(Day 34 of the poem's main action; Ulysses leaves Scheria; lands sleeping in the harbour of Phorcys on Ithaca; the second half of the poem begins)

The Apologoi end at the close of book 12 and the Phaeacian hall sits silent. Alcinous resumes: now that our guest has heard our songs and told us his story, let us each of us add a great tripod and a cauldron to the gifts already given, and reimburse ourselves from the people, for one man should not be asked to pay too much. The proposal is acclaimed. They retire for the night.

At dawn the great pieces are brought down to the ship and stowed deep under the rowing-benches by Alcinous himself, so that no man kicking them with his foot in the sea-passage should do them harm. The king sacrifices an ox to Jove. Demodocus plays through the daylight meal while Ulysses watches the sun a hundred times, longing for it to set. He turns at last to the company and gives the speech of farewell: Alcinous, glory of your people, send me away with a libation, you have done all that I could wish. May I find at home a faithful wife and my friends in peace. Pontonous fills the cups; the company pours to Jove; Ulysses gives the cup to Arete: farewell, queen, be happy in your house with your children and your king. Outside the gate the herald walks ahead with bread and wine; a maid carries fresh clothes; the crew take their places.

The Phaeacian ship is the swiftest in the poem. It runs faster than the falcon, the swiftest of all birds, runs over the sea; Ulysses lies down on a rug in the stern and sleeps the sweetest sleep, most like to death, of his whole wandering. By the time the morning-star rises in the east the ship has crossed all the western sea and reaches Ithaca. The crew bring her into the harbour of Phorcys (the Old Man of the Sea), a deep cove ringed by two cliff-headlands with a long olive-tree at its head and beside it the cave of the Naiads — a cave with two doors, one for mortals to the north, one for gods to the south, with stone wine-mixing-bowls and stone looms inside where the nymphs weave purple cloth. They do not wake him. They lift him sleeping in his rug and lay him down on the sand under the olive-tree, pile his gifts beside him out of the road, and put back to sea without speaking.

Neptune watches them from afar and is enraged. He flies to Jove on Olympus: Father Jove, no god will respect me any longer if mortals so insult me. I told this Ulysses he should suffer, and now the Phaeacians sail him home in luxury and full of gifts. Jove answers: take satisfaction however you wish; turn the returning Phaeacian ship to stone within sight of its city, and pile a mountain over their harbour so they may give up their convoy-trade. Neptune flies to Scheria, meets the ship just as it nears port, strikes it with his open palm — and the ship became a rock, rooted to the sea-floor with all the men on board, in the very mouth of the harbour their fathers had built. The Phaeacians on the shore see it and freeze. Alcinous remembers his father's old prophecy — Neptune would one day strike a ship of ours and pile a mountain on our city, because we ferry men freely across the sea — and orders twelve bulls sacrificed at once to placate the god and an end to all further convoy-work. (The poem does not say whether the mountain ever came.)

On the Ithacan beach Ulysses wakes — and does not know where he is. Athena has wrapped his country in a thick mist so that no neighbour shall see him before the plan is in place; the mist also hides the landscape from Ulysses himself. He looks round at the strange shore, the strange harbour, the strange olive — and despairs. Alas — what land is this and what people? Have these Phaeacians cheated me after all? They swore they would land me at Ithaca and instead they have left me on a foreign coast. May Jove punish them — but at least they have not stolen my gifts. He counts the tripods and cauldrons and chests; all present. He paces the beach in misery.

A young man comes along the strand, delicately formed like the son of a king but dressed as a young shepherd, with a fine double-folded cloak and sandals and a javelin in his hand. Ulysses runs to him gladly. Friend, the first man I meet here — tell me without scorn, where am I? what is this land? The shepherd answers, smiling: stranger, you must come from very far if you do not know this island. The name of Ithaca is known even at Troy. It is rough country, no good for chariots, but rich in grain and wine and pasture, and the cold rains never fail.

Ulysses smiles inwardly — home — and proceeds to lie about himself with a virtuoso freshness, because his nature was always to control his tongue first. He pretends to be a Cretan exile: he had killed a son of Idomeneus called Orsilochus who tried to rob me of my Trojan spoils; he ambushed him at night, killed him with the spear; took ship with Phoenicians; was supposed to be set down at Pylos or Elis but the wind brought the ship here; the Phoenicians put him ashore for nothing and sailed off to Sidon. And here I am with my goods, knowing nobody.

The shepherd laughs and changes. The bright form of Athena rises out of the dressed-up youth, fair and tall and accomplished in fine handiwork, smiling broadly. She lays her hand on Ulysses's wrist. He must be a clever rogue who can outmatch you in deceits. Even here, on your own ground, with me your guide, you cannot drop the trick — but enough; this is how we two understand each other, you the first of mortals in cunning, I the first of the gods in cunning. Did you not know I was beside you all this while? And she tells him: this is indeed Ithaca; you are home; but it is not yet time to show yourself.

Ulysses, half disbelieving, half delighted, asks her to prove the place. She blows away the mist. Mount Neritus stands above the harbour as he remembers it; the cave of the nymphs opens at the end of the bay; the olive bends as it always bent. He falls on the earth and kisses it, and prays aloud to the Naiads — daughters of Jove, I thought I should never see you again; receive my prayers now, for I will bring you the old offerings when I am king in my house once more.

They carry the gifts up into the cave together — gold, bronze, cloth — Athena lifting some, Ulysses some — and roll a stone across the door. Then they sit down under the olive to plan. Athena: think how you will lay hands on the shameless men who have lorded it in your house for these three years, wasting your goods and courting your wife. She has put them off with cunning of her own; her promises mean nothing; she has fooled them all and waited for you. But now we must move. Ulysses: I would have died as Agamemnon died, in my own hall, without your help. Tell me how to fight. Stand by me as you did at Troy, and I will fight against three hundred. She answers: I will. But first — I must make you so that no one knows you.

She touches him with her wand. The bright-curled brown hair fades; the smooth firm skin wrinkles; the bright eyes go dim and bleared with age; every limb shrinks, the back stoops. She throws over him the rags of a dirty beggar — a torn smoke-stained tunic, a ragged deer-skin, a battered staff, a wallet of skin slung from a frayed leather strap. He is the old vagabond. Go now to your faithful swineherd Eumaeus on the high pasture above the harbour. He has been loyal to you and to your son and to Penelope all these years. Wait there. I go to fetch Telemachus from Sparta — he is at Menelaus's house and the suitors lie in wait in the strait between Same and Ithaca to kill him on his return. Ulysses: why did you not tell him I was alive, when you yourself knew? She: do not worry for him; I am with him as I have been with you; I sent him on this journey to win his own fame; he will come home, and the suitors who plan against him will go down before him. She lifts off into the air toward Sparta. Ulysses takes the staff and the wallet and turns inland toward the high pastures and Eumaeus's hut.

Analysis

Chapter 0063 — Analysis

The hinge of the poem

Book 13 is the hinge. Twelve books of wandering and twelve more of homecoming. The book itself is the moment of pivot: it begins at the Phaeacian court at the end of the Apologoi and ends on Ithaca with Ulysses disguised as a beggar walking up to Eumaeus's hut. Halfway through it the Phaeacian utopia is closed forever — the ship turned to stone, the convoy-trade ended, Scheria sealed against the world. Halfway through it Ulysses arrives home and cannot for the first ten minutes recognise where he is. The poem's whole second half is the slow re-recognition of home, undertaken first by the hero who cannot see his own island for the mist, then by the dog who knows him at twenty paces (book 17), the nurse who knows him by the scar (book 19), and finally the wife who knows him by the bed (book 23). The slow-recognition pattern of the back half is established in this book by Ulysses's own slow-recognition of his country.

The death of the Phaeacians

The Phaeacian utopia is given one book to live (book 6, 7, 8) and is killed off in book 13 with deliberate dispatch. The same ship that carries Ulysses home is turned to stone by Poseidon within sight of its own harbour; the same king who promised escorts must now sacrifice twelve bulls and end the convoy-trade for ever. The Odyssey's most generous and pacific society is exiled from the sea as the price of the hero's homecoming. The poem registers this as a kind of theological cost-accounting: Ulysses's nostos is purchased at the price of Scheria's thalassocracy. The Phaeacians never appear again in Western literature except as Phaeacia — a sealed and inaccessible island that has been there always. Some readers (Schliemann among them) thought it was Corfu; some thought it Trapani in Sicily (Butler in The Authoress of the Odyssey); the poem will not say.

Athena's intervention and the first mutual scene

Book 13 contains the longest sustained conversation between Athena and Ulysses in the poem, and it is the first time the goddess has spoken to him in her own form. (She has been Mentor for Telemachus, Iphthime for Penelope, herald and shepherd for Ulysses, but never herself to him.) The scene is one of the great recognition scenes — recognition between divine patron and mortal protégé — and it is conducted as a duel of mutual fondness in the same idiom of professional cunning. Athena: he must be a clever rogue who can outmatch you in deceits — you the first of mortals in cunning, I the first of gods in cunning. Ulysses: I would have died as Agamemnon died, in my own hall, without your help. Stand by me as you stood at Troy. The scene shows two figures who know each other. Athena does not condescend; Ulysses does not grovel. They speak as long-time collaborators returning to a job they began together a long time ago. The Iliad has nothing quite like this; the Odyssey establishes a model of divine-mortal partnership that Virgil will deliberately not copy (his Venus to Aeneas is always at a distance, his Apollo to Aeneas is a stranger). The intimacy is Odyssean.

The Cretan lie

Ulysses's first speech on Ithaca is a lie. This matters. The man who cannot help inventing a Cretan identity even to the shepherd who has just told him the name of his island is the man the poem will spend ten more books showing in disguise. The first of the so-called Cretan lies — the four false narratives Ulysses will tell on his home soil — comes at the very moment of homecoming. The Odyssey takes Ulysses's polytropos nature seriously: he does not need to lie here, he chooses to. Athena's response is amused and admiring: she diagnoses the gift as constitutional. The poem is making a moral claim that has unsettled readers since antiquity. Plato disapproved of the lying Ulysses; Dante (in Inferno 26) damned him for the false counsel of the Trojan Horse; medieval readers preferred Achilles. The Odyssey accepts its hero as he is. The lies he tells will sometimes be necessary (to Eumaeus, who needs to be tested before being trusted) and sometimes unnecessary (here, to a goddess who can see through them). They are part of what he is.

The mist and the un-recognition of Ithaca

Athena wraps Ithaca in mist when Ulysses arrives. The pretext is to keep him hidden until the plan is ready; the effect is to make him not know his own country. This is one of the strangest emotional moments in the poem. The man who has waited twenty years to see this place cannot see it when he is on it. The detail registers something true about long-deferred return: arrivals are rarely commensurate with their anticipations. T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding — we shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time — is one of the dozens of poems that have read this book carefully.

The disguise and the choreography of recognition

Athena's transformation of Ulysses is the precise inverse of Circe's transformation of the men in book 10. Circe stripped human shape and left the human mind intact; Athena strips the youthful body and adds extreme age, but the man underneath is the same. The motif of disguise-with-mind-intact is the engine of the rest of the poem. Recognition in the Aristotelian-poetic sense (anagnorisis) is the move that drives every subsequent book: Argus the dog (17), Eurycleia the nurse (19), Eumaeus and Philoetius (21), Telemachus (16 — already done), Penelope (23), Laertes (24). Each recognition involves a token — a scar, a chair, a tree, a bow — and each is delayed for as long as the plot can bear. The poem here in book 13 establishes the rules.

The two-doors cave of the Naiads

The cave at the harbour of Phorcys, with its two doors — one northward for men, one southward for gods — has been read since antiquity as a symbolic image of the soul's descent and return. The Neoplatonist Porphyry (3rd century CE) wrote an entire short treatise De Antro Nympharum (On the Cave of the Nymphs) reading the cave allegorically. The two doors are the two paths into and out of mortal existence; the stone looms on which the nymphs weave purple are the soul's incarnation in the body. Whether or not the Odyssey intended such an allegorical reading, the cave is plainly chosen with care: it is the place where the goods of the wandering are stored, where the line between the human and the divine is made permeable, and the place from which the hero, transformed by his goddess, walks up the hill to begin the recovery of his house.

Butler's prose at the hinge

Butler's prose handles the transition with grace. The flat register works well for the long Athena-Ulysses conversation — the speeches are direct, the affectionate banter clear, the gear-shift from goddess-mode to plan-mode handled smoothly. Where Butler's prose loses something is in the brief moment of Ulysses kissing the earth of Ithaca: hexameter would lift this; couplets would compress it. Butler's he kissed the soil is exactly right and exactly small.

What to watch for

• The Phaeacians sealed off forever — utopia closed in exchange for the hero's homecoming.
• The first sustained mutual scene of Athena and Ulysses — divine-mortal collaboration as friendship.
• The first Cretan lie — Ulysses's polytropos nature as constitutional and incurable.
• The mist over Ithaca — un-recognition as the precondition for the long, slow re-recognition of the back half.
• The disguise as inversion of Circe's transformation — body changed, mind intact.
• The two-doors cave of the Naiads — the threshold between mortal and divine, the storehouse of the gifts.
• The dispatch to Eumaeus — the choice to land the hero in the swineherd's hut before any palace.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0063 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

Book 13 closes the long arc of Poseidon's wrath that began with the Cyclops's curse in book 9. The curse said: if it is fated he must come home, let him come late, in evil case, in a strange ship, alone, to find sorrow in his house. Every term has now been satisfied — twenty years late, the crew lost, the ship the Phaeacians' not his own — and Poseidon's last gesture is not against Ulysses (whom he can no longer touch) but against the people who carried him. The Cyclops's prayer reaches a kind of theological closure in the stone-ship and the threatened mountain over Scheria. The death of the Phaeacian convoy-trade balances the death of the Polyphemic complaint.

The first Cretan lie reaches back to Helen's drugged stories at Sparta in book 4 (where she told one version of Ulysses-as-disguised-spy and Menelaus told the corrective) — Ulysses now performs the same kind of self-narrating with the same precise blend of truth and invention. The Telemachy's training in xenia (the careful negotiation between guest and host with the asking-of-name held back until after the meal) is now reactivated: Ulysses arrives on his own island as guest-stranger, and the first encounter is the formal hospitality of asking direction. The poem turns the protocols of guest-friendship inward upon the king's own house.

Athena's recognition-and-greeting scene rhymes with her appearances to Telemachus in books 1, 2, 3 (as Mentor) — but where she was always in disguise to Telemachus, she here drops the disguise to Ulysses for the first time in the poem. The recognition between goddess and hero is the long-deferred mutual moment the Telemachy's pseudo-Mentor appearances have prefigured.

Forward echoes

• The disguise as beggar is the engine of every scene from book 14 to book 22. The Iliadic-coded hero, now in rags, will negotiate his own house room by room with no weapon but his cunning and the bow Athena will reveal in book 21. The whole moral structure of the second half — recognition delayed, revenge held back, identity protected — flows from the transformation at the end of this book.
• The slow re-recognition of Ithaca is the model for every later "exile returns and cannot at first see his country" episode in Western literature. Pierre's return to Russia in War and Peace; Aeneas's halting recognitions of fragments of Troy in Aeneid 3 (the small theatre at Buthrotum, the false Xanthus); every twentieth-century novel of return from war.
• The Phaeacian utopia closed in stone is the seed Plato will harvest for Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias: an island civilisation perfect and unreachable, sealed off by divine punishment. The Phaeacian topos becomes the model for every later "lost island" of European imagination — Avalon, Atlantis, Mu.
• The cave of the Naiads with two doors has its longest after-life in Porphyry's Neoplatonic treatise De Antro Nympharum (3rd century CE) which reads the cave as the soul's descent into incarnation, a reading taken up by Renaissance Neoplatonism (Ficino), by the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists, by Yeats's A Vision.
• Athena's wand and the transformation into the beggar is the model for every later "magical disguise that hides the king" — Odysseus into beggar here, Arthur into beggar in many medieval romances, Henry V incognito among the soldiers in Shakespeare, the duke disguised as friar in Measure for Measure, the king-incognito tale across folk tradition.
• The dispatch to Eumaeus is one of the most theologically interesting choices in the poem — the king goes first not to the queen, not to the son, not to the old father, not to the palace, but to the swineherd. The whole next book is on the high pasture among the pigs. The Odyssey's investment in the loyal servant as the moral centre of the household will shape every later return-narrative and will become the foundation of Roman clientela literature, of medieval romance's "good shepherd" topos, and ultimately of the parable of the prodigal son.
• Athena's instruction to test the suitors and to wait is the model for every later "delayed revenge" plot in Western drama and prose — Hamlet's holding-back, Edmond Dantès's slow campaign in The Count of Monte Cristo, the Western-genre return of the wronged man.
• The mist Athena uses to hide the country from itself is the precise model for the divine cloud Venus uses to hide Aeneas at his approach to Carthage in Aeneid 1.411–414. Virgil's "ipsa caligine multa" rewrites Athena's mist directly.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0063 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; receives the final gifts at Scheria, sleeps the Phaeacian crossing, wakes unrecognising on Ithaca, lies to the shepherd, is recognised by Athena, hides the gifts in the cave, is transformed into the beggar
• Athena — "Minerva"; meets Ulysses as a young shepherd, is recognised in turn, lays out the plan, transforms him, departs for Sparta
• Alcinous — proposes the further tripod-and-cauldron gifts, oversees the loading, sacrifices the bull to Jove, says farewell; his last appearance, ends with the prophecy of stone ship and mountain fulfilled

Mentioned / off-stage

• Poseidon — "Neptune"; goes to Jove to complain, strikes the returning Phaeacian ship to stone, the curse of the Cyclops finally exhausted
• Zeus — "Jove"; advises Neptune on the stone-ship and the mountain; the bull at Alcinous's feast is in his honour
• Telemachus — at Sparta with Menelaus; the suitors lie in wait in the strait; Athena now goes to fetch him
• Eumaeus — named: the faithful swineherd on the high pasture, where Athena dispatches Ulysses
• Penelope — Athena names her: holding off the suitors with cunning, her promises mean nothing, she waits
• Menelaus — named: hosts Telemachus at Sparta

Non-cast named figures: Demodocus the blind bard (plays at the closing feast); Pontonous the wine-steward (pours the final libations); Arete the queen (receives the last cup); the Phaeacian crew (the swift, silent rowers who lay Ulysses on the shore); Phorcys (the Old Man of the Sea, after whom the harbour is named); the Naiad nymphs of the cave (daughters of Jove, weavers at the stone looms, receivers of Ulysses's first prayer on home soil); Orsilochus son of Idomeneus (named in the Cretan lie as the man Ulysses pretends to have killed); Idomeneus (Cretan king, named in the lie); Mount Neritus (the landmark Athena uncovers); Same (the neighbouring island where the suitor-ambush waits).

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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.