile him
• Zeus — Minos his son sits in judgement; the Dioscuri are his sons by Leda
• Apollo — kills Otus and Ephialtes before they could climb to heaven
• Hermes — named by Heracles as his guide in the labour of fetching Cerberus
• Athena — named alongside Hermes as Heracles's other guide
• Laertes — Anticleia's report: living apart on the farm, sleeping by the hearth on leaves like a slave, refusing to come into town

Non-cast named figures: Elpenor (first ghost, requests burial; the rite to be done in book 12); Anticleia (Ulysses's mother, daughter of Autolycus, dead of grief); Perimedes and Eurylochus (held the ram and ewe at the trench); Persephone / Proserpine (queen of the dead, dispatches the shades); the Cimmerians (the dark-dwelling people at the edge of Ocean); Pyriphlegethon, Cocytus, Acheron (the rivers); the catalogue of heroines (Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Megara, Epicaste/Jocasta, Chloris, Pero, Leda, Iphimedeia, Otus, Ephialtes, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene, Eriphyle, with their husbands and divine lovers); Minos son of Zeus (the judge); Orion (the hunter with the unbreakable bronze club); Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus (the great sinners); Heracles (the phantom only, his true self with the gods); Cerberus (named); Eurystheus (named, the master who set the labours); Hebe (the wife of the immortal Heracles); Theseus and Pirithous (the unseen ones Ulysses would have stayed to see).

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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.