Now we're moving on to books nine through twelve of The Odyssey.
Some of the best parts of The Odyssey exist in this arc of the story.
A lot of the things that you'll remember about the cyclops, the sirens, all these
famous episodes get stuck into Odysseus recounting his own tales.
Recall what's happened, we've been on this island of Scheria for some books so
Odysseus has slowly carefully pieced himself together.
He's got his strength back. He's figured out a way to work himself
back into human society but his identity is still a riddle.
His host don't know who he is. And only after they've given him
overwhelming hospitality do they even bother, or, they, do they even presume to
ask his name. And now starting off in book nine,
Odysseus is going to start to fill in what that ident, identity's all about.
Remember at the close of eight, the direct question for him that came from the king,
Alcinous. Now, tell us who you are?
And in trying to figure out that question of identity there were several points
that, Alcinous made salient. Your name, your lineage and where are you
from? What is your name or your parents and what
place are you from? Odysseus goes ahead and answers those
right at the beginning above nine sets out his own identity straight forwardly for
his audience. But then he carries on to fill up the last
piece, this is going to be his past. What great things have you done?
Oh yes, yes, we need to know those, in order to figure out who it is that you
are. So a great Greek heroes identity is gonna
be, yes, name, lineage, whether from, and also, a grand and glorious set of
adventures in their past, what they've done magnificent things that they've
engage in. Odysseus now when he identified himself is
also taking over the role of the bard in the story.
He's going to become the singer of the tale.
It's like Homer hands things over to him and says go ahead Odysseus now you can to
have the reins for a while. And then here's Odysseus basically in you
know, perfect dactylic hexameter just like a real poet, performing for us his own
identity. He gets to take over the story now form
nine through twelve with a short breather in book eleven.
Now in the parts that we're going to turn to in the coming books keep an eye on
this, certain overall structure. They're are a lot of episodes that come
fast and furious, and lots of details, lots of adventure to come up, but there is
a way that you can organize your reading of it such that you can allocate interest
to what the episodes that are most important.
They tend to come in threes in book nine, we have a group of three, the adventure
with the Ciconians, then the Lotus Eaters, then the Cyclops.
In book ten, we have another three, Ilyste, the Lystrigonians and Cerces, then
in book eleven a long journey into the underworld.
And book twelve another group of three. The Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis, and the
cattle of the son. You can see our friends the sirens here.
Careful. Watch out if you start to hear their song.
It's going to entice you in. So we have in each of these groupings, two
short ones and a long one, that first group of three in book nine, the Caconians
and the Lotaseaters are both actually very short then the Cyclops is much longer and
takes up nearly half the book. In group two we have Ealis the
Lystergonians, those are the two short episodes, and then Zyrosy, which is the
much longer episode, the more substantial episode in book ten.
Book eleven, longer digression in the underworld, same cavings takes over again
in book twelve, short, short, long Siren, Sillan and Karyptos, and the cattle of the
sun. Watch for several important themes.
I'm just going to point out to a couple, there are more that you're going to
identify yourself in your own reading look for the idea of temptation.
There are pleasures awaiting you, but those pleasures sometimes have a price
associated with them. Also, curiosity goes together with
temptation to be tempted to grab something also is married in this set of stories
with the idea of curiosity and gaining knowledge.
Odysseus push and drive is always a sense of my goodness, what is that over there?
It could be something amazing, and I've got to spend some time trying to get to
know it. Also, look out for Xanea, this idea of
treating a guest in a proper way shows up in our stories, oftentimes in a perverted
sense, we get examples of how not do Xanea, how not to treat your guest.
Watch out for food crimes of all kinds. There are things floating around in these
stories, that are being treated like their food, but really shouldn't be eaten and
when you see those keep an eye out keep an eye out for them.
Lots of shape shifting going to be going on, humans are going to be taking the
shapes of animals and strange creatures are going to show up that are kind of
human but not quite. Now, throughout this journey Odysseus is
constantly trying to find out new things. Most of what happens in his exploration is
actually specifically keyed as a search for knowledge.
He gets down to the underworld oh sorry, he gets, when he gets over to Searcy, its,
its clue, he's, he's clued into the idea that says that actually what you should be
doing is finding out an important secret. There's a reason why all these terrible
things are happening to you while these wonderful adventures, that you're having
and explorations that you're having, are being forced upon you because of
something. Go to the Underworld to find out.
There's a specific search for knowledge, that's anchored from Circe forward.
But really all of the episodes have built into them this kind of temptation toward
some unknown thing curiosity pulling the way.
Not least behind us we see are sirens. They have this amazing, marvelous song
that's going to bring Odysseus to new depths of understanding as we'll see.
In order to get yourself a fuller sense of what these episodes are all about take
some time to link them into your memory. Get the groups of three straight.
There's going to be a quiz that pops up on the next slide run through that quickly to
make sure you've got each of the episodes straight in, in your own mind and then
we'll carry on with the rest of this lecture.
During Odysseus's ventures the further out we go the stranger things get.
Near the beginning we have some adventures that seemed pretty much like standard hero
stuff. He lands on the, the shores meets the
Kikonians. They clobbered them, grabbed their
treasure and leave standard kind of a hero pillaging behavior.
Then we get to Lotus eaters, they seem roughly like normal people, we can
converse with them there's some social interactions back and forth but they do
have the strange fixation on a certain kind of food they like to eat the lowes
leaves. Strange not sure what's so wonderful about
them. They make them feel marvelous.
There must be some kind of pharmacological effect.
Odysseus as man quite loved this. And Odysseus realizes uh-uh, we've got to
go no sense in anchoring ourselves here. For a hero you don't want to hang around
and relax. You know, early retirement so you can play
golf is not the kind of thing a hero wants to do.
Then we get to the cyclops. With the cyclops, things get very strange.
We are definitely in the world of strangeness when we arrive there.
The approach that Odysseus makes to the cyclops is typical of a kind of approaches
we're going to see in these episodes. The shore the, the ship will land on
shore, a party of men gets out. They scout the horizon, look for places to
go. See signs of life.
There might be smoke off in the off in the far reaches, there might be a spring that
they want to go to, a food source somewhere and they start to explore.
When they do, they make their way up a path, maybe up a hillside.
A rocky place, a wooded place. And they get to.
Something that's wondrous, and something that's marvelous.
In this case, something that's marvelously, marvelously strange and
frightening. They arrive at the area of the Cyclops.
Looking around to see what they might find and what they mostly find on their way in
to this strange clumping of, of, of animals, a clumping of creatures is that
there's a lot of things that they're just missing.
They're not quite like you and I, these Cyclopses.
They're lacking cultivation. They're, they don't know anything about
farming. So they don't have the tools and resources
to subsist on a grain-based diet. They don't have that settled farming
technology. They don't have then also the kind of
supplement in their diet that grain would give them.
A stable bread that they might have to, to, to eat and to provide them with
nutrition. They're going to have to get their
nutrition from somewhere else. Watch out.
They don't have councils. The Cyclopses don't get together to solve
problems, they don't work together to get things done, they don't form alliances.
They also don't have homes, they just live in these caves, completely rustic.
They're lacking each marker of civilization most prominent among these or
at least something that we could really remark on, is the fact that they don't
have ships. These Cyclopses don't know how to build
ships, and since they don't, they're not going to have contact with the outside
world, they're not going to meet lots of people that are different from them which
for us, great Greek heroes that we are the traders across the Mediterranean sea.
This is a sign of great lack of civilization.
Not to be in contact with, network with, people that are not like you.
That's very strange, that the Cyclopses don't have that.
In their in their cultural purview, they also lack and this importantly comes out
with Polyphemus, they entirely lack the idea of Xenia.
Remember our statement about hospitality and how important it is we see it coursing
through really most of the books of the Odyssey it surely shows up in a negative
way in these episodes we see people not performing the proper kind of Xenia or
hospitality. The Cyclopses are really most prominent
example of this. They don't understand the basic guest host
relationship. Cyclops, the Polyphemus doesn't realize
that he's supposed to be providing a gift to the people that arrive in his house.
He doesn't know how to do it. He, he's not generous.
He doesn't provide Odysseus and his men with the kind of overwhelming hospitality
that a real good host is supposed to do. You might think that Odysseus and his men
are a bit rude cuz they just keep you know, rummaging around on their own,
looking for it and asking for it. Right in the Cyclops' face they ask for a
gift that might seem a little bit forward or a little bit presumptuousness but
actually Homer doesn't seem to bat an eye about it and the reason that he doesn't is
because he thinks presumably that oh, this is a great hero, of course, he should be
getting some gift giving, but of course he gets none.
The gifts in the episode show up in interesting ways.
Odysseus is repeatedly asking for one when he arrives there, hey where's my gift, I'm
a guest in your house, where is my gift? Cyclops doesn't provide it, then also
there's that wine that Odysseus brings from this ship as their making their way
into the center of the island to look for this civilization.
And they grab that and take that with them.
Odysseus recalls it as a gift that he got himself, a guest gift that he got himself
from a hero called Maron. Odysseus had saved his family as heroes
might do sometimes Maron then gave him the gift of the wine.
Odysseus is now going to use this. Later on in the episode it becomes his
perverted gift to Cyclops. He says, here, why don't you have some of
this wine? What it's going to do is not make the
Cyclops enjoy wine, such as people do under normal circumstances, is going to
utterly debilitate him so that Odysseus and his mates can do some awful things and
poke out the one eye the poor cyclops has. I keep saying poor cyclops, I'm not sure
why I feel sorry for him. I do, a little bit anyway.
But so, they just drill this awful heated opposed into the Cyclops's eye.
The thing is now blinded and utterly named having failed to give gifts to Odysseys
men he gets the nasty one in return. Now, the gift giving and the laws of Xenia
are consistently violently in the scene were they violated at their worst, is when
the Cyclops decides not to serve food to Odysseus's men but instead to use
Odysseus's men as his own food. He grabs two of Odysseus's compatriots
right, when he sees them. Smashes their head against the ground and
eats their brains. This is very bad manners.
You're not supposed to do this kind of thing, instead a good host is supposed to
feed his guest not feed on his guests. The cyclops goes ahead and does that.
The worst perversion of all that one can imagine for the rules of Xenia.
It's not only that the cyclops is ignoring the rules of Xenia, it's that the cyclops
is actually perverting them. Turning them inside out in awful, awful
ways. This brings us to universal law number
three, universal law number three, pretty much held true across all of human
society. All my universal law are like that.
Universal law number three is, it's not good to be food.
It is not good to be food. Human beings do not like the idea of
becoming food for other creatures. It is a source of revulsion to us.
It's so awful that it causes us to have an awful kind of disgust response.
Ugh. It's not just terrifying or frightening,
it's actually utterly disgusting. The violence that's involved in killing
someone is here gone a further step as a ripped up human being is now chewed on,
swallowed and metabolized. The full annihilation that comes through
metabolism seems to be worth at the core of just how awful it is to image a human
being becoming food. Then there's also the problem that reminds
us that whatever living things that are out there in the world survive.
It's true. By eating other living things.
That's a sad thing about organic, the organic world but is indeed nearly
universally true that living things survive by eating other living things.
When you and I start to think of ourselves as food we place ourselves in this very
broad spectrum of all of living things out there who are part of a food chain.
I think that there's a part of us that likes to think of ourselves as much more
special than that and not just as a member in a food chain.
It makes us it's awful for us to think of ourselves as belonging to that part of
what it is to be inside, of, to be a living organism as well.
Now, to make his way out of this particular problem, Odysseus has this
amazingly clever idea of debilitating the Cyclops rather than killing him.
Killing the Cyclops they'd be stuck in the cave in the cave so he debilitates and
this then gives Odysseus a means to get out of the cave.
Straps himself to the bottom of the ram and has his mates strapped to the bottom
of the other animals in the flock and they escape out the open door underneath these
animals when Cyclops tries to check the animals to make sure nothing funny's going
on about Odysseus and his men get through and get out.
Not before Odysseus in a further sense of cleverness introduces another of the
famous tricks in this episode when he is tormenting the Cyclops.
The cyclops is asking his name. Odysseus says my name is No Man.
Now this the Polyphemus being sure that the person that is having all this doing
all this mischief in his own cave is named, No Man.
When his neighbors come over to ask him what's wrong, Polyphemus he says to his
fellows Cyclopses, "Well I'm, No Man is harming me, No Man is harming me," at
which point. The fellow's not to bright.
So yah, okay well one's harming you we'll just go back to our business.
So they just depart and go away. Odysseus then adopts this pure anonymity,
the name of no name. He, in some ways loses his name in the
Cyclops episode not though quite well enough in Marx's entrance into a certain
kind of anonymity, in a strange world modern about Odysseus is on his way out,
like great heroes who can't stand the idea that the Cyclops might go through the rest
of his life not knowing who it is that beat him.
So as he and his men are escaping, Odysseus shouts back, oh, and by the way
in case anyone wants to know, the one who blinded you and beat you at this
competition is Odysseus. Now, when he does that Odysseus can't help
but give his name so that his fame can spread and his glory can spread for having
bested Polyphemus. But what he does is give Polyphemus now a
means to draw down a curse on Odysseus. Odysseus would have been completely at
anonymous. Had he not told Polyphemus' name, shouting
out his name at the end gives him the glory of having bested Polyphemus but it
now gives Polyphemus the means to call down a terrible curse on Odysseus.
Without the name, Polyphemus would have been powerless to do it.
The name gives him a way in, it's like his address, his special identity.
Now that Polyphemus knows Odysseus's identity, he can say to his father, who
just happened to be Poseidon. Sorry Odysseus, bad mistake.
Just happens to be beside. Dad, take care of that awful man Odysseus,
who took care of me. And when he does that Polyphemus will
surely answer him and nasty things are going to come Odysseus' way.
Now if we wanted to half step back and tried to think about this episode as a
whole, Cyclops represents according to one of the tools we've already seen in our
curse, a wonderful example of a kind of social lesson on the importance of Zenia.
In the case of Polyphemus, this is the kind of reading I've been developing for
you, in the case of Polyphemus, this example of Xenia is actually a perverted
example. He stands as a perfect negative example of
what not to do. And with this story, all the Greeks that
are reading can sit back and listen to a myth that underlines and underscores the
importance of proper guest treatment. The importance of properly treating a
guest. Without doing that, a person is running
the risk of being compared to one of these awful criminals the cyclops himself.
So make sure that you uphold Xenia, you Greeks, otherwise some people might start
thinking you're acting like a cyclops and, boy, that would be a horrible thing for
people to think about you.