Singing Homer Podcast

About Singing Homer Podcast

A performance of Homer's Odyssey in ancient Greek, with texts. homerist.substack.com (https://homerist.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

A P David

Category

arts · fiction

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

24 Apr 2022

Latest episode

26 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

81 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 Jul 2026

   ‘The Witlessness of Her Thought’—Homer in English

   Odyssey 11.260-80 In Greek: Odysseus (as Homer) has just told us the story of Tyro, whose ghost has come to meet him in Hades. The climax comes when he steps forward and speaks as Poseidon, in the moment after the god has himself climaxed with a sleeping Tyro, whose own speech climaxes thus for the performer on stage: “It’s me, I tell you: I, Poseidon the Ground-Shaker.” There are more sex acts to come in Odysseus’ revue, but none, shall we say, so verbally realised. In tonal Greek, with the accentually emphatic syllables in bold (note that these are often the long syllables which follow the acute sign): αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοί εἰμι Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων. (Od.11.252) A rising pair of successive long oxytones cascades down on εἰμι, ‘I am’. How does one top that, or even follow it? I have been approaching the text of the Odyssey as a script for a solo performer, not without reward. Although the diction and rhythm of Homeric poetry are highly stylised, within those textures Homer appears to contrive extraordinary opportunities for a solo performer to immerse himself in emotive and vivid characterisation, most obviously in the speeches like that of Poseidon. But between narratives and similes, proems and invocations, the Homeric score presents a veritable buffet of styles and registers for an hexameter singer to engage. That the manuscripts preserve a script or a score, rather than (for example) the record of an improvisation of some kind, is demonstrated by certain seemingly scored elements in the poetry’s pitch patterns. Most famous is Odysseus’ use of the joke name Οὖτις to fool the Cyclops; the joke can only work if the accentual system adopted by Hellenistic scholars in their text of Homer is true to the poet’s original composition, whether or not that original itself involved a written score. The joke depends on there being an audible difference in tonality, and yet a similarity when communicating through a massive boulder sealing a cave, between οὖτις and οὔ τις, μή τις and μῆτις. To be clear, the usual linguistic analysis has it that there is no difference between the members of these pairs in their phonemes or their syllables, nor indeed in the location of the accented syllable—that is, the particular syllable which is dynamically reinforced or stressed by the voice. It is the first syllable in each case. The only difference between οὖ and οὔ or μῆ and μή is whether the voice sharply rises in pitch and then emphatically falls (circumflex, ῀ ) over the course of the long vowel sound, or else rises only at the end of that long vowel (acute ´ ), to fall on the subsequent unmarked syllable. (Such a following syllable carrying heavy falling pitch becomes the emphatic one when it happens to be long, but in each of these cases the τις element is short, and the rising acute syllable is itself the emphatic one.) Since in English we do not distinguish between pitch patterns when we stress a syllable, but rise or fall or both willy-nilly, while we (typically) increase the volume and the length of the syllable, we cannot reproduce the actual joke in English. We have to reduce it to a spelling joke: that is, same sound but different spelling (in my rendering, ‘Nowan’ = ‘no-one’). But in a pre-Alexandrian text of Homer, written without accentual information and the separation of words, the spellings would have been identical: ΟΥΤΙΣ and ΜΗΤΙΣ. The only differences in the sounds represented by these letters arise from their tonal prosody. Hence the joke would only have emerged when the text was performed by someone who knew where and how to sing the Greek accents. Anyone else reading a written text of Homer before Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the extant system of accent marks, would have been as confused by Odysseus’ trick on Polyphemus as a foreigner reading the ‘potato-potato, tomato-tomato’ song. ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’ That is why it seems Christopher Nolan has had to cut this epically Odyssean and Homeric bit of wit in his film called The Odyssey. What a loss, but it is essentially a musical joke native to ancient Greek which cannot be reproduced. Indeed I shall expect Nolan, in a most general way across his traversal, not to have not been in on the joke—an observation made all the same without prejudice—when I go to see a matinée of his latest hero’s tale. I have further demonstrated that Odysseus and Penelope each have distinctive accentual motifs in Homer’s Greek, respectively three straight long oxytones and three successive circumflexes, each of which makes itself felt as an intrusion, whenever it recurs, into the usual strong-weak (LONG-short-short) alternation of dactylic rhythm. In an audience that needs to distinguish readily and purely between a long rising oxytone (οὔ, μή) and a rising and falling circumflex (οὖ, μῆ) to register the music of Homer’s poetry—as we have shown above—a succession of three straight of either must have caused both a melodic and a rhythmic jolt inside an hexameter line. Such moments in the speech patterns of Penelope or Odysseus seem most naturally taken as intentional melodic gestures in a musical medium; they are, in effect, signature lines, functioning like leitmotifs in opera. Greek poetry, after all, and more besides, was referred to by its poets as μουσική or ‘music’. It was composed not only of ῥυθμός ‘rhythm’ but ἁρμονία ‘harmony’, whose elements were described in the very same way as the two adjacent elements of the Greek pitch accent: as ὀξύς (‘sharp’ ‘acute’ ‘rising’) and βαρύς (‘heavy’ ‘grave’ ‘falling’). It is not therefore metaphorical to call Homer’s poetry music; it was in fact analogous more to recitative than it was to Paradise Lost. Since these leitmotifs of identical harmonic sequences do not always inhere in the same words, it is impossible to locate them within a theory of oral improvisation by means of purely metrical verbal formulas. The so-called metrical formulas of Homeric, or traditional, or even a purported Indo-European epic, ignore all the language’s pitch accents. Hence the prevailing modern dogma proposes a theory of Mozart which ignores all his notes! It is claimed, sometimes explicitly, that ancient Greek poetry does not inform its metres with the dynamic accents of its words to produce its poetic rhythms. It would be the only known language, the only known poetry, the only known music so to do. We must expose this entrenched absurdity. In the light of unambiguous evidence, the text of Homer, as we have it from the Alexandrian transmission, cannot therefore be approached any longer as an end product of a tradition of improvised composition via fixed verbal formulas, with no regard in the composing for words’ and phrases’ intrinsic pitch accents. It must instead learn at last to be registered as a score for histrionic, mimetic performance, which intentionally celebrates and exploits the infixed tonal nature of Greek expression to realise the individual character of both speaker and speech, even within a highly stylised medium. At moments of intense emotion, Odysseus and Penelope break out of the grooves of hexameter rhythm when they speak, and they each do this in highly distinctive, dynamically melodic ways. Odysseus’ Catalogue of Women is admittedly a puzzle from the histrionic point of view. After such a rousing speech and interlude as that of Poseidon waking Tyro after sex in a river bed, how does one slip successfully into the faceless chant of the catalogue form? I have been wont to understand the catalogue form as the original for Homer’s and Hesiod’s poetry, the spring from which it sprung. Here again is the performance from the beginning of the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships—just one ship’s worth—which I helped reconstruct about a quarter-century ago while tutoring at St. John’s College. The idea is that catalogues were lists, such as genealogies, or the sequence of events in plain prose which has come down to us as the ‘epic cycle’, which could have been rendered into dactylic hexameters so as to accompany an ancient round dance. A dactylic syrtós is extant in Greece today. The round dance had the conjuring power of circle dance: it was a participatory experience in which the community of dancers felt their ancestors joining them, summoned within the circle by their full melodic names, which scholars call ‘noun-and-epithet phrases’. Odysseus’ invocation of Heracles, as son of Alcmene whose ghost he meets (266-8), takes almost a whole line: Ἡρακλῆϝα θρασυμέμνονα θυμολέοντα (‘Heracles, Bold-Spirit, Lion Breath’). The epithets are not predicates, not assertions about the man, but an extended overflowing of his name. The singer intoned such an extended name, savouring every syllable, to the rhythm of the dancers’ feet and the motion, rightward with regular retrogressions, of their bodies: The experience for the dancer is not one of listening to poetry, nor is it for the singer one of selling them on his verses. This is not mimetic representation but ritual evocation and participation in the living presence of the past, like Odysseus present amongst Persephone’s parade of ghosts. The path from cataloguing to storytelling is, however, spontaneous and straightforward, as straightforward as a relative pronoun. In a catalogue of women an entry will include her single name and, instead of a patronymic, the ascription of a filial or maternal or spousal relation to some man. One need only, optionally, elaborate with a relative clause, ‘she who …’ (ἡ …), usually at the beginning of the next line, and you’re off on a digression which can last as many lines as you please. In the case of Tyro, there are three such: ‘She who stated (ἣ φάτο …) that she was the offspring of blameless Salmoneus’; ‘She it was (ἣ ποταμοῦ ἠράσσατ’ …) fell physically in love with the river, divine Enipeus’—this is the digression that inspires a speech; and finally, after the date rape in the eddies and the vaunting speech by Poseidon, ‘But she got pregnant (ἣ δ’ ὑποκυσαμένη …) and bore Pelias and Neleus …’ To my mind the speech is a destination and a climax dramatically, and the material which follows the third relative clause about her children comes across aesthetically as a coda or appendix. I cannot help but feel that once Homer discovered the power of a speech as a dramatic event, in which an audience member participates not as a dancer or onlooker but as an enthralled and inwardly moved spectator—like a seated theatre- or concert-goer—he had let the genie out of the bottle. A similar situation recurred in the telling of stories in songs which were danced and sung by a group of circle-dancing men (a ‘chorus’), a kind of song which came to be called ‘tragedy’: as soon as the composer thought to pull out a chorus member to sing the part of a protagonist at a story’s critical moment, something happened. … how and whenever it was that the soloists stepped forward, instantly they became actors; theatrical drama made its appearance in the Greek world and turned that world into a stage. The poetic sensibility of a Pindar, with its fluidity of identity between poet and chorus, its mesmeric, stylized, verbal-orchestic narration of myth, was instantly antiquated; the dramatist emerged; the actor entered upon the stage of history. The histrionic presence of the actor, the dramatic representation of life, the impetus towards realism in the artistic ideal, were developments that were bound to revolutionize the relation between artist, performer, and audience. But it seems that the revolution which turned the world into a stage had already occurred within the Homeric milieu: … such a development was paralleled in the emergence of the rhapsode—a solo, standing, staff-bearing, lyre-less declaimer in the theatre, playing all the parts—as against the depictions inside Homer of the bard, who is a seated, lyre-playing singer, circled on occasion by a ring of dancers. It is no wonder that in the fourth century, philosophical reflection on art should have been fixated on this new ‘rhapsodic’ power, concentrated by the poet-dramatist through the actor; it is no wonder that imitation should have been at the focus of the philosophical lens. The performer and his story became the central facts of Greek poetry, dimming by comparison the centuries-long tradition of danced verse from which he emerged. In the case of Athenian drama, the song-and-dance chorus from which tragic storytelling actually emerged turned suddenly into a problem for the dramatist—who was still called a ‘chorus teacher’ (χοροδιδάσκαλος)—to solve: what to do with the chorus? Although the ancient poets’ solutions proved inspired enough for modern dramatists sometimes to emulate, the use of a chorus on a modern stage is experimental and more than a little ingratiatingly historical. It becomes another actor’s part. There was no need for the original chorus, which had been everything, once drama happened. One should have thought that a similar thing might have dawned on the poet composing for a rhapsode and his theatre. What would a motionless audience have to do with the participatory dance rhythms of a chanted catalogue? Once they’d had a taste of it, they would have wanted to hear what happened not as a list, like an historian’s timeline, but as though it were happening before them in real time, unfolding in pace and rhythm, and to see the harried protagonists not only summoned by name, but to come to life and speak in living deliberation. Whatever the spell of the communal catalogue experience, surely the expanding digressions of the rhapsode, developing into the vivid narrative of events, the expression through speeches as though the women and heroes were standing before you, and the sublime power of the similes as asides to arrest narrative time and capture somehow its experience and meaning, took him to a place where to return to the list would be like returning to a time before running water. Why should catalogue poetry ever again make an entrance when we have discovered the once-discovered but seemingly eternal pleasure of epic narrative and actorly immersion? And yet here is Odysseus himself—after giving the Phaeacians the story of his sorry adventures among Cicones and Laestrygonians and Lotus-Eaters and Cyclopes, his plentiful ‘ah me’s, the imprecations of Aeolus and the solipsistic lament of Polyphemus, and the journey to Hades itself with Teiresias’ enigmatic prophecy and the epiphany of his mother’s ghost—here he is, turning to a catalogue-y catalogue of dead women. Evidently Homer and his audience were still close to the experience of dancing dactyls to hexameters composed for the purpose. Demodocus sang warrior’s tales to the Phaeacians, however, not lists, and they danced to a song about naughty activities of the gods, replete with tasty speeches and dialogue (8.258-369). But Odysseus’ own hexameters were to be listened to in silence, from that day to this, just as no one now dances to a Bach minuet. And still he chose, after all his narrative and thespian virtuosity, to deliver his audience catalogue poetry. There must have been something to it, something which worked aesthetically, but beyond relative pronouns and lavishly extended dactylic names, I confess I have to say—at least in part—‘I guess you had to be there.’ There is not a student who does not skim through or skip the lengthy Catalogue of Ships when it interrupts—or so one feels—the momentum of the Iliad. The introductions of Antiope, Alcmene and Megara, and Epicaste mother of Oedipodes, give us little nuggets of fact and narrative which more hint and imply than tell, perhaps deliberately. This seems to be the usual thing for catalogue poetry, in which I include Hesiod’s Theogony. There may indeed be an aesthetic of teasing half-disclosures involved, something like in movie trailers, but it can sometimes feel as though the poet is waving his hand at something he would rather not get too far into. Perhaps it would try the patience of an over-familiar audience who only needed a prompt. This is what frustrates, for us who are not privy to almost all of Homer’s world, or past, or his or her aesthetic landscape. Mind you, the format of extended name and relative pronoun, ‘he who …’ or ‘she who …’ which can initiate a story, a sort of two-line base, proved a fecund aesthetic and narrative template. Consider the famous proems of the Iliad and the Odyssey, how they each exhibit and depart from the form. The first line of the Iliad, for example, is dominated by the name and patronymic Πηληϝιάδεω Ἀχιλῆϝος, ‘of Peleïades Achilles’, but the relative pronoun which begins the next line is not ‘he who’ but ‘she who’; ἣ picks up not a person, but the feminine subject of the song requested of the Muse by the singer. This is the μῆνις, the wrath of Achilles, the first word of the Iliad. Books, dissertations, and essays have been written explaining how the whole action of the Iliad unfolds as the completion of this relative clause, describing the manifold action and consequence of the anger of Achilles. She places grief, she hurls souls, she makes dog food of heroes. Some see this arc completed with Achilles’ ostensible reconciliation with Agamemnon in Book XVIII; others see the rage as deeper and more resilient than a reaction to that quarrel, a thing briefly susceptible but ultimately impervious to aesthetic or passionate sublimity, an indignance at mortality itself and at the rest of the human status imposed on us by nature and society. However one reads it—even if one thinks the proem is merely a late addition—the genius of making anger rather than someone’s name the subject of both the song and the inevitable relative clause, ‘she who …’, belongs to a poet literally versed in catalogue poetry, in a way that shapes fundamentally his narrative thought. The Odyssey, on the other hand, ends its first line with an enjambed relative clause, ‘he who many …’ (ὃς μάλα πολλά), but this time there is no named subject at all. The subject the Muse is asked to versify is ἀνήρ, ‘man’, although this is not the man who is everyman or Man, but the masculinity whose counter in a multipolar and threatening but also initiatory cosmos, we are soon enough to realise, is called γυνή, ‘woman’ and the feminine. It is in fact quite some time, twenty-one lines, before we ever hear (in passing) the name of this putative warrior, replete with a fitting epithet. The relative clause here feigns generality, hints suspense, and delights in not revealing too much too soon, like its subject. Given our predicament as foreigners who know neither Greek nor the events nor the stories that recount them, what poetry can we find in Odysseus’ nuggety catalogue entries? To begin with there is the agenda in this poet which I touched on last time, to bring forward the women; perhaps they were heretofore unsung, perhaps such a celebratory parade of ancient women was unprecedented, we have no way of knowing. Certainly the notion of meeting these women’s souls one after another must have transformed the experience of reciting their poetic memorial. The catalogue becomes, vicariously, almost an interactive medium. Women made possible the men and even the towns who populate the sort of tales called κλέα ἀνδρῶν, of which the Iliad is either an example, or the iconoclastic heir who broke their mould. These are the ‘glories of men’ or Men’s News magazines, depending on your perspective. After a night in Zeus’s arms, Antiope gave birth to a brace of boys Who first established the seat of Thebe of the Seven Gates, And fortified it with towers, since without towers they could not Settle in Thebe, her wide dancing ground, for all that they were strong. (11.263-5) It is at least curious that these presumed-to-be mighty sons, Amphion and Zethus, who founded a city and built its battlements, immediately have their prowess undercut by the statement that they could never have defended their new town without the fortifications. Evidently they were trying to appropriate a place that was already discovered and populated, like America or Palestine. It is possible, however, that they established only what is called here the ‘seat’ of Thebe and fortified that, a sort of government stronghold, because of the hostility of the Thebans who were already there. One only says this because elsewhere Cadmus is the founder of Thebes. Ino who saved Odysseus at sea with her veil, was Cadmus’ daughter. There is a sense of sanctuary in the notion of the wide dancing ground enclosed by defensive walls and towers. There is instead a sense of intrusion if the towers represent a new and imposed usurpation from within. In either case, the place for dancing and μουσική—the possibility of poetry, including the memorialising of Antiope, Amphion, and Zethus in the face of the other anonymous mothers and sons dwelling outside—is predicated on an outward facing, hostile and militant political establishment. But there are seven gates in and out, if you want to join the dancing boys and girls. Alcmene next gets a minimal three lines, giving her name, her spouse’s name, and the full line for the name of her famous son: And after her I saw Alcmene, the spouse of Amphitryon; Mother to Heracles, Bold-Spirit—Lion Breath; She conceived him when she had sex in the bent arms of big Zeus. (266-8) The stories about Heracles the original Superman must have been legion, but they get not so much as a nod. Odysseus does not tap into his august and scary predecessor’s greatest hits. Whether he is steering clear for some reason, we cannot know; but perhaps the third line is a clue to Odysseus’ focus in these nuggets: it’s the sex! Alcmene had sex in big Zeus’s embraces (ἀγκοίνηισι Διὸς μεγάλοιο μιγεῖσα). Is this the through line (pun intended) from Tyro and Poseidon on, that the focus in each of these entries in Odysseus’ catalogue is the line describing sex and conception? Have we perhaps stumbled on the clue to the ellipsis and brevity and handwaving allusion? The focus is actually on the one, soft-core moment which in its overwhelming immersion, as though one is enclosed within a mountainous purple wave, makes to fade all the interesting details of past and future, consequence and fate. Homer has invented a soft porn catalogue, which we might recognise as a narrative genre where the details of the story only serve loosely as a frame, as prompts of a sort to tickle and whet the imagination for the money shot. Megara, a sexual partner of Heracles, then gets only two lines. She is the first of the women Odysseus meets who has not slept with a god. But the second line confirms the clue as to Odysseus’ sexual focus: τὴν ἔχεν Ἀμφιτρύωνος υἱὸς μένος αἰὲν ἀτειρής. She’s the one Amphitryon’s son would have, his energy relentless and constant. (270) Heracles is known for his many labours, but surely the ‘energy relentless and constant’ here is meant to put one in mind of what Megara experienced in bed, when he’d ‘have her’ (τὴν ἔχεν). Between Tyro, Antiope, and Alcmene, we find the sources of heroes at Troy and Argonauts, the foundation of Thebes of the Seven Gates (Thebe in Homer), around which so many traditional stories revolve, and of course the towering figure of Heracles, to whom all modern superheroes owe a debt. He satisfies the conceit that we can be players in the heavens, that one of the bodies raging in the sky may actually be on our side—even one of us, born of woman. The labours of Hercules turn Odysseus’ journeys and sufferings into a sort of satyr play. In each of these instances the fulcrum is the moment the woman has sex with either Poseidon or Zeus. Each of these so far can be construed to be rape. Hence these women are the womb of history. Is this a catalogue of women or a catalogue of wombs? There is a reductive aspect to the catalogue so far, whether that is a side effect of the form or an intention. The beauty of the woman conspires with the lust of the god to generate history. Lucretius would perhaps sympathise, that a fire burning in Helen for Paris is an ignition which ultimately sets fire to Ilium. Hitler’s mum took a fancy. History is wombs of fire. Things complicate, however. After Heracles and Megara—Homer breaks the pattern and mentions no offspring in their case, but later stories say Heracles kills them—we continue our descent into the ways of mortal erotica when we come to what we know as the story of Oedipus. In Odysseus’ telling it is actually the story of his mother, whom he calls Epicaste. The son Homer calls Oedipodes. And I saw the mother of Oedipodes, beautiful Epicaste; She’s the one did a big piece of work—in the witlessness of her thought— When she was wedded to her own son: the guy slew and stripped his father, Then mated her: and right away, the gods made the thing notorious among folk. (271-4) For the first time in the catalogue we hear of a deed being done. Of course the deed in question centres on an act of sex, but this time there’s a difference; it is a ‘big deed’ (μέγα ϝἔργον) in the sense of an outrageous one. Evidently there are rules when it comes to human coupling, but there has been no comment on divine rape of human women, or inter-divinity incest. There is no word for ‘incest’ in Greek, but it can perhaps be taken for granted that the parent-child relation was forbidden, though speaking of it between mother and son was seemingly not taboo. Indeed, the gods themselves were keen to publish the thing right away! The shock is concretely rendered in the melodic tonal prosody: γημαμένη ὧι υἷι, ‘wedded to her own son’, contains four straight syllables of changing pitch, the last three of them long and dynamically prominent or stressed, with two consecutive circumflexes. This is what justifies the appalled emphases in my translation. It is striking that the gods’ scruples mirror the human, and mean to amplify them. In point of fact they are tattletales. Let us note the details in Odysseus’ nugget: it is not said that Oedipodes did anything in ignorance. He killed and despoiled his father, then had sex (‘married’) with his mother. It is said that Epicaste did her ‘big deed’ with this qualification in the dative case: ἀϝιδρίηισι νόϝοιο. Translators say ‘in the ignorance of her mind’, but I do not think Homer’s usage will yet bear the notion of ‘mind’ for νόϝος; this word seems always to signify something concrete in him, as I would style a ‘thought’ or a ‘plan’ or an ‘intention’, a product of thinking (νόειν), rather than an underlying faculty (‘mind’, ‘intelligence’). νόϝος (more familiarly in the contracted form νοῦς) most certainly came to have this meaning in philosophy and more popularly. But it seems to me all the text requires of Epicaste is an ignorant or stupid thought, whose folly resided principally in an expectation that she wouldn’t be caught—as perhaps might have been contrived somehow, if the pesky gods had not blown the couple’s cover. Oedipodes himself continued to rule among the Cadmeans in ‘ravishing’ Thebe. He was one himself, in the line of Cadmus like his father. One rather feels the city’s epithet as a predicate, perhaps especially as it is separated from its subject after the mid-line break (caesura). Thebe was indeed a place of ‘much erotic desire’ (Θήβηι πολυηράτωι). It is said he suffers griefs but they are not explained, nor are the ‘baneful plans’ (ὀλοὰς βουλάς) of the gods which somehow underpin his continued rule. These are the frustrations of catalogue poetry, and Homeric allusion. We hear in the Iliad that Oedipodes had a big funeral. There’s no mention that he was blinded. But she? Walked into Hades’ house, the mighty Gatekeeper, Once she’d strapped a noose high from the lofty roof-tree, In the grip of her own grief: and for him, she left pains behind— A ton of them, what a mother’s Furies accomplish till they’re done. (277-80) Epicaste took her own life. As Jane Austen noted, in relation to the punishment dealt to the male partner in the violation of taboo: ‘In this world, the penalty is less equal than could be wished.’ It is intriguing to speculate that Homer’s phrase ἀϝιδρίηισι νόϝοιο made some formative impression on Sophocles, where he may have understood it as ‘ignorance of mind’. “How could she not have known? He must not have known either. But how could he have killed his father in ignorance? Hmm. There’s a plot point there. But the whole thing is really about him.” And so Sophocles and Freud. (And Nolan). In both stories the mother-wife commits suicide. But why does Epicaste curse her son? There are explanations both for the suicide and the curse, which do not depend on unwitting action or incest. Shame is shame in either case, but the one is not intrinsic, it is the shame of being exposed. Perhaps she is angry at being seduced or raped, now that the plan, of which she had been persuaded and convinced, has been shown to be witless. Is she, however, the first of these women to be angry at being deceived or raped? Or the first to become impossibly sad? Their speeches are muzzled. Yet they bear silent witness. The Odyssey already has a song within a song, before the catalogue of episodes which constitute Odysseus’ wanderings, or the catalogue of women in Hades within that ‘Tale of Alcinous’. This is the love affair of Ares and Aphrodite, sung by Demodocus while the Phaeacian boys dance in its rhythm. It seems to offer a different paradigm for the possibilities of sexual congress, albeit in a divine realm and not without consequence at the hands of a jealous cuckold. Poseidon will pay, for Ares, the adulterer’s price. But Aphrodite emerges without shame, amidst the lustful laughter of the boy-gods looking longingly on: ἣ δ’ ἄρα Κύπρον ἵκανε φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη, ἐς Πάφον · ἔνθα δέ ϝοἱ τέμενος βωμός τε θυήεις. ἔνθα δέ μιν Χάριτες λοῦσαν καὶ χρῖσαν ἐλαίωι ἀμβρότωι, οἷα θεοὺς ἐπενήνοθεν αἰὲν ἐόντας, 365 ἀμφὶ δὲ εἵματα ἕσσαν ἐπήρατα, θαῦμα ϝἰδέσθαι. … she arrived at Cyprus, Love-Smile, Aphrodite, To Paphus: where she has a precinct and redolent altar. There the Graces bathed her and anointed her with olive oil, Ambrosial, the kind which emerges on the surface of gods who exist forever, And they dressed her round in love-arousing clothes, amazing to look at. (8.362-6) For Aphrodite, there’s always a happy ending. Perhaps that is not possible in the human realm. But it remains to be seen what can be made of the song without the song, what sort of paradigm it may propose: the song of Odysseus’ struggle to return to Penelope. Is that also to be exposed as the ‘witlessness of his thought’? These are the two people who each emote in their own accents. There is more to identify them than a name and a lineage. That is the musical reality of the Odyssey. I understand why teachers and filmmakers want to make this a poem about an epic hero. But there is no one who speaks in tones like either Penelope or Odysseus. This is a fact of Homer’s Greek. This is a couple who, despite the difference in their melodic energies, will come to exhibit that oneness of thinking (ὁμοφροσύνη) which Odysseus wishes, upon meeting her, for Nausicaa and her imagined husband. Is there possible in the human realm a sort of timeline that is not merely a catalogue of seductions and impositions, love affairs and broken promises, but a ‘love story’? One cannot translate this last concept into Greek, except to say, by name, The Odyssey. Epicaste was left no option. She is no goddess of love. Instead she walked into Hades’ house, the mighty gatekeeper (πυλάρταο κρατεροῖο), and indeed her soul has made the walk back, to meet Odysseus just within that gate. Her story ends abruptly, because that is how catalogues work. Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe (https://homerist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   2 Jul 2026

   ‘He undid the virgin’s zone’—Homer in English

   Odyssey 11.225-59 In Greek: Persephone’s first called witness, and the first soul permitted by Odysseus to drink the sheep’s blood and thus to speak, is Tyro. Once again Odysseus puts front and centre the gory ritual of the blood-drinking from a dug trench, which, one presumes, would have been done on all fours like an animal. Whatever the impact of this foregrounding upon how we take in the series of souls of noble women to follow, it seems most likely to be a reductive and equalising feint from the world of comedy, unsuited to the Boeotian tragedies to which these women and their stories will, one day, pregnantly attach. There the first that I saw was Tyro, well-fathered, Who stated that she was the offspring of blameless Salmoneus, And claimed to be the lady wife of Cretheus son of Aeolus. (Od.11.235-7) It’s not clear whether Tyro was the original tyro; etymologists connect our word to a Latin tiro, meaning ‘new soldier’ or ‘recruit’, but that -y- needs explaining. Usually representation of a sound by -y- in Latin suggests an origin in Greek short -υ-. It does seem that Homer’s Τυρώ (whose -υ- is long or lengthened in Homer’s verse) was a newcomer to social and political prominence, conspicuous, no doubt, for an extraordinary sexual attractiveness, although she does not appear to merit a ‘fair-tressed’ or a ‘ravishing’. Instead her introductory epithet is εὐπατέρεια, ‘of a good father’ or ‘good parentage’, which amounts to a claim that is strangely, if gently, undermined. At least, it seems a thing to remark on, despite crickets from the commentaries, on the sense of ‘stated’ (φάτο) and ‘claimed’ (φῆ) in the lines that follow. Why should Tyro’s status as either daughter or wife require any sort of assertion on her part? As if she were some sort of nouvelle claimant, a tyro? Continuing in the spirit of what came to be called comedy, Odysseus decides that the best way to deal with the crowd of women’s souls gathered around the blood was to draw his ‘sharp-edged sword’ from by his ‘firm thigh’ so they could not drink all at once. Hence the women, in the face of the hero’s brandished phallus, … came on, one before the other, and each woman Would announce her own lineage fully; while I was for questioning all of them. (233-4) Though he tells us that the women spoke, he does not say their lines but only gives us reported speech; she ‘stated’ and ‘claimed’. By itself this introduces the element of doubt about their veracity; one wonders to what end? The choice of reported speech is expensive dramatically. It is also not clear if the women actually said anything else but their lineage (γόνος), or indeed if Odysseus asked any other question of them. The story told of them in the third person goes on to begin with a relative clause, ‘she who did such and such,’ which is the style of a catalogue. The details of the story then related are therefore separated in origin from either Odysseus’ question or each woman’s answer. They do not come from the horse’s mouth. The distance thus created rather obtrudes when we are used to Homer delighting in embodying speakers and speeches in his art. None of the souls of the ancient women speaks in their own person before the audience, whereas those of the warriors whom Odysseus had known will later be full of things to say. It should be noted that only men in Homer’s poems receive epithets which we classify as ‘patronymics’, and which function almost as surnames (Lāertiadēs or Pēlēïadēs, e.g., for Odysseus and Achilles, or Cronidēs for Zeus). Tyro’s reputed husband Cretheus, for example, is Aiolidāo, ‘son of Aeolus’. Tyro herself, however, must be located genealogically by either or both of her father and husband, and it would seem that there can be uncertainty about these attributions in later generations; whereas the certainty seems to be absolute when it comes to male patronymics. This is true even when the Aeolus who is Tyro’s grandfather is thought not to be the same Aeolus who controls the winds and marries his children to each other. Perhaps that is why there is extant a Catalogue of Women in hexameter verses; it would seem the mnemonic reinforcement sometimes aided by musical settings would be more necessary in the case of ancestral women than the men, who live lives with their patronymics ever present. The spirit of Father Cronus, for example, himself long departed with the golden age, is present throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey in the regular sounding of Zeus’s patronymics Κρονίδης or Κρονίων. But Hera is not known as ‘daughter of Cronus’. She is remembered as Zeus’s no.1 wife, not his sister, except of course in titillating Roman or Victorian mythology books. I say this because the evident cultural certainty about male patrilineal descent is so at odds with human nature and experience. One should have thought that women would have the best guess at who might have fathered their child. The culture of patronymics seems, in light of this fact, to protest too much its certainty. Although Homer has Tyro claim to be a daughter and a wife, she seems altogether free of what those claims may claim on her. She acts fully in the power, and under the power, of her own erotic being. As the relative clause of her listing relates, ἣ ποταμοῦ ἠράσσατ’ Ἐνιπῆϝος θείοιο, ὃς πολὺ κάλλιστος ποταμῶν ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἵησιν. καί ῥ’ ἐπ’ Ἐνιπῆϝος πωλέσκετο καλὰ ῥέεθρα · She it was fell physically in love with the river, divine Enipeus, Who was much the most beautiful of the rivers who move upon the earth, And she was often coming and going for Enipeus’ lovely currents. (238-40) What can my readers make of the idea of sexual attraction for, and relations with, a river? I suppose there is a dreamily poetic way to take this, where the river becomes an evocative metaphor for the forces and currents one experiences in sexual arousal and orgasm, coursing within and around the participants. It may help colour the picture that Tyro is at this point a virgin—what is described as her ‘virgin zone’ (παρθενίην ζώνην, 245) is later removed, one should think for the first time—and so her thoughts of erotic rivers may be adolescent or pubescent and involve pink unicorns. The clue, however, that Homer is not in metaphorical mode, is that more often than not, his allusions to encounters between rivers and women result in pregnancy. The characters in Homer’s poems generally cannot name their human ancestors beyond two generations; at that point divine agents intervene, among them your lusty rivers. The Homeric people are evidently two generations removed from a decimating cosmic upheaval, or emigration under duress; their economies no longer forge weapons, it seems, but only inherit or trade or win them in battle. The present activity of the gods suggests that nothing has yet settled, that cosmic equilibria remain unstable; but that prior to the great generations of the truly World Wars, first involving Heracles or Theseus or Atreus and then Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus, there was an Hiroshima, as it were, from beyond which Homer traces no descent. There some time emerged on the nascent Hellenic scene, as if from stage right, the likes of Agamemnon’s grandfather, Pelops for whom the present Peloponnese was named—perhaps when it was still an island (nēsos)—and Aeacus and Arceisias, patrilineal grandfathers of Achilles and Odysseus. And a number of Homer’s present-day heroes trace their ancestry to a river who made love to their grandmother. In other fora, I have suggested spontaneous pregnancy as a non-miraculous occurrence amongst women and other mammals, the fortunate or unfortunate survivors of cosmic thunderbolts and their associated vorticial winds, earth-shakes, and deluges. It would seem to be impossible, alas, to recreate the conditions of such electrified and radiative environments under experimental conditions, to test their effects on ova and gametes generally. Perhaps it is in such environments that the degenerate, mutant y-chromosome itself first emerged. But what is evident is that fresh water rivers are non-conducting, and therefore can present an oversized insulated obstruction and telluric guide to the extravagant voltages, expressing themselves around them in diverse fantastical rock-melting, mountain-building winds and discharged veins of copper and gold. The following is an experiment conducted by Billy Yelverton, at the request of the late Michael Steinbacher, showing two opposite electrodes suspended over sand, with a channel of fresh water snaking between them. Do not miss the final still images (15:39): No less than the Grand Canyon in Arizona, with its adjacent catastrophic deposits of uranium, is stupendous testimony to the almost absurd power of an already present fresh water flow on the polarised forces discharging on either side. The banks of a river, in such circumstances, would have been extraordinary places of radiative flux and interaction, and possibly also of safety from the worst effects. Probably they still are. Life hugs the Nile. Lovers take river walks. Despite all the human reasons to lie about paternity, let us not close our minds to the possibility of riparian parentage. Homer is not speaking of virgin births, nor does he (or Tyro) clumsily attempt to divert gossip about adulterous liaisons. We do not know what we do not know, and I propose it best to suppose that Homer knew something we do not know about the erotic and progenitive power of certain rivers, under special historical circumstances no longer as present in his (or our) present. In the Iliad the river Scamander is shown to be capable of flooding and drowning people, like our rivers; in the past, however, it (he) had fathered humans and the progenitors of heroes. There is no reason to suppose that Homer was not serious about this, whether in the spirit of tragedy or of comedy, and I am more inclined to take him seriously than I am the theatre of the fatuous, where authorities declaim that a river gradually eroded the sheer-faced crack of the Grand Canyon, leaving no delta or detritus. No age ascribes more magical powers to rivers, including on bone-dry neighbouring planets, than the present Age of Uniformitarian Science. There is, to be sure, something wondrous about electrical insulation, and rivers, but not something magical. This is not to say that Homer does not have fun with the idea that rivers can be lovers and fathers, only that he does not question the fact of it. How does one imagine the copulation, for example? He has the enraptured Tyro frequent the world’s most beautiful river’s beautiful currents; does that mean she had a swim, and that was the sex of it? This could certainly explain how Poseidon caught sight of her naked and was bitten with fateful desire. But it seems the river must have had to take on the form and endowment of the human male, to give the woman some incentive and something to grapple. And indeed, in order to do the deed himself with Tyro, Poseidon takes on the likeness of the river Enipeus, in a form human enough such that he can ‘lie alongside’ (παρελέξατο) a woman. But where does he do this? In the mouths of the eddying river, he went to bed with her. (242) The Earth-Shaker Poseidon disguises himself as Enipeus and makes love to Tyro in the eddies—of the river Enipeus! Rather than stipulate or attempt to resolve the problem of how a river can make love to and impregnate a woman, Homer rather exults in the paradox, tickling a feeling for ‘meta’ humour in him to which we are getting used and coming to expect. Perhaps Enipeus can’t spot the clandestine lovers at his mouths, where his currents run into Poseidon’s sea? Enipeus himself was never so lucky as to father children by Tyro, unless her later children, alleged to be by her husband Cretheus, need to get paternity tests. But the engendering achieved by Poseidon is something quite astounding in the description, even for Homer: πορφύρεον δ’ ἄρα κῦμα περιστάθη οὔρεϊ ϝἶσον κυρτωθέν, κρύψεν δὲ θεὸν θνητήν τε γυναῖκα · Purple indeed was the wave stood up over them—equal of a mountain, Its back arched—that hid the god and the death-bound woman. (243-4) One can no longer know what apparition inspired these words, but it must have been known concretely to his audience to be evoked in so few words: a mountain-high wave the colour of purple dye, arched in stasis over the eddying mouth of a river to frame a couple making love. That is one for the Hollywood magicians. Did any becalmed or frantic Israelites make love between the Red Sea’s watery walls? Homer’s description is explicit, at least from a masculine point of view, and as explicit as Homer ever gets about such things. Sometimes a sword is not just a sword, but this time there’s no double entendres: λῦσε δὲ παρθενίην ζώνην, κατὰ δ’ ὕπνον ἔχευεν. αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ἐτέλεσσε θεὸς φιλοτήσια ϝἔργα, ἔν τ’ ἄρα ϝοἱ φῦ χειρί, ϝἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ τ’ ὀνόμαζεν · He undid the virgin’s zone and poured sleep down on her. But once the god climaxed his acts of love, He grew into her with his arm, spoke a line and called it what it was: (245-7) Although the impression is strong that Poseidon would have got his way no matter what, the story is still framed as a matter of Tyro’s desire and consent. She is fooled by Poseidon into thinking that she is sleeping with the ‘man’ that she has in fact already chosen. It seems important somehow that the intent of this erotic woman is kept pure, at least of the smell of rape, and perhaps of the idea of desiring Poseidon directly. There is positive spin going on: Odysseus’ whole catalogue of femmes fatales is making statements on many levels, including to its internal audience: seated among the Phaeacians, one might say presiding over them, is Queen Arete, in whose approval the possibility of Odysseus’ home return is known to lie. As we shall see, Arete is effusive about Odysseus’ lineup of women and his elaboration of their stories; Odysseus scores. Note that after undoing her maiden girdle, but before he climaxes, Poseidon puts Tyro to sleep. Is this date rape? Is Poseidon Bill Cosby? Again I wonder what readers may speculate. It may be that there is a quality of mercy in this backdoor rapist, in that there is good reason to suppose that sex with a divinity (perhaps especially a male one) may be too physically overwhelming or even mortal for a mortal. It may also be that there is a delicacy about representing the female orgasm. According to one of the non-Homeric stories, Teiresias was one who had experienced being both a man and a woman; hence he was asked by Zeus and Hera to decide their dispute, as to whether the man or the woman got the greatest pleasure from sex. When he answered truthfully—we’ll have to take his word—that it was the woman by as much as ten times, Hera blinded him in anger. But one cannot be sure if her anger was from a Victorian shame or indignance, or rather for losing a bet to Zeus. At any rate, Odysseus exempts Tyro from pleasure with her lover, or else himself from describing or otherwise expressing it; and denies her memory of their moment beyond the awesome liquid purple arch above, and the undoing below of her virgin garment. Perhaps he is conscious of Arete in his audience. But he is not therefore shy of depicting Poseidon, his enemy but also the Phaeacians’ patriarch, as a deceiver and a roofie rapist. The only speech Odysseus composes and performs in his catalogue of women he delivers as the successful lover Poseidon. This itself is striking, and calls attention to his choice, both why him? and why not any of the women? Whatever the answer, Poseidon’s speech is an extraordinary moment for Homeric poetics, when one understands this concept in the frame of a solo performer embodying the composition as its method of delivery. As a sculptor works in stone, so does Homer through his rhapsode. First Poseidon wakes her up in his arms and makes his annunciation to Tyro: χαῖρε γύναι φιλότητι · περιπλομένου δ’ ἐνιαυτοῦ τέξεις ἀγλαὰ τέκνα, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἀποφώλιοι εὐναί ἀθανάτων · σὺ δὲ τοὺς κομέειν ἀτιταλλέμεναί τε. “Thanks and be well, woman, for this lovemaking: this same time when the year comes round, You will bear splendid children, for it’s not completely useless, going to bed With the deathless ones: see that you look after them and rear them …” (248-50) The children she had by Poseidon were Pelias and Neleus, fathers respectively of Achilles and Nestor, without whom there would be no Iliad. It might seem odd to elevate Nestor’s significance on par with Achilles’, since he is a bellicose, rapine old windbag, but it seems in classical authors Homer’s Nestor was remembered as an exemplar of sagacity and oratorical skill. It need not be the case that classical authors knew what they had in Nestor, or Homer, any more than the ‘oral theory’ academics do today. It must be said, however, that there seems to be a sense of humour in Homer’s elevation of Neleus alongside Pelias, in the comparison of their dwelling-places: τὼ κρατερὼ θεράποντε Διὸς μεγάλοιο γενέσθην 255 ἀμφοτέρω · Πελίης μὲν ἐν εὐρυχόρωι Ἰαωλκῶι ναῖε πολύρρηνος, ὃ δ’ ἄρ’ ἐν Πύλωι ἠμαθόεντι. Those two that became strong ministers of big Zeus, The pair of them: Pelias in the wide dancing grounds of Iolcus— He lived there, rich in sheep—while the other was in sandy Pylos. (255-7) Nestor’s ‘sandy’ Pylos sounds, and is meant to sound, distinctly, prosaically sandy in the shadow of Iolcus, rich with sheep on grazing land, and her wide spaces for dancing. Among her other children, attributed to her sometime husband Cretheus as sire, is Aison, the father of Jason. Between the story of the Argonauts and the Trojan War, Tyro can therefore be said to be the mother of the greatest hits among those stories which supply the κλέα ἀνδρῶν (klea andrōn), the ‘glories of men’ or the ‘tales of heroes’. I have been making a case, since the sacrifice of Nestor’s heifer, that the Odyssey itself means to foreground the experience of the women who made possible that Trojan War, not only the obvious Helen, but the mothers and wives who counterpose with their labour, patience, and endurance, the supposed exploits of men. Students in college may encounter the phrase klea andrōn among a handful of other phrases transliterated from ancient Greek; the Iliad and the Odyssey are supposed to belong to their genre. But when we walk in on Achilles (an ἀνήρ [sg. ‘man’] among ἀνδρῶν [pl. ‘men’]) singing from these klea andrōn to Patroclus—a possibly reluctant audience of one—we know we are in ‘meta’ territory. As I read the Odyssey the phrase begins to register in rather a different way, as, literally, ‘men’s tales’; even ‘men’s news’, in the sense that one speaks of ‘women’s magazines’. Note that in Greek ἀνήρ/ἀνδρός always means ‘man’ in the sense of ‘male’ and usually ‘warrior’, not ‘man’ in the sense of ‘human’. ἄνθρωπος (anthrōpos) is the generic term (as we say) meaning ‘human being’. γυνή (gynē), on the other hand, the principal word for ‘woman’, does not give the appearance of being derivative, as do ‘woman’ and ‘female’. It evidently refers to a distinct species. A phrase with surprising implications is Zeus’s title ‘father of gods and men’ (πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε, e.g. 1.28). He is not the father of all living, or of human beings (anthrōpoi), but ‘warrior men’ (andres). Zeus is not boss of the feminine, but a son of a mother who has won his way into a kind of authoritarian political governance over gods and fighting men. This is not to suggest that the Odyssey ought to be understood as a ‘women’s tale’. It’s very first word announces its subject: ἄνδρα, a man or the man. One might do worse, however, than to compare the poem about the man to the dead women in Odysseus’ catalogue: they must be identified by claims as to their father or their husband or their children—that is, relationally, not directly by a patronymic. Some essential part of the Odyssey lives in reaction or response to the Iliad, but not the other way around; and to this extent (I claim) she acts and draws her power sometimes as a corrective and at others as a complement. Yes, both the Iliad and the Odyssey are usefully addressed as klea andrōn—another set of songs are called nostoi, ‘homecomings’, to accommodate the Odyssey—but their respective takes on the genres brood with self-reflectivity and critique, to result, in the case of the Odyssey, not in tragic sublimity but in comedy’s savage bite and bellyful. More on this next time. In the Odyssey’s opening lines the word andra (‘warrior man’) is almost immediately juxtaposed by the word anthrōpos (‘human’): ‘so many the peoples (anthrōpōn) whose towns he saw, whose thought he came to know’ (1.3). Hence its relational sense is drawn out. This is not a poem about ‘man’ or an everyman, but a particular warrior who went wandering on an unintended journey of discovery, once the fighting was done. Soon (1.13) he is described as νόστου κεχρημένον ἠδὲ γυναικός, which I have rendered thus: ‘in want of his return home, as well as his woman—the wife—’. This seemed okay as exposition, as it draws out the relational quality and the possible peculiar signification of the one word gynaikos as a silent reference to Penelope. But I’ve used too many words. Homer’s phrase is actually a pithy four words which describe the man, also as yet unnamed, as ‘in need of restoration and [a] woman’. The poet as much as says that the warrior is an homeless man in need of woman, not the de facto sufficient and independent subject of ‘tales of heroes’. The notions of ‘hero’ and ‘heroic verse’ are misleading in the extreme in the way they have come to frame Homer. The subject is too vast and interesting to burden the passage on Tyro and Poseidon’s tryst, except that their verses help to point out that heroes have mums who sleep around and give birth to the Iliad and Jason and the Argonauts, and so give them parts to play. To study the ‘hero’ of Greek cult is to study religion and anthropology. To study the universe of the Sophoclean ἥρως (hērōs) is to study the universe. The one thing these heroes may have in common with Homer’s, is that they are all victims, in a sense that Christian martyrs would share if they had not borne witness to a gospel. It is possible that the heroes bore witness to something in their sacrifice. But it was not heroism, in our usage, nor were they ‘role models’ so much as choice victims, prime grade meat, though some might be called paradigms or archetypes. To pay attention to Homer’s own usage, consider the opening lines of the Iliad: ‘ten thousand souls of heroes … hurled into Hades, themselves made a feast for jackals and omen birds …’ They were not special, there were a myriad of them. One should therefore begin one’s investigation into Homer’s usage with the working hypothesis that an Homeric ‘hero’ is a nameless male human who dies futilely while fighting. Those are five italicised qualities from different parts of speech which inhere essentially in Homer’s hero. His destiny is to be dog food. Finally in Poseidon’s speech to Tyro arrives the god’s dramatic epiphany through the voice and body of the performer. We come at last to the promised moment of histrionic apotheosis. The rhapsode, being Odysseus among the Phaeacians playing Odysseus in Hades, reciting his encounter with a catalogue of women who are mothers of epic narrative, becomes his own great nemesis, the god Poseidon himself. He mugs the role as a secretive backdoor lover who nevertheless says who he is on the way out: the performer presents himself alone on stage basking in his sexual glory: “Now go to your house, and keep to yourself and do not say my name; Ah but it’s me, I tell you: I, Poseidon, the Ground-Shaker.” (246-52) Ensconced as it is at the start of the procession of women’s souls, the dramatic power of this moment gets lost in the literate, academic approach to the poetry of the Odyssey. This is in fact a poetry which scripts (not suggests) performance; that is likely a formulation abstract enough to apply to all ancient Greek epic and lyric poetry. On this spectrum Odysseus’ story has been a series of dramatic announcements of his name, starting with Outis (‘Nowan’) and then ‘Odysseus’ to Polyphemus the Cyclops, Poseidon’s son, seemingly to climax here with this declaration: ‘I am Poseidon’ (ἐγώ τοί εἰμι Ποσειδάων). Before us stands the god. The performer presents himself as one who has just had sex with Tyro. He has just undressed her, put her to sleep, and climaxed within her in front of us. This is as close to public erotica as Greek mimesis will get, unless one admits the vases. The use of ἐγώ is always emphatic in Greek; that is, the subject ‘I’ is already contained in the verb εἰμί, so it is never necessary to add ego. It is therefore in the script that the performer launch into this moment. He removes the clothes of his disguise and stands there splayed on stage like an erection. To the Phaeacians, he is Poseidon who says, ‘I’m your Daddy.’ So who is this ‘I am’, this Poseidon? Next time we shall return to the journey of the oar and the winnowing-fan. They are what they are. But when you plant either one upright in the ground, its double meanings become red herrings for the perennial double entendre: the thing is a phallus, a lingam. It is a maypole. From my first book (with an embedded quotation): … the customs of the village festival gave rise to two types of dance. There was the processional dance of the band of worshippers in progress round their boundaries and from field to field, from house to house, from well to well of the village … The other type of folk-dance, the ronde or ‘round’, is derived from the comparatively stationary dance of the group of worshippers around the more especially sacred objects of the festival, such as the tree or the fire. The custom of dancing round the Maypole has been more or less preserved wherever the Maypole is known. The phallic song and dance, which was still current in many cities in Aristotle’s time (Poetics 1449a12–13)—perhaps also with the function of marking and consecrating the boundaries, farms, and water sources of the unwalled village (κώμη)—was the ancient Greek version of the processional type of village chorus. Aristotle connects the name of comedy (κωμῳδία) to this village processional (the word would be composed of village+song in Greek). The ribald festal revel called a κῶμος, from which modern scholars prefer to derive ‘comedy’, may well also refer to the phallic processions of Aristotle’s reportage. What could grumpy Poseidon, the backdoor lover and the earthquake, have to do with the spirit of comedy? I shall attempt to tell this tale next time. Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. 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3. 

   14 May 2026

   ‘Tell your woman’—Homer in English

   Odyssey 11.152-224 Odysseus’ encounter with his mother begins in the same hideous way in which, one presumes, all his encounters with the souls of the dead and gone begin. All that is said is that she came up and drank the dark animal blood. Who knows what the performer mimes or enacts. But if we let our imaginations work, we see a sad old woman squatting down or on all fours, lapping up spilt blood like a dog, or perhaps she cups her hands and draws from the pool. Either way there’s blood dripping down her face, and maybe staining her motherly hands as well, the while she talks to her son. Or where does the blood go in an insubstantial thing? What does it become? Clearly it is up to the performer how far forward in our imaginations to bring the clumsily gory possibilities, but it is Homer himself who has prescribed the bloody ritual, overseen by Odysseus’ sword, as a precondition of any dialogue. Homer has no interest in hiding the deadness of the dead; he wants the disquieting sensual ambience, a slightly farcical macabre, to frame and colour his scene. Homer seems to suggest that the quaff of blood causes the instant recognition of Odysseus in his mother (αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω), but it seems she must have been aware of who he was to have been hanging around already, first in line for a drink. Odysseus had to fend her off with his sword, remember, so Teiresias could go first. Perhaps among human souls, Odysseus’ mother was an exceptionally thirsty one. I don’t think this would be a profitable comic implication, however. It seems rather that Homer has gone out of logic’s way to emphasise, at least here, a kind of unawareness in the psyche prior to the tasting—or ingestion?—of fresh blood. It is not even human blood in the communion, but sacrificed blood of the flock. It seems there is no life after death, properly speaking; the souls have no strength, even to communicate, except with fuel they cannot procure by themselves. Teiresias is exceptional among them in being able to prophesy truth. The others seem able only, when prompted, of memories and renewing old interests or old stories. We shall see, however, that Odysseus’ mother, who remains nameless after her introduction as ‘Anticleia’ (Od.11.85)—she’s simply ‘Mother mine’, μῆτερ ἐμή—may prove uniquely and movingly capable. But there is no question of an Homeric theology or a consistent eschatology, beyond the proximate needs of the story; the rules of engagement Teiresias expounds have been preemptively broken by the insertion of Elpenor who has already spoken first, against Circe’s instructions, and without a hint of blood on his ghostly lips. Homer has therefore created an air of ambiguity about the rules, which is generally a feature rather than a bug in horror films. ‘How’d you get here?’ says Mum, like anyone who meets a traveler in Homer; ‘you must have had some ship! There’s that cosmic Ocean in between. Are you fresh from Troy, or did you manage a stop-in at home?’ (I paraphrase.) Odysseus tells her his story, as would any other soul over there. There’s no lack of self-pity: ‘always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered …’ (αἰὲν ἔχων ἀλάλημαι ὀϊζύν, 11.167). No, he’s not had a chance to go home. He’s been forced to come here to consult the soul of Teiresias. He’s not come down—or over, or up beyond the sky—in order to see his Mum. (It must be said, Hades lives in a dark place, like the adjacent land of the Cimmerians, but in Homer it does not seem that we are prompted to imagine an ‘under’ world; on Achilles’ shield the stream of Oceanus encircles the cosmos, and seems, therefore, to be celestial. Hades is somewhere beyond its farther bank.) Now, is there a joke in this? Dionysus, in one of his manifestations anyway, is famous for braving Hades’ realm precisely in order to rescue his mortal mother Semele. Such a motive must surely resonate with humanity in general, as well as Greek speakers, both of whom tend to miss their mothers. To be sure, our Odysseus does not know beforehand that his mother is dead. But Homer rather moots this point, in the sense of making it irrelevant, by going out of his way to show that even if he’d known about her plight, Odysseus would not have attempted a voyage to Hades to find his mother—if not to rescue her, at least to meet her one last time—like Dionysus to save his mother, or Orpheus his Eurydice—before he would do so to consult Teiresias: On there came the soul of my mother, dead and gone, Daughter of Autolycus Great-Heart—Anticleia. I left her behind alive, when I went to sacred Ilium. Now, I burst into tears soon as I saw her, and pitied her in my life’s breath: But no way was I for letting her in early—no matter the density of my grief— To get near the blood, until I heard from Teiresias. (11.84-89) The man had ‘burst into tears’ upon seeing Elpenor’s ghost as well, but there was no scruple then about remembering his mission or following Circe’s orders. There is a bloody-minded determination that rules and characterises this hero. There is not sentiment or romance. It seems to me that Homer makes him look a bit ridiculous, all in all. Wait your turn, Mum. I’m not here for you. Of course we have no idea if Odysseus is an avatar of Dionysus, or whether Homer’s story about the sea journey south to Hades is instead the original for Dionysus’ descent to his mother. It does seem odd that the parody or sendup should appear before the religious tale, but there is no use in presuming about the mysteries of history—especially when there are more lacunas than continuous or contiguous wholes in the data—or the unpredictable twists of religious and cultural development. Few in the ancient world seem to have registered the Odyssey as comedy, with the conspicuous and notable exception of Aristotle (Poetics 1453a36). But perhaps we should consider that from our position, and more importantly our disposition, not a single joke would seem to have been told in the entire Judaeo-Christian corpus. The cultural sway of that corpus perhaps prevents us from best assessing what’s actually there, in the wrinkles of the flesh. If there’s jokes, we’re not in on them. What can I do but bear witness to what I experience in Homer’s Invisible Realm, rather than dismiss the macabre, the surreal, and the flat-out ludicrous, as unsuited to the ceremonies at the altar to that stately unicorn the professors call ‘epic’? Let us look again at Odysseus’ responsive self-pity: For I have not yet come near her, Achaea, nor yet have I set foot On my own mother earth, no; always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered, From the very first I began to follow radiant Agamemnon To Ilium of the fine foals, so I might do battle with Trojans. (11.166-9) I hope my reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but this may be the first hint at an expression of regret from Odysseus about his decision to go to Troy. To be sure, there has been plenty of sadness in Odysseus’ story so far, perhaps even second-guessing. There has been the mourning over the men lost, several times repeated, a general air of mourning settled upon the whole voyage. The debacle in the Cyclops’ cave seems told in a tone, meanwhile, in equal parts confessional and proud. It was foolish and fateful for the rest of his journey, but in the consequence Odysseus announced himself by his name: no regrets, I should have thought. At the banquets in Phaeacia, tales of brave Ulysses, among other famous Achaeans, have been sung to men in their cups; they are evidently fascinating and entertaining in the Scherian theatre, these exploits of foreign heroes in foreign lands. Clearly they have been rather more complex experiences for Odysseus himself, also in audience. But I should not characterise that experience as one of regret. He sobs uncontrollably, until finally Alcinous demands his identity and Odysseus’ cover is broken. His tears are then compared to those of a widow fallen over her Trojan husband, as spears prod her in the back to join the chain of the enslaved. (One responds to this simile differently if one thinks of the newly widowed Andromache, or the newly re-widowed Helen.) At the very least, Odysseus is ‘going through’ something he must have to, in order to cope with hearing his story, where the experience of his many victims, and possibly one in particular, are made present to his consciousness as though he were reliving trauma in therapy. He goes so far as to bribe the singer to sing the slaughter after the Horse, the very episode of his butchery which traumatises him. But that does not suggest by itself, of necessity, that he feels regret. His seeking the means for a good cry seems to answer a larger and less focussed need, like choosing to see a tragedy. Grand releases of psychic energy, from diverse people of diverse backgrounds, explode in the stands at a home game. I suppose that’s why we go? But when confronted by the soul of his dead mother, there is a glimpse of an almost nihilistic resignation to futility. Odysseus says he has been united with grief ‘from the very first’ he followed Agamemnon, so he ‘might do battle with Trojans.’ ‘From the very first’ (ἐξ οὗ τὰ πρώτιστα) takes us to the very beginning of a catalogue of consequent events, the beginning before the beginning that he makes to his Phaeacian audience with his first stops after leaving Troy. The phrase recalls the opening of the Iliad (I.6), when Homer asks the goddess to begin singing from the time when (ἐξ οὖ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα) first Agamemnon and Achilles ‘stood apart, paired in strife.’ One suspects that for the first time Odysseus, as a consequence of this encounter with his mother, sees his decision to follow Agamemnon and fight his war as the moment that began his catalogue of pain and grief. This catalogue now goes much further back than his hubris with the Cyclops and the vengeance of Poseidon that has wrecked his journey home. ‘That he might do battle with Trojans’ and ‘follow Agamemnon’ ring with painful hollowness in the presence of his mother whom he has lost meanwhile. “You been out, son? What you been up to? No good?” Mum has a power to elicit clarity about oneself, even from the grave. A word and a look from her can undercut the pretensions of heroic action and heroic song. Penelope has already once come down from her room and tried to change the channel (Od.1.337-44). His mother appears to have made Odysseus extend the catalogue of his life much further back than heretofore, not to his childhood but to the moment he left Mum behind to go to war. Immediately he asks after his mother’s death. Was it a long illness, or was it Artemis’ gentle arrows? The latter must have brought some sort of sudden death which was thought, for some reason, not to be painful. Then Odysseus asks after his father and his son, not about their health, but their status; did they still possess the wealth he had gained in lands and livestock, or had some other dude become boss? It seems clear that Odysseus had made more of himself than he had inherited in Ithaca. But it is not clear just how he had acquired lands and livestock, and how he had maintained them. Once supposed facts of history like a Mediaeval era of feudalism are now up for reinterpretation; all there have ever been about ancient and pre-ancient (e.g. ‘Homeric’) economies are projections of recent theory and experience. As early a theorist (and historian) as Thucydides, for example, did not entertain the idea that Helen played any significant role in the causes of the Trojan War. It was all down to Agamemnon’s inheritance of consolidated lands, a naval power, and his humanly greedy acquisitiveness. No gods or women or even loyalty need be involved in his gathering an invasive armada, when the motivations of rational acquisitiveness or consumerism, or those of an ambitious mob boss would suffice. The story of the Odyssey does seem to showcase a monogenetic patriarchy, in the line of Laertes to Odysseus to Telemachus. But it is all too clear that it is Odysseus who has both elevated his father and the prospects of his son, and that without him, there is a vacuum in Ithaca which is not likely to sustain either of them. He is the trinity, without him there’s a poor old man and a callow, unpromising grandson of no use to each other. Odysseus’ seems to have been a de facto kind of rule, where the mere threat of his prowess was enough to cause fealty, without a standing army or police; and to grant him the ability to levy oarsman-soldiers for the expedition to Troy, like a local version of Agamemnon. And yet he must have had a sort of magical something, or Odysseus would not have caught Homer’s attention, or those of his subjects. In the story we have, we are allowed and perhaps encouraged to project the monarchist’s dream of a benevolent king, a father rather than a patriarch, un upright man to whom disputants spontaneously come as a judge. But Odysseus’ questions of his mother do not climax with the concern for his patriarchy. One of the joys of reading the Odyssey is that whatever Homer grew up with, he was not brainwashed by the institutionalised delusions of modern education. All of our ‘departments’ from sociology to economics to political science, physics to philosophy to theology, seem to have managed to theorise about the realities of our condition, or our creation, without a need to acknowledge that woman and the feminine could play any role that matters to the theory, except as an occasionally intransigent factor or given. Composed ‘history’ shows much the same delusional quality. I am not saying that Homer calls for a revisionist feminism. Such a thing seems to me to reinforce the delusion with its blinkers. What is called for—which is to say, what I am not used to seeing—is history which accounts for the ways that women shape events, whatever niche this majority of humans is thought to occupy politically or socially. Its seems to me a premise evident to children and the childlike, which is all the same missing in what passes for history and theory, that women cause events, in premises, process, and outcomes. Anyone who’s grown up in a family, which includes your Alexanders and your Adolfs, knows this. And yet there is no hesitation in even the most dispassionate accounts for averring that a certain rational masculinity, whether it is prudent or daring, is imputed to history-making decision-makers and the moment of their decisions. The explicit delusion lies in the idea that femininity has not played a role, that nothing has been missed in locating fateful decisions entirely behind a brave and chiseled masculine mask. Was mother whispering in his ear, or speaking through that mask? Astrophysicists waste billions in public money trying to prove the existence of fantasies, such as multiple black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, simply to shore up their gravitational cosmology and its Big-Bang god ex nihilo; while they ignore the electric currents which literally blow through their hair, and make it stand on end. The feminine motives and agency amidst the heavenly powers in Homer’s universe are too explicit to require comment. But his depiction in the Odyssey of mortal women could be described as feminist, only in that it seems to demand an acknowledgment which corrects a wrong of neglect and abuse, rather than depict neutrally an obvious reality, or demand a revolution of the patriarchy. I recall the sacrifice of the heifer upon the departure of Athena from Nestor’s feast (3.371-463): The sacrifice of the heifer, with the women of Nestor’s house ululating in ecstasy, seems to demand a symbolic reading … The men encamped on the beach like an invading army were sacrificing quantities of bulls, exclusively male animals. The object seemed to be placating or thanking Poseidon. Here, Nestor calls for an unbroken heifer to honour Athena, the Virgin. The sexual metaphor is made quite explicit in Nestor’s request [for the unbroken heifer] … It seems the honouring of Poseidon involves the sacrifice of male animals, whereas the honouring of Athena calls for the sacrifice of a female, and in particular, a ‘virgin’ … [T]he sacrifice of the heifer seems to embody the sacrifice of women for the sake of the Trojan misadventure, and masculine fantasy generally … it seems to be consummated by the guttural cry of the women of Nestor’s household. I find both a dignity and an unspoken acknowledgement in this wordless ululation (ὀλολύζειν) of the women. The price that women pay is perhaps more than can be acknowledged in words. No amount of gilding can adorn this. One really feels the passing of this heifer’s ghost. It feels like a release from suffering. Teiresias has just told Odysseus that even once he has succeeded in reestablishing himself at home, he must make a final journey inland, carrying an oar on his shoulder until some passerby mistakes it for a winnowing-fan. He must then, and there, plant the oar and perform a sacrifice of three male animals to Poseidon. The whole journey and ritual seems to be one of atonement, not one that changes any patriarchy but an atonement that must be made before it can be allowed to continue. The winnowing fan is sacred to Demeter; this seems a safely taken allusion. But there is no mention of her name, and it could be that a syncretism is Homer’s notion. The reconciliation between male and female, sea-piracy and landed agriculture, Olympian and chthonic, the gods and the Goddess, all seem to be wrapped up in the parable of the oar and the winnowing fan. It is perhaps a stretch to see Athena on the side of the earth goddess and Poseidon as the Olympian; I shall discuss this in a later post. Remember that in the stately wand-wielding goddess, the single Homeric performer embodies both the forest witch Circe and Olympian Athena, and also mortal Penelope at her loom. This unity in the archetypal posture of the performer may go a long way toward linking entities that seem, on paper, impossible to combine. That’s a flex that Homer has. It may be that on his final journey, Odysseus is to be an emissary in aid of reconciling the feminine power in the world to the rapine masculine, by means of a sacrifice of the male. So Odysseus’ last question to his mother’s psyche is not about her own death or the status of his father and son, but about his wife. This is a rising triad which suggests that his wife surpasses the patriarchy in her importance to himself. His character of Elpenor had been the first to introduce Penelope’s existence to the awareness of the Phaeacian audience; he invokes her as ‘wife’, literally ‘bedmate’ (ἄλοχος), among the list of people Odysseus had abandoned at home. (One must always remember that it is Odysseus telling the story, playing both himself and Elpenor, so these disclosures have a certain staginess about them.) Now, playing himself, she is his ‘wooed and wedded’ bedmate (μνηστῆς ἀλόχου); another layer is being peeled off the onion, in a staged dialogue for solo onion. Penelope’s suitors are called μνηστῆρες; Odysseus has already been a successful one. Consider that it is neither her health nor her status that Odysseus asks after: And tell me about my wooed and wedded wife—her plan (βουλή) and her thought (νόϝος)— Does she remain by her son and guard everything securely, Or did she already mate an Achaean man, whoever’s the best of them? (11.177-9) Βουλή (boulē) and νοῦς (νόϝος, nous) are often translated ‘will’ and ‘mind’ respectively, but these are not mental or psychic faculties, in the modern or philosophical style, or biological ones, like the θυμός (thumos, ’life’s breath’) or indeed the ψυχή (psychē, ‘soul’ or ‘ghost’), but rather the concrete manifestations of seemingly hidden inner processes; hence always in Homer, ‘plan’, and ‘thought’ or ‘intent’. A word often translated ‘word’ or ‘speech’ or ‘command’ is μῦθος (mythos), which of course has a fraught semantic development in Greek as well as later use. But in Homer it is opposed to ἔπος (epos), a concrete ‘word’ or sonic grouping, like an hexameter line; the quasi-physical quality intuited in ἔπος is suggested by its characteristic epithet, ‘winged’ (πτερόεις), which identifies it as a movement of air. μῦθος in Homer instead points to the act of speech as a concrete ‘disclosure’, of what had before been hidden in the unseen process of human cogitation. It is the disclosure of a plan or thought. And it is the social status of the speaker which can make such a disclosure, in effect, a command. Odysseus is therefore interrogating his mother’s ghost about his wife’s strategy. He seems to approach Penelope’s situation in a surprisingly distanced and pragmatic way, as though either option would make sense to him—that is, in her position, as a matter of survival: has she taken the risk of sticking by her son and somehow guarding their assets, or has she sought the relative security of marrying the ‘best of the Achaeans’? That is, Odysseus does not seem to be a patriarch asking if his submissive wife is still being submissive; instead he is asking his mum about Penelope’s decisions, and the state of mind they imply. It seems to be a vivifying ambiguity in the Odyssey (rather than a thing due our cultural and historical ignorance) that we have no idea who runs Ithaca or how, or even what it would mean to ‘run’ Ithaca or any other Homeric settlement. There is no police or bureaucracy. There is no throne room. The strongest man has no army but the retainers of his own household. The farms seem to run themselves, with no trouble to the herders from the loss of a daily pig to the feasters. Does the Odyssey actually contain a view of just, or at least effective kingship? The suitors seem to think that Penelope’s new husband will be a king. But what’s the racket he’ll be running? And in the meantime, what or who is making things happen? What Odysseus seems instinctively to know, is that the plan and the thought of the woman are crucial to what may develop. If there is an Homeric thought about history and political science, not to mention theology and cosmology, this would be it. Historians, excepting father Herodotus, seem to have been uninterested in whole worlds of human motivation, to the point of being delusional. Even on a battlefield and its high-ground strategies, one might ask why do soldiers fight? Does it matter who bakes their bread? And why is your ship always ‘she’ when you defend her? (Continued immediately in the next post, where you will find the recitation of the passage in Greek at the end, as usual.) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe (https://homerist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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