The Odyssey puts us into a world that is a peculiar mixture of the strange and the familiar. The tension between strangeness and familiarity is in fact the poem’s central subject.
Privilege entails terrible vulnerability.
Now morn, in saffron robe, the earth o’erspread; And Jove, the lightning’s Lord, of all the Gods.
For many a Trojan, many a Greek, that day Prone in the dust, and side by side, were laid.
For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.
Then at last his sorrowing wife detailed the horrors that befall those whose city is taken; she reminded him how the men are slain, and the city is given over to the flames, while the women and children are carried into captivity; when he heard all this, his heart was touched, and he donned his armour to go forth.
Pathetic Paris! Womanizer! Cheat! You are the very best at looking pretty.
You pleased our enemies, but shamed yourself.
Talk not to me of compacts; as ’tween men And lions no firm concord can exist, 310 Nor wolves and lambs in harmony unite, But ceaseless enmity between them dwells: So not in friendly terms, nor compact firm, Can thou and I unite, till one of us Glut with his blood the mail-clad warrior Mars.
Along with them swift-footed Achilleus went, letting fall warm tears as he saw his steadfast companion lying there on a carried litter and torn with the sharp bronze, the man he had sent off before with horses and chariot into the fighting; who never came home to be welcomed.
Embraced the omen, and majestic rose.
Yet through my court the noise of revel rings, And waste the wise frugality of kings.
Cries to the gods, and vengeance sleeps too long.
The cognate word xenos can mean both “stranger” and “friend”; it is the root from which we get the English word “xenophobia,” the fear of strangers or foreigners, as well as the sadly less common “xenophilia,” the love of strangers or of unknown objects.
Knowledge of death motivates Achilles to kill with terrifying gentleness and dispassion, calling his enemy “my friend” even as he ends his life.
It is Helen, daughter of Zeus, who most clearly articulates the relationship between her father’s plans and those of the poetic tradition: “Zeus set an evil lot upon us all, to make us topics of a singer’s tale for people in the future still unborn.
Helen’s lament emphasizes Hector’s ability to see her as a human being, in a context when most of the Trojans were unable to do so. Implicitly, her lament for Hector is also a lament for the dehumanization, unkindness, and cruelty towards women, subordinates, and captives that are normalized in war, and will proliferate after the death of the city’s primary defender.
The desire to fight and kill can be as overwhelming as hunger, and war can become even “sweeter” than the dream of returning home. Fighting can become an immersive experience, comparable to the intense, total engagement of participation in dancing, sports, or acrobatics. Rage, grief, weariness, panic, fear, and energetic zeal all “take,” “seize,” or “enfold” the person.
Shame accrues to the woman through the actions of men, regardless of her wishes. The scene makes clear that, despite her divine heritage and her extraordinary intelligence, Helen has no more choice than Briseis about whose bed she shares.
It didn’t matter if three hundred million years passed, our part in the timeline would be there, affecting everything that was to come.
Any time a man hits a woman, it’s no longer between him and her.