Summary

Divine Justice in the Odyssey: Poseidon, Cyclops, and Helios

Author(s): Charles Segal

Source: The American Journal of Philology , Winter, 1992, Vol. 113, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 489-518

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/295536

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AMERICAN

JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY

DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY:

POSEIDON, CYCLOPS, AND HELIOS

I. DIVINE JUSTICE AND HUMAN UNDERSTANDING

The discrepancy between the "higher" morality of Zeus articu- lated in the proem and the vindictiveness of Poseidon and Helios has long been regarded as one of the major obstacles to a coherent theology in the Odyssey and one of the most serious compositional problems of the poem.' These two episodes, I argue, far from being anomalies or merely the residues of an Ur-Odyssee, are pivotal points in clarifying the poem's more or less unified moral concerns.

There is little doubt that the Odyssey incorporates older strata of beliefs about the gods, just as it incorporates older strata of folklore in the creation of its hero.2 But the evolution of an increasingly moral

For recent discussion and bibliography (which must be exemplary rather than exhaustive) see B. Fenik, Studies in the Odyssey, Hermes Einzelschriften 30 (Wiesbaden 1974) 208, n. 18, and 223ff.; R. Friedrich, "Thrinakia and Zeus' Ways to Men in the Odyssey," GRBS 28 (1987) 384f. For a typical analytic view see J. Irmscher, Gotterzorn bei Homer (Leipzig 1950) 56-64. In the milder variant of this approach advocated by W. Schadewaldt, "Der Prolog der Odyssee," HSCP 63 (1958) 15-32, esp. 16, a later poet ("Bearbeiter," "B") has grafted an ethical interpretation upon an earlier, ethically more primitive work, traces of which remain, however, in the figures of Poseidon and Helios. For a critique of the analytic approach see U. Holscher, Untersuchungen zur Form der Odyssee, Hermes Einzelschriften 6 (Berlin 1939) 81f., and G. Bona, Studi sull'Odissea (Torino 1966) 23ff., 36ff. For the underlying unity of the conception of the gods in the poem see K. Reinhardt, "Die Abenteuer der Odyssee," in Von Werken und Formen (Godesberg 1948) 86ff.

2Whether the more self-consciously moralized theology of the Odyssey is the result of historical development or of different poets or of changing concerns, themes, or styles in a single poet remains a matter of heated controversy: see, e.g., L. A. Post, "The Moral Pattern in Homer," TAPA 70 (1939) 158-90, esp. 159ff., 188; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Sather Classical Lectures 25 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1956)

American Journal of Philology 113 (1992) 489-518 ? 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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CHARLES SEGAL

conception of the gods over many centuries need not exclude a coher- ent theology in the "monumental composition" of the poem's final phase. Viewed diachronically, nature divinities like Helios, Proteus, or Circe may well represent a type of divinity older than Zeus or Athena. Synchronically, however, these differences among types of divinity form part of the poem's total vision of what gods might and should be.3 In other words, Homer has brought together into an artistic and con- ceptual whole both older and more evolved notions of divinity and in this way grounds his epic in a self-consciously moral theology.4

We are especially concerned with two devices by which Homer achieves his moral effect: juxtaposing gods of different levels of moral sensitivity (like Zeus and Poseidon) and bracketing the less moral, more "primitive" divine behavior in a well-demarcated section of the poem, the fabulous realm between Troy and Ithaca in books 5-13. In- deed, this bracketing process begins in the very opening lines of the poem, where Poseidon's wrath is firmly set apart from the pity of "all" the other gods (1.19-21):

32f.; A. Lesky, "Homeros," RE, Supplbd. 11, Sonderausdruck (Stuttgart 1967) 42f.; H. Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus, Sather Classical Lectures 41 (Berkeley and Los An- geles 1971) 28-32, 37; J. S. Clay, The Wrath of Athena (Princeton 1983) 215ff., with useful bibliography. For the folklore elements in the poem see, e.g., R. Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Homeric Epics, Sather Classical Lectures 20 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1946) chap. 1; D. L. Page Folktales in Homer's Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 1973) passim; U. Holscher, "The Transformation from Folk-Tale to Epic," in Homer: Tradition and Invention, ed. B. Fenik (Leiden 1978) 52ff., and now his Die Odyssee: Epos zwischen Mirchen und Roman (Munich 1988) passim; Clay (supra) 68ff.; C. Calame, Le recit en Grece ancienne (Paris 1986) 122ff.

3For a good statement of how diachronic and synchronic perspectives can be balanced and viewed as complementary see G. Nagy, Pindar's Homer (Baltimore 1990) 4f.

4The poem's explicit concern with justice belongs to its "ethical" or "normative" quality, in contrast to the tragic tone of the Iliad: see Aristot. Poet. 24.1459b12ff. Not every divine action, of course, fits into a neat moral scheme, and even generalizations about moral behavior and divine justice have to be understood in context, as part of the flow of action and the interplay of character. A typical example is Od. 17.485-87, where a suitor's comment on the gods' moral watchfulness follows upon Odysseus' invocation of "the gods and Erinyes of beggars" when Antinoos throws a footstool at him. There is a further irony in putting such a moral in the mouth of one of "the overweening young men" who share in Antino6s' hubris and thus in his doom. Cf. also the sequence of prayers and omens in 15.523-48, especially after Athena's appearance to Telemachus in 15.9ff., which is parallel to her appearance to Nausicaa in 6.21ff.: see Holscher (note 1 above) 85.

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

OEOt 6' /eXealQov aJrcavTeg v6o()L IlooEL6&0Ovog- 6 ' aoIXEQXEg E[tEVEavev avTl0eiO 'OvoGJ'/i JtCdosg fv yalav IxeOaOm.

Isolated from the other gods, Poseidon is cast at once into the role of the "other," the blocking force or obstacle to Odysseus' return and to Zeus's will.5

As the Odyssey is a poem about change, the theology too is inti- mately bound up with the shifting experience and widening understand- ing of the hero. Odysseus has "seen and come to know the mind of many men" (1.4), but he has also seen and come to know many forms of the mind of gods. Even though our extended view of him over many years is condensed into the relatively brief span of days in the fore- ground, we follow an entire lifetime, from birth to death, as it is stamped with the presence or absence of divine justice. We also see the lingering traces of the amoral, unscrupulous trickster.6

On the human level the superimposition of Odysseus' past on the present shows us how a moral consciousness is shaped over the course of a lifetime of suffering and witnessing divinity's workings among mor- tals. Analogously, on the divine level, Zeus's program for retributive justice at the beginning is not an accomplished fact of the world order but appears as work-in-progress. Hence he states his theodicy in the form of a complaint, uses present and future tenses (1.32-41), and brings us into the present with the phrase "as even now" (og xcai viv) in 1.35. Before the end of the first book, in fact, we see a mortal making just the accusation that Zeus has tried to refute, namely that the god is responsible for the ills of mankind (1.347f.; cf. 11.558-60).7 Later, we hear of Zeus's justice at work, through the agency of Athena, in the shipwreck of some of the Trojan heroes because "not all were percep- tive orjust" (3.133f.). Locrian Ajax's excessive and foolish boast that he could escape the sea even against the gods' will (4.503-5) fatally incurs Poseidon's wrath (4.499-511). These instances of divine justice, though

5This is the only time in the poem that nosphi occurs first in the line and with a proper name, a stylistic detail that adds to the isolation of Poseidon.

6See R. B. Rutherford, "The Philosophy of the Odyssey," JHS 106 (1986) 160f. 7In the Iliad the attribution of "responsibility" to the gods or to Zeus is fairly

common: see 3.164f., 19.86-89, 260-74, 409f. One may even wonder whether the Odyssey proem has in mind that of the Iliad, where the poet asks "Which of the gods" threw Agamemnon and Achilles together in strife (1.8).

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CHARLES SEGAL

glimpsed only fleetingly, prefigure the realization of Zeus's justice in the main line of the action as we follow the principal hero in the great crisis of his life.8

Although the Odyssey seems more advanced morally than the Il- iad, it nevertheless resembles it in making the omniscient narrator's increasing clarification of Zeus's will accompany the hero's gradual understanding of that will. Achilles, overreaching, transgressive hero that he often is, initially identifies his goals with the will of Zeus and only too late recognizes the suffering implied in that identification.9 Odysseus, whose life is defined by restraint, moderation, and continu- ity, can use his moral understanding as a way of achieving his goals.

The Odysseus who arrives on Ithaca in book 13 has performed the narrative act of recollecting his many years of travel."' In addition to this integrative work of bringing past experience into his present time of life, he has the benefit of planning his future moves with Athena in book 13. She puts him once again in contact with the basic traits of his charac- ter by reaffirming them to his face (13.291-99, 330-38). At the same time she permits him a privileged (if abbreviated) account of divine arrange- ments beyond his mortal knowledge. "I knew in my heart," she says, "that you would return after the loss of all your companions, but I did not want to fight with Poseidon, brother of my father, who put anger in his heart in wrath because you blinded his own son" (13.340-43). This recognition of Athena's concern also changes Odysseus' understanding of the gods' ways. The Odysseus of the second half of the poem, de- fending his house on Ithaca, is surer of divine help and more prudent and self-controlled than the Odysseus who defended his own and his men's lives against the Cyclops.

His first instructions to his son consist in sharing his special knowledge of the gods' help for righteous vengeance. When Telema- chus first appeared in the poem, he complained to Athena, disguised as Mentes, about the gods' "evil devising" of his father's woes (1.234-45; cf. also 1.348). But, many books later, Odysseus uses his own example

8See Clay (note 2 above) 47ff. 9Cf. esp. Iliad 18.74-93, where Achilles acknowledges the disastrous results of his

request of Zeus, and 24.525-51, where he expounds human suffering in the parable of Zeus's two jars. On Achilles' tragic recognition at the end of the Iliad see C. H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) 202ff. and most recently M. Mueller, The Iliad (London 1984) 56-59.

'?See C. Segal, "The Phaeacians and the Symbolism of Odysseus' Return," Arion 1 (1962) 21ff.

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

to correct Telemachus and teach him about Athena's power and con- cern (16.207-12). His hymnic phrasing here resembles Hesiod's praise of the power of Zeus in the proem of the Works and Days (5-7; cf. Theog. 447). Shortly afterwards Odysseus counters Telemachus' dis- may at the odds against them by assuring him of the help of "Athena along with Father Zeus" (16.260). In the removal of the arms from the great hall the miraculous glow from Athena's golden lamp gives him another opportunity to instruct his son in "the ways of the gods" (dike theon, 19.43). They can work a "wonder" or "marvel" for a mortal whom they wish to aid, as Telemachus says here (mega thauma, 19.36); and we are reminded of Odysseus' first words to his son in book 16, as he begins his paternal task of initiating him into the gods' ways and tells him not to "wonder" (thaumazein) too much (16.201-12, esp. 203).

In his other relations on Ithaca too Odysseus displays a moral awareness deeper than most of those around him. In a famous reflection on the feebleness of man and the ephemerality and uncertainty of human life, he warns Amphinomus of the doom awaiting those who "devise deeds of overweening violence" (atasthala mechanoontas, 18.143)." In his first address to Penelope in his disguise as a beggar, he gives a definition of kingship that stresses piety, fair judgment, and concern for the people (19.108-14; cf. Hes. WD 225-37). His disguise also provides several occasions for revealing mistaken assumptions about the gods. Both Eurycleia and the cowherd Philoitius blame Zeus for their master's failed return when Odysseus in fact is standing before them (19.363-69, 20.201-10).12 His advantage over the suitors lies in his

"See G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore 1979) 163, who notes that atasthaliai "are conventionally associated in Homeric diction with acts denoted by the word hubris and its derivatives." Human suffering because of men's own atasthaliai is a recurrent theme, although it is not unique to the Odyssey: cf. II. 4.409 and 22.104; see Post (note 2 above) 164; also Schadewaldt (note 1 above) 31 with n. 13; 0. Andersen, "Der Untergang der Gefahrten in der Odyssee," SO 49 (1973) 12-14; Clay (note 2 above) 34-38. It is interesting for Odysseus' identification with the moral aims of Zeus that his general- ization on the feebleness of human life in Od. 18.130f. closely resembles Zeus's remark in II. 17.446f. With Odysseus' warning to Amphinomus we may also compare his monitory tale to Antinoos about how hubris results in disaster (17.431-44).

'2G. E. Dimock, The Unity of the Odyssey (Amherst 1989) 330, suggests that this despair about Zeus's justice is answered by Laertes in 24.351ff. This is perhaps too programmatic, but this darkness about justice doubtless serves as the foil to the light that comes at the end. Fenik (note 1 above) 223f. seems to me to exaggerate the contradiction between Athena's urging on the suitors (18.346ff. and 20.284) and Zeus's dissuading evil- doers in the proem; the two actions belong to different stages of human crime; and the

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CHARLES SEGAL

moral superiority as much as in his cunning (metis).'3 The pattern is already established, embryonically, in his first major victory by cunning that we meet in the poem, his encounter with the Cyclops, Polyphemus.

Near the end of this episode Odysseus reads the Cyclops a moral lesson: the evil deeds were bound to recoil back upon him because he did not revere the laws of guest-friendship. Zeus and the other gods, therefore, have punished him (9.477-79):

xal XtlV OCi y' EEitXE xL?aE L xcRaxa Ieya, oXYETXL', EJei EL vov; 0VX o Ci EO o) EVl O'XC eoOt(0evca- TO OGE ZUc; TELoatTO xal OEOi lt kot.

This reflection on retribution from Zeus, which the god himself had introduced in the proem (tisis, 1.40), offers a moral interpretation of Odysseus' own action: he succeeds because he identifies his purposes with the gods' ways of justice and vengeance. He comes to grief be- cause he cannot resist the temptation to gloat over his victory and make sure that his enemy knows the identity of his vanquisher (9.491-505).

The Cyclops episode, however, raises serious problems for divine justice. On the one hand, the Cyclopes "trust to the immortal gods," who seem in fact to look after them, for their untilled and unplowed land bears grain and grapes (9.109-11), and "Zeus's rain makes increase for them" (111). On the other hand, they are overweening and without laws (9.106-11). If the gods are the guardians of righteous behavior, why do they shower such abundance on these "arrogantly behaving Cyclopes," &avb6cv OrzjEQlvoOEO6vTWv, as the poet calls them at the beginning of the Phaeacian episode (6.5)?'4 The narrative of Polyphemus explores this contradiction and at least partially resolves it by showing that the Cy- clopes' trust in the gods is misplaced, at least in the case of the signal example of Cyclopean hybris, Polyphemus.

contrast, in fact, strengthens the divine justice. The gods' justice receives independent confirmation from an area removed from the main events of the poem: Zeus and Artemis work together in punishing the maidservant who kidnapped Eumaeus as a child (15.475- 81, esp. 477f.).

'30n the poem's concern with the moral basis of Odysseus' victory over the suit- ors see the careful study of S. Said, "Les crimes des pretendants, la maison d'Ulysse et les festins de l'Odyssee," Cahiers de I'Ecole Normale Superieure (1977) 9-49, esp. 28, with the further literature there cited.

'4The oxymoron of the phrase perhaps suggests the outlandishness of regarding the Cyclopes as "men."

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

II. PHAEACIANS AND CYCLOPES, ZEUS AND POSEIDON

As Kirk and Vidal-Naquet have pointed out, the Cyclopes make their appearance in an unstable conjunction of opposites. They occupy both a Golden Age paradise where, "trusting to the gods," they receive the earth's fruits without toil, and a subhuman condition of dwelling in mountain caves with only a rudimentary social organization and iso- lated nuclear families (9.106-15).15 Odysseus' arrival brings out the neg- ative side of their primitive society, for just this "lack of concern for one another" (ou66' akXXkfXv aXkeyovoL, 9.115) prevents them from coming to Polyphemus' aid (cf. 9.399-412). Eager to get back to sleep in their individual caves (9.401-4), they readily accept his statement about "No- body" as an excuse to dismiss his complaint.

Polyphemus, in other words, crystallizes the savage side of the Cyclopes' precivilized world; and with this savagery he brings into the narrative a more primitive, less morally evolved notion of divinity. Through his encounter with Odysseus he moves, unwittingly, toward a world where higher moral norms come into play. Whether he acknowl- edges Zeus or not (9.275-78), he eventually gets judged and punished according to a world order defined by the justice of Zeus rather than the wrath of Poseidon.16

Odysseus' Phaeacian hosts are almost the exact opposite of the Cyclopes, from whose proximity they once fled (6.4-8). Taken together, the Phaeacians and the Cyclopes embody the two poles of a privileged

15 See G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures, Sather Classical Lectures 40 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1970) 162-71; P. Vidal-Naquet, "Land and Sacrifice in the Odyssey: A Study of Religious and Mythical Meanings," in The Black Hunter, trans. A. Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore 1986) 21f. Recently J. N. O'Sul- livan, "Nature and Culture in the Odyssey," SO 55 (1990) 16f., has rightly criticized Kirk's view of the Cyclopes' "super-culture," but he goes too far in the opposite direction, paying too little attention to their ambiguous place between savagery and the Golden Age. R. Mondi, "The Homeric Cyclops: Folktale, Tradition and Theme," TAPA 113 (1983) 22ff., argues that the contradiction in the Cyclopes reflects Homer's conflation of two traditions, a folk-tale tradition of a man-eating ogre and an old Greek myth, reflected in Hes. Theog. 139-46, of smith gods who forge Zeus's thunderbolt and are rewarded for their aid against the Titans with the Elysium-like paradise reflected in Od. 107-15. This explanation is attractive for the origins of the Homeric Cyclopes but still does not account for the use to which Homer puts his composite version (if such it is) in the poem.

'6Polyphemus' description of his fellow Cyclopes as "not being concerned" with Zeus (ou . . . alegousi, 9.275) is perhaps an ironic echo of their lack of "concern for one another" (ou . . . alegousi, 115).

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CHARLES SEGAL

closeness to the gods. The Phaeacians are above, the Cyclopes below the norm of such relations with the divine among mankind. The differ- ence is analogous to that between the Golden Age and Silver Age in Hesiod (WD 115ff., 133ff.), except that the Phaeacians also have traits of a fully human, Iron Age world of cities, sea travel, and complex social organization. Despite this contrast, however, the Phaeacians and Cy- clopes share a certain unpredictability in their responses to guest-host situations, one of the poem's most important codes of behavior for defining "normally" civilized humans, i.e., Greeks.'7 Supercivilized though they in some ways are, the Phaeacians shift mysteriously from the lack of response to Odysseus' request for hospitality in Alcinous' long, embarrassing silence (7.153-66) to the extravagant generosity of transporting him home and giving him lavish gifts.

In his formal welcome of Odysseus, Alcinous can point to a time not long in the past when the gods used to appear to them and dine among them at their sacrifices, "since we are near to them, as are also the Cyclopes and the savage races of Giants" (7.199-206; cf. 5.35, 19.279). The three races-Phaeacians, Cyclopes, and Giants-enjoy this privilege because of common descent from or close connection with Poseidon (cf. 7.56ff., 13.130); but that genealogical relationship, as we shall see, points to other affinities. Each of the three belongs to a stage of moral behavior prior to that of the ordinary mortal world; each is a remnant of a more archaic past. Even the Phaeacians, as we have observed, have something of the Cyclopes' isolation and hostility to strangers.

Several additional features of the narrative contribute to the asso-

ciation of the Cyclopes with an older world. In their combination of agricultural abundance and asocial violence they resemble the two ear- liest of Hesiod's five ages, the Golden and Silver Races. Like the Phaea- cians (7.114-21), they resemble the Golden Race in the spontaneous agricultural richness of their land (9.107-11; cf. 9.123f.; WD 117f.).'8 Un- like the Phaeacians, they are close to the Silver Race in their rudimen-

17See G. P. Rose, "The Unfriendly Phaeacians," TAPA 100 (1969) 389-93. '1It is an important difference between the Cyclopes and Phaeacians, however,

that the abundant produce of Alcinous' orchard belongs to a landscape that has been bounded, contained, and ordered by walls, rows, drying places, etc. (7.112f., 123f., 127), and adjoins an elaborate architectural complex that in turn reflects a high degree of social and political organization (7.130ff.).

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

tary social organization, their aggressive violence, and their lack of respect for the gods (9.106, 112; WD 134-37).19

By associating the Cyclopes and the Phaeacians with the Giants (7.59 and 206), Homer makes the two former peoples seem part of a more distant time, for the Giants generally belong to an older order. 20 In Hesiod's Theogony, for example, the Giants are born from Gaia and the severed genitals of Ouranos and are coeval with the Erinyes and the Meliai (185-87). Hesiod's Cyclopes are the children of Gaia and Oura- nos (Theogony 139).21

Through his siring of Polyphemus and his association with the Giants (7.56-59), then, Poseidon is also displaced into an older world order. By making him the father of Polyphemus (though not necessarily of the whole race of Cyclopes), Homer virtually makes Poseidon one of the deities of primordial creation. His union with a daughter of the ancient sea divinity Phorkys to sire Polyphemus (1.72) reinforces this regressive pattern, for this otherwise unknown Thoosa would be of the same generation as the Graiai, the Gorgons, Echidna, and Typhon (cf. Hes. Theog. 270-336). In his role as the father of Otus and Ephialtes too Poseidon acquires the same aura of pre-Olympian antiquity (11.305- 20). These precocious and aggressive adolescents closely resemble Hesiod's Silver Race (cf. 9.317f. and WD 132-36); but they also resem- ble the Theogony's Titans or monsters like Typhoeus in their attack on Olympus and also in their close connection with the earth (11.309).

'9See also L. Slatkin, "Genre and Generation in the Odyssey," Metis 1 (1986) 264- 66. It is interesting that the Odyssey never describes Polyphemus' behavior explicitly in terms of hubris or atasthalia, perhaps because his world is still ignorant of a standard of action that opposes dike and hubris.

20On the problem of the chronological placement of Homer's Giants see A. Heu- beck, S. West, and J. B. Hainsworth, eds., A Commentary on Homer's Odyssey, vol. 1 (Oxford 1988) ad 7.59. Odysseus refers to the Giants as a "savage race" (agria phula, 7.206) and later likens the Laestrygonians to them (10.120). Indeed these last are like slightly evolved Cyclopes: they are huge, violent, and anthropophagous, but they have an agora (10.114) and an astu (10.118). Their capacity for cooperation in fact makes them far more dangerous than the Cyclopes. While Polyphemus kills only six men, the Laestrygo- nians destroy all of Odysseus' ships but one (10.121-32).

21For the differences between the Homeric and Hesiodic Cyclopes see Mondi (note 15 above) 18ff., 22ff. Like Homer, however, Hesiod introduces his Cyclopes with an epithet denoting their overweening violence (huperbion etor ekhontas, Theog. 139; cf. Od. 6.5, 9.106), and this may indicate that the two versions are not quite so separate as Mondi suggests.

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CHARLES SEGAL

Just as the Odyssey tries to bring the polycentric, polytheistic world order under the unified morality of Zeus, so it tends to suppress or displace the cosmogonic strife in the background of the Iliad.22 The Odyssean Poseidon seems to move back into a pre-Olympian time of monsters, Titans, and Giants; but the poem subsumes this chronologi- cal or historical dimension of the world order into the here and now of

Zeus's reign. By thus absorbing the struggles for cosmic sovereignty from the remote past into the present (or, in other terms, projecting the diachronic on the synchronic axis of the narrative), the Odyssey estab- lishes its Olympian, Zeus-governed present as the only perspective from which an older order can be viewed. And in that perspective Po- seidon appears as an archaic feature of the world, the representative of an obsolescent world order. To put it differently, what is a diachronic process in Hesiod's Theogony and in the glimpses of cosmogonic narra- tion in the Iliad has here become part of a contrast, in the present, between Zeus and Poseidon, in which the latter is on the way out, as it were, and in fact disappears when the scene shifts fully to the narrative present on Ithaca.

In his contact with both Phaeacians and Cyclopes, Odysseus is the catalyst for pushing the residual old order into the new Zeus-gov- erned world. Rejecting Calypso's offer of immortality (cf. 5.215-24), he refuses the possibility of a world, like that of the Phaeacians of long ago, where the barriers between god and mortal could be fluid (7.199- 210). By injecting the sharp separation between mortality and divinity that he carries with him from the Calypso episode, he radically alters the Phaeacians' relation to their most important god, Poseidon. Just as the Phaeacian island is the point of Odysseus' own return from the moribund ease of Calypso's island to the "real" world of work, suffer- ing, and justice on Ithaca, so the Phaeacians' contact with him intro- duces them to the harsher side of their divine ancestor (13.128-87).

Earlier in the Phaeacian episode, Demodocus' song of Ares and Aphrodite presents Poseidon as a dignified, effective peacemaker who conciliates conflicting positions through negotiation and the quasi-legal procedures of pledges and guarantees (8.343-58). But this image of a pacific Poseidon is bracketed by the frame of the song and thus sepa- rated from the Poseidon that Odysseus knows and will cause the Phaea-

22E.g., II. 1.401-6, 8.13-27, 8.477-83, 15.18-24. See C. H. Whitman, "Hera's An- vils," HSCP 74 (1970) 37-42, and L. Slatkin, "The Wrath of Thetis," TAPA 116 (1986) 10-14.

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

cians to know (13.149-87). Demodocus' conciliatory Poseidon, spokes- man of flexibility and forgiveness, is appropriate to his song's light, happy, sensual world of wit and laughter-the kind of world that the Phaeacians think of themselves as inhabiting (8.334-43; cf. 246-49).23 Odysseus' anger at Euryalus' challenge has already revealed the differ- ences between his world and the Phaeacians' (8.158-234); his relation to Poseidon will soon take those differences to a more serious level. The

imagined Poseidon of Demodocus differs from the Poseidon experi- enced by Odysseus as Demodocus' tale of Hephaestus' ultimately in- consequential punishment of Ares differs from Odysseus' ruthless ven- geance on his wife's suitors on Ithaca. In contrast to the wronged husband's acceptance of compensation from Poseidon in Demodocus' song, Odysseus categorically refuses any such offer of compensation from the suitors (22.55-64).24

These differences are analogous to the contrast between Zeus's rosy view of helpful Phaeacians who will honor Odysseus "like a god" and send him home without harm and with rich gifts (5.36-40) and the dangerous Phaeacians about whom Athena gives Odysseus an early warning (7.32-36). Here too the Phaeacians' suspicion of strangers stands in suggestive proximity to their special favor from Poseidon (7.35). These two views of the Phaeacians are an index of a "Jovian" and a "Neptunian" world order respectively. Zeus, looking ahead to the fulfillment of the action in the broad perspective appropriate to his role in the poem (and his function as Zeus Teleios), defines the Phaeacians solely as the instruments of the return that he prophesies. But Athena, who executes those orders in the details of a mortal's experience, must acquaint her charge with the other, Neptunian side. At the end of the episode, in book 13, the ominous side of the Phaeacians, again ex- pressed through their relation with Poseidon, is turned against them- selves (13.128ff.); but here too, beyond their ken, Zeus is exercising

23 This is virtually the only episode in the poem that depicts the frivolous side of the gods that we see in the Iliad, but the Odyssey will give Zeus no part of the frivolity; he is very much in the background (cf. 8.306): see W. Burkert, "Das Lied von Ares und Aphro- dite," RhM 103 (1960) 143. The ancient commentators noted the absence of Zeus: see schol. ad 8.344. Poseidon's attempt to end a quarrel here is very different from his eager- ness to pick a fight with Apollo in the Theomachy of the Iliad (21.435ff.).

24The parallelism between Hephaestus' situation in the song and Odysseus' on Ithaca was familiar to ancient readers: see Athenaeus 5.192d-e and Burkert (note 23 above) 140.

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CHARLES SEGAL

some control over Poseidon (13.139-58), as he has done from the very beginning (1.68-79).25

Both the Phaeacians and the Cyclopes are hosts who underesti- mate the consequences of entertaining their guest and, as a result, are themselves changed forever by a limitation or maiming of power. In both cases the loss is accompanied by the recognition of an ancient oracle (palaiphata thesphata, 9.507 = 13.172). The Phaeacians are supe- rior to the Cyclops in remembering their oracle before its fulfillment (8.555-69). Yet the knowledge does them no good (cf. 8.562f.); and, like the Cyclopes, they trust too much in being "dear to the gods" (6.203; cf. 9.107). Thus King Alcinous dismisses the prophecy with an insouciance characteristic of Phaeacian complacency: "The god would accomplish these things, or they would be unfulfilled, as seemed dear to his heart" (8.570f.). In contrast to Aeolus (10.73-75), who has a god's clear- sighted, distanced perspective on mortal life, the Phaeacians' fore- knowledge of the disaster connected with transporting a mortal like Odysseus does not dissuade them from their promised escort.

Polyphemus not only rejects Odysseus' claim to the rights of guests and strangers protected by Zeus (9.266-71); he also regards the Cyclopes as exempt from the rule of the gods. The Cyclopes, he ex- plains, "pay no heed to Zeus who bears the aegis nor to the blessed gods, since we are much stronger" (polu pherteroi, 9.275f.). But Poly- phemus is both impious and wrong.26 The death of Locrian Ajax earlier (4.503-11) provided a warning about claiming independence of the di- vine will. The Poseidon of the Cyclopeia is not yet so morally devel- oped.

As the wine that makes Odysseus' revenge possible comes, ulti- mately, from "Zeus's increase" (9.111), the Cyclopes' absolute "trust in the gods" for their sustenance points to a less beneficent side of the divine gift. The verse on the growth that "Zeus's rain" brings (111) recurs, for the only other time in the poem, in Polyphemus' mouth as he praises Odysseus' vintage and compares it to nectar and ambrosia (9.357-59):

25Poseidon's punishment of Locrian Ajax in 4.503-11, however, suggests a morally concerned Poseidon who, like Zeus, reacts against boasting and the ate of defying the gods.

26Contrast H. Dem. 148, where one of the well-behaved and reverent princesses of Eleusis insists on how mortals must endure the gifts of the gods, "for they are much stronger" (polu pherteroi).

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

xai y&a KvxXoETrool (tQEL i Le6cOQOg @aQovQa olvov EQLoToC4VUXov, XaCi Oq(>v ALO6g 6O0PQOg &dEl-

a&Xk T66' &dpQooiTlg xai vEXTa6O EoTLV aJEoQQ@Wc.

The rain from Zeus that gives the Cyclopes their easy life provides Odysseus with the means of vengeance.

Polyphemus' comparison of the wine to nectar and ambrosia (359) also points up the extreme distance between this cave-dwelling herds- man-cannibal and the gods on Olympus. Polyphemus calls the wine "ambrosial" and "nectareous" (9.359) when its purpose is to avenge his raw-eating cannibalism (9.344, 347). Moreover, the vin ordinaire that the Cyclopes know is a gift of Zeus that grows without sowing or plowing (9.109). It thus stands in the ambiguous relation of the rest of Cyclopean life to civilization and "culture" in general. The grand cru that Odys- seus enlists against Polyphemus, on the other hand, is hypercivilized: it is a gift of the priest of Apollo, bestowed because Odysseus and his men protected the priest and his family (9.196-201).27

It is right, morally and artistically, then, for this wine to stand at the furthest possible distance from Polyphemus' life and behavior. Maron gave it to Odysseus, along with other "radiant gifts" (9.201), as a reward for revering the gods (&a6ocvoi, 200) and for preventing possible violence. Its presence among Odysseus' stores is itself the result of a civilized exchange between men: respect for the gods, the inhibition of violence, and the giving of guest-gifts.

In every way Maron's life is the antithesis of the Cyclops'. While Polyphemus inhabits a cave on the mountain with his sheep (and with- out gods), Maron, a priest of Apollo, lives in a grove of the god (9.200f.) with his small but complete human household, including wife, child, and servants (9.206f.).28 The gifts that accompany his wine include gold and silver vessels and also other civilized foodstuffs, the "provisions" (ac) that Odysseus loads on his ship.29 His wine is a "divine drink," of sweet and godlike bouquet, to be mixed in the proportion twenty to one

27See N. Austin, "Odysseus and the Cyclops: Who is Who?" in Approaches to Homer, ed. C. A. Rubino and C. W. Shelmerdine (Austin 1983) 20f.

28The fact that Maron keeps the knowledge of this wine from all the servants except the housekeeper (9.205f.) of course shows its preciousness, but it may also prefig- ure the guile with which Odysseus uses it against Polyphemus.

29In 2.289f. such "provisions" are described as including "wine and grain, marrow of men," and so imply the food of a fully civilized diet, not the Cyclops' milk and raw (human) meat.

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CHARLES SEGAL

(9.205-11). But the Cyclops, though he calls it a draught of nectar and ambrosia, drinks it unmixed and then belches it out along with gobbets of raw human flesh (9.372-74), merely substituting it for the milk that he drank "unmixed" with his grisly meal earlier (9.297). This "unmixed milk" (9.295) thus prepares for the disparity later between the wine and its drinker and is not, as Denys Page claimed, "a very small but very characteristic oversight."30

The wine, so perverted from its original use, proves to be the appropriate exchange with the Cyclops after all. Odysseus gives it to him in place of the guest-rights that Polyphemus refused to honor, and it completes the negative reciprocity of Cyclopean hospitality. All the guest-gifts are harmful, and the wine enables Odysseus to rob Poly- phemus of his sight as the pendant to the Cyclops' gift of eating Odys- seus last.

The Cyclopes are taken in by Odysseus' trick of "No Man," Outis / metis, because, as they tell Polyphemus, "If no man is doing you violence, alone as you are, there is no way to avoid sickness from great Zeus, but do you pray to your father Lord Poseidon" (9.410-12). Poly- phemus, then, was even duller than his fellow Cyclopes, for in respect to both life (111) and possible death (411) the Cyclopes are in fact depen- dent on and weaker than the gods.31 Later, Polyphemus will take their advice and pray to Poseidon, but only when it is too late (9.526ff.).

In one further respect the Cyclops has little justification for boast- ing of superiority to the gods, for his own life is hedged about by a prophecy of disaster (9.507-14). He lacks the wit to see that such ora- cles, though communicated by a mantis aner (508), nevertheless derive from Zeus and the will of Zeus. Although he knows that there is a moira for the life of Odysseus (532) over which he has no control, he can- not perceive any moral pattern or larger purpose behind these future events. Odysseus, by contrast, in his first address to Polyphemus, had attributed his landing on the Cyclopes' island to the counsel or metis of Zeus (9.262).32

30D. L. Page, The Homeric Odyssey (Oxford 1955) 7. 31The ancient commentators noted the contradiction between Polyphemus' claim

in 9.275 and this statement in 9.411, and attributed it to his bad character and his isolation from the other Cyclopes: see schol. ad 9.411.

32Zeus's "unerring plan" (earlier in the work but later in the chronology of Odys- seus' return) had already set forth another part of the hero's moira, namely that he will "see his dear ones and come to his high-roofed house and his own native land" (5.41f.).

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

When Polyphemus answers Odysseus' boast with his own claim to be the son of Poseidon, he raises the possibility that his divine father "will heal me if he wishes, he and not any one else of the blessed gods or of mortal men" (520f.).33 By so vehemently separating Poseidon from the other gods, Polyphemus projects upon Olympus something of his own isolation among the Cyclopes. He betrays a total lack of under- standing about the divine order, wherein Poseidon's "will" (ai x' e0E- XnoL, 9.520) is subordinate to Zeus's. The poem's very first scene had shown Zeus already countermanding Poseidon's will (1.78f.); and in book 5 Zeus reiterates that Odysseus' return is part of his "unerring plan" (nemertea boulen, 5.30). When that plan is fulfilled in book 13, Poseidon even repeats Zeus's words (13.136-38 = 5.38-40) and has to content himself with punishing the Phaeacians (cf. 13.131-33).

Polyphemus' emphatic exclusion of "all the other blessed gods" in 520, then, is a serious blunder, and it reflects a mode of behavior consistent with what we have seen of him hitherto. He has presumed unjustifiably upon Poseidon's "will" and power. His fellow countrymen might have given him better advice, for they know that diseases come from Zeus and are not to be avoided (411), even though they suggest that he also pray to Poseidon (412).

It is an inconsistency worthy of Polyphemus' moral obtuseness that, while he boasts that Poseidon himself "will, if he wishes, heal" him, he in fact prays only for revenge. He asks for the blockage of Odysseus' return, not for the healing of his eye. The other Cyclopes had advised him differently: "One cannot avoid sickness (that comes) from great Zeus; but do you pray to your father Lord Poseidon" (9.411f.). Their counsel had made such a prayer for healing a real possibility;34 but Polyphemus' own brutishness condemns him to continue his suffer- ing. The Cyclops is left blind in more than one sense.

Another feature of the prophecy reveals the same brutishness and

Zeus's statement is not inconsistent with the Cyclops' curse, for Zeus also knows that the return is not apemon (5.40); but here, where he addresses Odysseus' divine sponsor, he emphasizes the gains rather than the losses. Cf. Alcinous' confidence that there is "no fear for (his ships) to be harmed" (pemanthenai, 8.563), since "we are the pain-free escorters of all" (pompoi apemones, 8.566).

33This confidence in Poseidon's potential helpfulness forms a pendant to Alcinous' facile dismissal of the prophesied threat from Poseidon in 8.570f.

34The phrasing of 9.412 suggests that Polyphemus might expect help for his eye from Poseidon because the god is his father.

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ignorance. Polyphemus can understand it only in his own terms, i.e., brute force and conquest (9.513-16): he expected a big, strong attacker, but instead only some small, puny fellow "subdued me with wine" (516).35 Nor does he make any connection between this prophecy and his behavior toward Odysseus or his flouting of Zeus Xenios (272-78). Despite his curse on Odysseus, he is an unregenerate believer in brute force. Paradoxically, however, he succeeds despite himself; and the means that he uses only as a last resort prove to be the right ones. His last missile fails to reach Odysseus' ship, but his curse eventually does hit its mark (9.536-40). The spoken word of the prayer, the invisible and distant fulfillment, proves, after all, the more effective instrument of revenge.

Polyphemus would also repeat his earlier outrage in his ironical offering of "guest-gifts" ('tva TOL JITe eivlMa OELo, 517f.; cf. 356, 'va TOt 6C) gilvLov). Yet the parallelism between his gesture of stretching forth his hands in prayer to Poseidon (527) and Odysseus' prayerful gesture to Zeus Xenios (294) confirms Odysseus' interpretation of his revenge as an act of just punishment, or tisis, sponsored by the gods (TOC oE ZESg TELGaCTO xati 0eOL akkXo, 479; cf. 270, 275-78). Indeed Odysseus' claim- ing of "Zeus and the other gods" as avengers in 9.479 may be an ironical reminder of Polyphemus' own scorn of "Zeus and the blessed gods" in 275f.

Even in the depths of Polyphemus' cave, Odysseus had expected divine help, in this case from Athena, for the act of tisis (9.316f.): 'l rJCO TeLoacLtrlv, 6oiq 6e [tot erXo; A90lvrI. At that point he and his men were in the grip of amechanie, despairing helplessness before the Cyclops' "cruel deeds" (295). But the tables are turned when the Cyclops' only recourse is prayer to the god-a tacit acknowledgment, to us, though not to him, of that inferiority to the gods that he had so strongly abjured in his first act of violence (275ff.). This moral ignorance of the Cyclops supports, per contrarium, the view of the gods stated in the proem. Polyphemus' atasthaliai include both the cruel acts themselves and the false assumptions about the gods on which his behavior rests (9.275- 77).

Odysseus at this stage still has much to learn about the gods, as

35Dimock (note 12 above) 113 seems to me to read the Cyclops' response far too optimistically. For the Cyclops' acceptance of the power of the gods, except in the nar- rowest sense of his prayer to Poseidon, there is no evidence in the text.

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

his own narrative enables us to discern. He invoked Zeus's justice in his first boast (9.478-80), but he soon takes the dangerous step of presum- ing what Poseidon will do: "Would that I could deprive you of life and send you down to Hades, since not even the Earth-shaker will heal your eye" (525).36 It is at this point of Odysseus' gratuitous verbal aggression that Polyphemus utters his curse (9.526ff.). Only then does Odysseus glimpse the possible power of the prayer and therefore (im- plicitly) his own folly: "So he [Polyphemus] spoke in prayer, and the god of the dark hair heard him" (9.536). When Odysseus sacrifices the Cyclops' great ram to Zeus "who rules over all," he recognizes that Zeus "did not lay hold of the sacrifices but was deliberating how all the well-oared ships should perish and all my goodly companions" (9.552- 55). Viewed only as narrative information, these lines show the limited knowledge of a mortal, immersed in the stream of events. But they may also indicate the retrospective knowledge of the man who is telling this tale many years later and from this distance can discern a pattern of divine intervention that he could not see before.

We should not assume that Odysseus' comment in 9.553-55 proves the moral arbitrariness of Zeus or is the result of the sloppy fitting together of different versions. Homer is careful to separate his narratorial omniscience from Odysseus' ignorance of divine interven- tions, even when they are on his behalf.37 We the audience know Zeus's design only by the poem's fiction of the omniscient narrator (cf. 1.65-79 and 5.30-42).38 The connection between the Cyclops' curse and the will of Zeus is made only in the third-person account of the omniscient narrator in a scene on Olympus to which Odysseus cannot, of course, be privy (13.125-45; cf. 1.68-75). In contrast to the direct, material,

36See schol. ad 9.525 for the folly of Odysseus' assumption. 370d. 12.389f. is the clearest instance. Cf. also 6.325f., where Odysseus does not

know that Athena is in fact beside him now, in disguise, to help him; and in 7.263, in summarizing his travels to Arete, he does not know whether Calypso let him go "because of Zeus's message, or whether her mind was changed." On Homer's care to keep mortal and divine knowledge distinct see 0. Jorgensen, "Das Auftreten der Gotter in den Biicher L-pt der Odyssee," Hermes 39 (1904) 366ff.

38The inconsistency, if such it is, between what Odysseus says of Zeus in 9.553-55 and what Zeus says in books 1 and 5 can most simply be explained by Odysseus' assump- tion that human affairs generally are governed in some way or other by Zeus (so too, e.g., Nausicaa at 6.188f.) and that Poseidon's agency will, however remotely, have the approval of Zeus: see note 40 below.

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CHARLES SEGAL

anthropomorphic intervention of Poseidon in his affairs, this negative sign from Zeus in 9.552 is remote, mysterious, and hard for Odysseus to explain or interpret.

On Polyphemus' island the hero is drawn toward resemblance with his antagonist. For both the hero and the monster, in different ways, hatred and anger threaten to override their own good. If Po- seidon's wrath is an extension of the primitive brutishness of the son who calls it forth, Odysseus sinks to a similar level of impulsive anger and vengefulness: he addresses the Cyclops "with wrathful spirit" (xexoTrn6T 0ovU C, 9.501) and makes his disastrous boast (9.501-5).39 Yet, unlike the Cyclops, Odysseus eventually recognizes the consequences of his behavior, for he is, of course, telling this tale of his own errors. He lets us see his own retrospective recognition of his folly when he tells how he refused to heed his companions' "gentle words" (9.492f., 500). The closest that Polyphemus comes to any such opportunity for reflec- tion is his address to his ram, a dumb beast who is carrying the enemy to safety; and even here his address reiterates both the terms of his deception (Outis in 9.455, 460) and his own outrageous behavior.

In the Cyclops episode, however, Odysseus is still partially blind to the will of Zeus. Despite his foreboding at the sacrifice of Poly- phemus' ram (9.553-55), he never makes the explicit connection be- tween Poseidon's anger and Zeus's complicity in the hardness and losses of his return. In his retrospective comment on the sacrifice he mentions neither the Cyclops nor Poseidon.40 He learns of Posei- don's wrath, at first hand, only when he has escaped from it to Ithaca (13.342f.). Strictly speaking, he is incorrect in asserting that "Zeus was deliberating how all the well-oared ships might be destroyed and my goodly companions" (9.554f.), for we never hear of Zeus planning in

39This phrase recurs only twice more in the poem, both in situations of extreme anger: Odysseus' address to the impudent maid Melantho in 19.71 and the mutilation of Melanthius in 22.477. It is akin obviously to the kotos of Poseidon himself (11.102 = 13.342).

40Even Teiresias' prophecy does not seem to open his eyes (11.102f.). When Ino- Leucothea asks Odysseus why Poseidon hates him so (5.339-41), she naturally assumes that a shipwrecked man has incurred the sea god's wrath: see 4.505ff. In 5.423, 5.446, and 6.326 Odysseus knows of or assumes Poseidon's wrath; but even though he has had the prophecy of Teiresias, he says nothing of the Cyclops. When Odysseus does get a brief glimpse of divine dealings, thanks to Calypso, it is of the wrath of Helios, not Poseidon (12.374-90). Some of the difficulty of 9.553-55 may be due to Homer's attempt to combine a straightforward narration of the past with the first-person retrospection.

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

exactly this way. His "unerring plan" aims in quite the contrary direc- tion (5.30). Early in the poem he explicitly says that Poseidon's anger at the blinding of his son is the cause of Odysseus' delay (1.68-70).

The nature of divine justice appears differently when Odysseus gets beyond the morally primitive realm of the Cyclops. When he de- scribes the culminating disaster of his travels, the shipwreck off Thri- nacia, he attributes both destructiveness and helpfulness to Zeus: Zeus destroys the ship by lightning (12.415f.; cf. 7.250), and Zeus prevents Scylla's reappearance (12.445f.). In noting this helpful intervention, Odysseus here gives Zeus the paternal epithet, "father of gods and men" (12.445). This shipwreck, unlike that of book 5, is under the sign of Zeus, not Poseidon, for it is not merely the result of a specific god's personal animosity but has a claim to justice. Odysseus' explicit men- tion of Zeus at this point may reflect his recognition of the justice of his companions' doom. He had recently learned from Calypso, shortly after Hermes' visit to her island (12.389f.), that the agent of destruction is Zeus, but he also knows that Zeus has taken over from Helios the task of punishing a human transgression against divine prerogatives (cf. 12.374-88). When he makes his men swear a solemn oath on Thrinacia, "that no one by his evil recklessness (atasthaliai kakai) kill any cow or sheep" (12.300f.), he echoes the poet's own words in the proem on their fatal atasthaliai (1.6-9) and so, presumably, is moving closer to the truthful knowledge embodied in that narratorial omniscience.

III. HELIOS AND THRINACIA

Although the Cyclops includes "losing all the companions" in his curse (9.534), it is not the curse itself which produces this part of his revenge. It results from the men's own transgression of a divine com- mand, the taboo on eating the cattle of Helios.41 The pattern validates Zeus's theology in the proem, which we now see through Odysseus' eyes, and also introduces an important change in the conception of

41 On the religious and ritual violations involved in the eating of Helios' cattle see J.-P. Vernant, "Manger aux pays du Soleil," in La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, by Marcel Detienne and J.-P. Vernant (Paris 1979) 243-48. Before Thrinacia, Odysseus does not know that his men are doomed. Teiresias had pointed out that even the Cyclops' curse would not necessarily lead to the companions' annihilation, for Poseidon would only make the return "hard" (argaleon, 11.101). Circe then repeats Teiresias' words verbatim (12.137-41 = 11.110-14).

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CHARLES SEGAL

divinity. Helios' revenge, unlike Poseidon's, develops from a series of carefully demarcated stages that reveal the companions' responsibility at nearly every point.42

First stage. Repeating the warnings of Teiresias and Circe, Odys- seus urges them to bypass Thrinacia (12.271-76). Led by the factious Eurylochus, the men refuse, complaining of exhaustion (12.278-93). Odysseus gives in, on condition that they swear not to harm the cattle, and the men so swear (12.303f.). When they do land, Odysseus repeats the warning yet again (12.320-23).

Second stage. A month passes, and they are becalmed and short of food (12.325-32). Odysseus withdraws to pray to all the gods of Olym- pus, but they answer his prayer by "pouring sweet sleep on (his) lids" (12.337f.). In his absence, Eurylochus "began his evil plan" (339) and makes a second speech, rousing the companions to disobey. They can, he suggests, make reparation with offerings if they reach Ithaca; in any case a swift death at sea is preferable to slow starvation on the island (12.340-51).

Third stage. Odysseus awakens, discovers what the men have done, and complains to Zeus and the other gods for having "brought (him) to disastrous folly (ate) through pitiless sleep," during which the others "devised their enormous deed" (12.371-73). This complaint to "Zeus and the other gods" illustrates just the accusation that Zeus leveled against mankind in the proem (1.32ff.). The underlying cause of the catastrophe is the men's own folly, not the gods' malevolence. The gods merely make use of the weakness of mortal flesh (Odysseus' som- nolence) to give the companions the space and freedom in which to destroy themselves.43 In contrast to the Cyclops episode, this moral causation is kept prominently in view.

42W. Schadewaldt, "Der Helioszorn in der Odyssee," in Studi in onore di Luigi Castiglioni (Florence 1960) 865f., gives a good account of the gradual, step-by-step pro- cess of the companions' doom but overstates the importance of Odysseus' oath as a moralizing addition that fits the episode into the theology of the proem (867f.). The oath is in fact not mentioned again after the landing on Thrinacia (12.298-304). See also Bona (note 1 above) 10ff. and Andersen (note 11 above) 12-14.

43The gods' role in sending sleep is arguably ambiguous. The sleep seems to come as an ironic answer to Odysseus' prayer of 12.337f. The contrast between the generic epithets of the "sweet sleep" that frames this motif (glukus hupnos, nedumos hupnos, 338, 366) and the "pitiless sleep" (neles hupnos) with which the gods have allegedly lulled him into "infatuation" (ate) in his outcry on awakening in 12.372 may also suggest that Odysseus is blaming the gods for the normal mortal weaknesses of the flesh. Compare the role of sleep in proving the weaknesses of mortality in the Gilgamesh Epic (tablet 11.197-

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

Fourth stage. Helios learns of the slaughter of his cattle and at once addresses Zeus, threatening to withhold his light from the world unless he receives "retribution," tisis (12.378, 382). Meanwhile the men sacrifice and eat the forbidden cattle, until Zeus, in due course, lures them again to the open sea, where he destroys the ship. Only Odysseus survives (12.397ff.).

The gods, to be sure, do not go out of their way to help the strait- ened Greeks; and the "sweet sleep" that they send to Odysseus precipi- tates the disaster. We feel sympathy for the doomed companions; their fault, given the circumstances, seems pardonable and in any case not deserving of such severe punishment. But Odysseus' narrative empha- sizes the men's responsibility rather than divine malevolence. Like Ae- gisthus in the proem and like the suitors later, the companions are fully warned. They also yield to "reckless folly" (atasthaliai) despite having alternative courses of action. When they decide to sacrifice Helios' cattle they are not actually starving: they are living on fish, birds, and other game (12.330-32). This diet may not be to their taste, but it is enough to keep them alive.

In terms of the common Homeric device of double determination, the gods' intervention is the visible expression of the companions' loss of morale, discipline, and good judgment. At the moment when Odys- seus accedes to Eurylochus' request to land, he recognizes that "a god was plotting evils" (xcta TOTE 6 yl yIwOXOV 6i 6l 8Caxax [i6ET0O 6a(fcov, 12.295). This divine "devising" has its visible, human equivalent when Eurylochus "began his evil counsel to the companions" immediately after the gods send sleep upon Odysseus (12.339). Odysseus himself presciently interprets his men's initial disobedience as "evil reckless- ness," atasthaliai kakai (12.300), thereby bringing their act into line with Zeus's warnings in the proem and the punishment of the suitors.

Even this brief analysis shows how carefully motivated is Helios' anger and how different it is from the circumstances and execution of Poseidon's wrath.44 To this extent, therefore, Odysseus' explanation

228). The thematically related sleep in the Aeolus episode (10.31ff.) is naturalistically motivated by Odysseus' ten days at the rudder all alone (10.31-33). The unmotivated sleep of the Helios episode is possibly the result of a deeper weariness and of increasing loss of control. For the problem and review of previous literature see Bona (note 1 above) 21-23.

44 Such considerations also show the inadequacy of the analysts' view of Helios as a mere doublet of Poseidon: see the review of scholarship in Schadewaldt (note 42 above)

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for his and his men's suffering progresses from a model of merely wrathful retaliation to one of personal responsibility and to an at least partially defined moral causality.

Poseidon never mentions justice. He is motivated solely by an- thropomorphic, personal animosity. Odysseus had committed no crime in punishing the Cyclops, and the god is merely holding a bitter grudge. When Zeus sanctions Poseidon's reprisal against the innocent (13.128- 58), he is acceding to a pattern of behavior which, as we have noted, is bracketed as remote or obsolete through the association of Cyclopes, Phaeacians, and Poseidon with an older Golden Age-Silver Age world. It is as if a remnant of the Phaeacians' ancient proximity to the Giants and Cyclopes still clings to them (cf. 6.4-6, 7.59ff.). Even so Zeus tem- pers Poseidon's violence, so that the sea god does not "smash" the ship but only turns it to stone (13.151 and 163f.; cf. 177f.).45 Poseidon now goes off "apart" (nosphi, 13.164), resuming the situation where we found him at the opening of the epic (1.20).

IV. FROM VENDETTA TO JUSTICE

Poseidon's anger is pure wrath (kotos, kholos) in a narrowly per- sonal vendetta. Homer's contemporaries, of course, would recognize the right of a family member to exact vengeance. Odysseus implies a story of just such a family vendetta in his first lie on Ithaca (13.258-73). A little later Telemachus learns of a similar story from the prophet Theoclymenus (15.224, 272-78). And the poem will end with the at- tempt by Antinoos' father to take vengeance for the killing of his son (24.433-37). Yet Zeus's opening paradigm of family vengeance, the story of Orestes, imbeds such vendettas in a clearly moral structure of

861 with n. 1. Equally mistaken, I believe, is Fenik's view (note 1 above) 225f. that the Helios episode is "a hasty attempt to harmonize the Helios story with the ethical norms set forth by Zeus in his first speech, an attempt that is simply abandoned within the wrath-tale itself." The problem arose, Fenik argues, because the poet did not want to change "the old adventure stories of the Apologoi" when he incorporated them into his epic (226). But we should distinguish between possible origins and the final effect, or in other words between the diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

45Various attempts have been made, from Aristarchus on, to tone down Zeus's acquiescence in Poseidon's wrath; but the language of 13.158 need refer only to blocking the harbor; and in any case Poseidon's threat seems not to have been carried out (cf. 13.179-83). For recent discussion see R. Friedrich, "Zeus and the Phaeacians: Odyssey 13.158," AJP 110 (1989) 395-99.

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overstepping limits, lacking good sense, and retribution (huper moron, agatha phronein, and tisis, 1.35-43).

The motif of brutal divine anger drops out of the poem when Odysseus escapes from Poseidon's realm in book 13.46 Once outside of the god's reach, he establishes a new relation with divinity, beginning with his face-to-face meeting with his patron goddess, Athena, for the first time since he left Troy (cf. 13.314-23).47 This relation is at once more personal and more focused on moral behavior than what has pre- ceded. The Cyclopes' and Phaeacians' respective relationships with their gods are based on genealogy; Odysseus' relation with Athena, as she indicates, is based on an affinity of natures.48 The shift, in other terms, is from a metonymic to a metaphoric principle, from contiguity (by blood) to affinity (by nature).49 Zeus, who is the most detached of all the gods, is also the fullest embodiment of this relation by principle rather than by kinship. After he appeases his brother Poseidon's wrath against Odysseus and the Phaeacians, he becomes almost wholly a remote Olympian guardian of justice and retribution.

The Helios episode prepares for this progression, for it embodies a shift from the narrow, personal motivation of a particular god to a universal god concerned with the preservation of the world order. The grouping of both of these movements at the poem's major geographical

46For the blinding of Polyphemus and the anger of Poseidon see, e.g., in addition to book 9, 1.68-79, 5.339-41, 5.446, 6.328-31, 11.101-3, 13.125ff., 13.339-43. In Demodo- cus' song of Ares and Aphrodite, however, it is, ironically, Poseidon who points the way to a peaceful, nonviolent solution: see note 23 above.

47On the importance of this scene as a transitional moment in Odysseus' situation see Rutherford (note 6 above) 157-59, with the bibliography in his note 63.

48E.g., 13.296-99, 330-32. See Segal (note 10 above) 39; Clay (note 2 above) 42f., 198f.; cf. also 5.5-20 and P. Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and Iliad, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 46 (Ithaca 1987) 20-23. Note too that Athena's emphasis on her skill in pasi doloisi in her identification of herself to Odysseus in 13.298f. echoes the same terms in Odysseus' self-revelation to the Phaea- cians in 9.19f.: see P. Pucci, "The Proem of the Odyssey," Arethusa 15 (1982) 52.

49One should be careful not to moralize this meeting excessively; and Rutherford (note 6 above) 148 rightly raises the point that Athena's delight in their affinity rests on trickery rather than moral behavior. But morality is not entirely excluded. To be sure, Athena stresses cleverness rather than morality as their common bond; yet the quality of good sense or firmness of mind, ekhephron, in 13.332 has a moral application: cf. 22.411- 16. She appreciates Odysseus' moral qualities, moreover, at the very beginning, when she praises his piety in 1.60-62, and Zeus had agreed. In their meeting in book 13 she obvi- ously cannot talk of sharing the quality of piety with him because she is speaking as a god, and Homer would not call a god "pious."

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transition in book 13 brings together the two developments of divinity: the change from paternal loyalty to affinity of nature and the change from purely anthropomorphic wrath to the administration of justice.

By the end of the epic Odysseus comes close to realizing Zeus's Olympian plan on earth (with some important qualifications, as we shall see) and answering the god's complaint about mortals in the proem. He echoes Zeus's words as he stands over the bodies of the suitors (22.416; cf. 1.34). Later Laertes recognizes his son and his deed in similar terms, the requital of the suitors' "reckless insulting" (atasthalon hubrin etei- san, 24.352).50 Even Penelope, skeptical as she is about Odysseus' re- turn, has no doubts about the mechanism of divine justice: "Some one of the immortals killed them, looking angrily at their outrage that pains the heart and their evil deeds. ... Therefore they suffered woe because of their reckless folly" (23.63-68). The slain suitors, on the other hand, remain totally blind to the moral pattern behind their death. Amphime- don, explaining their demise to Agamemnon in Hades, sees only a vague kakos daimon behind Odysseus' return (24.149). He dimly dis- cerns "the mind of Zeus" (&kk' 6TE b6l ILv eyeiLQ Ali6 v6o0 acyit6XoLo, 24.164), but only as the agent that "arouses Odysseus" from his toler- ance of blows and insults, not as a moral intelligence behind the return as a whole. Like the Cyclops, he never mentions tisis or dike.

V. THE COMPLEXITIES OF JUSTICE

The account of the Cyclops' curse in book 9 shows Odysseus' life story in a triple refraction. He hears his moira foretold (1) in the mouth of an enemy in a tale (2) which he is now telling to the Phaeacians and which we now hear (3) as a tale-within-a-tale. The very fact of report- ing his own failings, particularly with editorial comments like "it would have been much better" (9.228), shows the narrator's own perspective of greater understanding of his past. He even reports the charge that his own "reckless folly" or atasthaliai caused the Cyclops' destruction of his men (10.435-37). At that point Odysseus was not prepared to credit

500n this passage see Dimock (note 12 above) 330. Note too the prophet Hali- therses' remark on the death of the suitors because of their own "evil folly" (atasthaliesi kakesi), 24.458); and he is heeded by the suitors' kin no more than he was by the suitors themselves when he interpreted the omen of the eagles in the assembly of book 2.

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

this view of his moral responsibility, and he would have drawn his sword to strike off the speaker's head (10.438-41). To be sure, the accusation was tempered by the accuser's character and situation: Eurylochus has been traumatized by witnessing Circe's magic (10.435-37). Neverthe- less, Odysseus does not suppress the accusation, nor his own violent reaction to it (10.438-42).51 It is, of course, possible that his intention is also to display himself to the Phaeacians as a man who has learned better; but were his aim only to please his guests he might have kept wholly silent about these unfavorable details.

This retrospective technique expresses one of the Odyssey's un- derlying messages, that human life is always in process: to live as a mortal is to suffer and to change, and to keep learning about both men and gods (1.3). Even when Odysseus has reached his goal of reunion with Penelope, there is more toil ahead, which he unfolds as he relates Teiresias' prophecy (23.248ff.). Even when he is safe among the Phaea- cians and tells them of the Cyclops' prayer, he has learned that an ultimately happy nostos can be robbed of its joy by the losses and sufferings that attend it (9.532-34).

By the end of the poem Odysseus does seem to have learned from his mistakes. When he has killed the last of the suitors, Eurycleia would raise the cry of triumph, but Odysseus "restrained her and held her back, eager though she was" ((XTEQvxc xai eoXE0cv iE[EtEvrv zsE, 22.409). The hero who could not restrain his own boasting years before can now check his servant in a situation where boasting might indeed be safe and appropriate.52 Yet that same earlier episode also prefigured Odysseus' capacity for such restraint, as he resisted his initial impulse to kill Polyphemus in his cave (EiTEQO; &6 tE Ov[tog EQVXEV, 9.302). It is "not piety to boast over dead men," he tells Eurycleia now, for it is the "portion from the gods," their own "harsh deeds," and their own "overweening insolence" that brought about their doom (22.412-16). The last word in 416 brings us back to Zeus's warnings about men's

51C. Gill, "The Character-Personality Distinction," in Characterization and Indi- viduality in Greek Literature, ed. C. Pelling (Oxford 1990) 10f., rightly stresses the ethical accountability and accessibility of Odysseus' account of his past; yet the situation be- comes far more complex when one also considers the multiple refractions of the imbed- ded narrative form.

52 Schol. ad 22.412 cites the occasion of a boast by Odysseus over a fallen enemy in the Iliad (11.450), but rather oddly says nothing of the far more relevant boast to Poly- phemus in the Odyssey.

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atasthaliai in the proem (1.33f.; cf. 1.7), but it is now Odysseus himself who puts this moral construction upon the events.53

In preparing Odysseus for the bloody deed of revenge at his ar- rival on Ithaca, even Athena had taken pleasure in envisaging "some one of the suitors splattering the ground with his blood and his brains" (13.395f.). Her contemplated revenge is strikingly similar to the Cy- clops' murderous feasting (cf. 9.289f.). Her expectation seems to be realized when we do in fact hear of Odysseus, in third-person narra- tion, as "splattered with the blood and gore" of the suitors, though to the relief of the modern reader Homer leaves out the brains (22.402). Here too Odysseus, like the Cyclops, is compared to a ravening lion (22.402-5; 9.292; cf. 4.335ff.). Yet, as we have noted, he immediately restrains himself and his servant with a concern for "piety" (22.411-16), and he orders the purification of the chamber soon after (22.480f.). In this way he separates himself from the brutality of his more "primitive" Cyclopean stage and comes closer to the broad perspective of Zeus in the proem.

Odysseus' house on Ithaca now realizes the positive paradigm of Zeus's justice, of which the negative paradigm was the house of Aga- memnon. In Odysseus' house both Penelope and Laertes respond to the deed of vengeance with a moral interpretation similar to Odysseus' (and to Zeus's): the suitors have suffered for their hubris, kaka erga, atasthaliai, or atasthalos hubris (23.64-67, 24.351f., cited above).

No situation or perception in the Odyssey remains static for very long, and the poem ends neither with the hero's exemplary moral re- straint nor with his close kin's moral justification, but with the continu- ation of the hero's rashness and impulsiveness. In the closing scene, Odysseus does not heed Athena's first call to "hold back" ('ioXE)O0 JtToX0FoU, 24.531; cf. 22.409), despite the "pale green fear" that grips everyone else (24.531-36). To stop him requires a thunderbolt from Zeus himself and then a second admonition by Athena, aimed at him directly ('LiaXo, 543). Athena's warning also repeats Odysseus' own command of restraint to Eurycleia just after the suitors' deaths ('oXEo, 22.411) and earlier to Telemachus ('oXacve, 19.42). Athena thus uses Od-

53Skhetlia erga here in 22.413 was also Odysseus' phrase for the Cyclops' first outrage in 9.295. The phrase occurs only one other time in the Odyssey, when Eumaeus, criticizing the suitors, generalizes about the morality enforced by the gods (14.83f.): "The blessed gods do not love harsh deeds (skhetlia erga), but they pay back retributive justice and the rightful deeds of men."

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ysseus' own admonition against him. It is not just the Cyclops and the suitors who refuse to "heed the gods" and who fall prey to their moral blindness. Yet Odysseus soon does "obey" the goddess (epeitheto, 24.545), as he did not obey his men in the Cyclops episode (9.228 and 500).

The little scene with Athena reflects one of the underlying themes of the epic. Mortal life is always subject to time and change and to the uncontrollable contingencies that these hold. And men are always sub- ject to fits of rashness, anger, and destructive folly. Hence there is al- ways need of Odysseus' virtues of adaptability, moderation, and the awareness of possible retribution from the gods. As we see him in this closing episode of the poem, Odysseus, despite (and even because of) his successes and victories, still needs the restraint, foresight, and pru- dence associated with his goddess Athena.

This danger of slipping back to careless self-importance may ex- plain the hero's somewhat curious omission near the end of the poem. Despite all the suffering that Polyphemus' curse has cost him, when he comes to tell this portion of his adventures to Penelope in their joyful night of reunion, he speaks only of having punished the Cyclops and says nothing of his responsibility for having provoked the curse that so delayed his return (23.312f.). The habit of self-presentation in the Iliadic mold dies hard. Or perhaps Odysseus assumes that his wife will be more interested in hearing about his cleverness than his folly and its cost.

At the end, however, Odysseus is not allowed to become a hero who seeks the unlimited extension of his will and his passion, like Achilles in Iliad 18-22.54 Athena, so closely identified with his most "Odyssean" character traits (cf. 13.330-38), calls him back at the end to being truly Odysseus. As in the proem, she and Zeus work together; they collaboratively insist that this is not the world of the Iliad nor the place for the Iliad's unchecked surge of warlike violence and bloodlust (24.526-47).

In the Iliad the attempts, early in the action, to "end strife" prove ineffectual or partial.55 In the Odyssey divine fiat imposes the cessation

54In Iliad 24 the gods also intervene and impose limits (e.g., 24.112-19), but only after the hero has crossed, or threatened to cross, these limits and thus stands in a position of tragic excess and violation.

55Cf. I/. 1.210, 319; 2.221-24, 243, 277. On neikos and eris in relation to the social order envisaged by epic see Nagy (note 11 above) 226f., 311ff.

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of the "strife" (neikos, 24.543) that divides the social order. These gods, like Zeus in the last book of the Iliad, hold out to men the hope that they may attain (or regain) the more orderly society that we glimpse fleet- ingly in the assembly of book 2, in aspects of the Phaeacian kingdom, and in Odysseus' almost Hesiodic praise of good kingship to Penelope in book 19 (108-14; cf. WD 225-37). In this world, as in the Iliad, vio- lence is not to be the final solution; and the poem ends not with battle but with the conciliatory and civilizing act of oaths on both sides (24.546).56

Odysseus' last Iliadic battle faces both backward and forward. It is a renewal of the vigor of his father, who, thanks to Athena, actually makes the kill, like a warrior of the Iliad (24.516-25). And it assures the future of his line in his son's proof of valor and Laertes' joy in the presence of three generations fighting together (24.504-15). As we know, however, Odysseus' last triumph is not the end of his story. His life requires some further, unknown effort beyond the immediate satis- faction-an effort that is characteristically Odyssean in its motifs of travel, ambiguous words, and encounter with unfamiliar people and customs (cf. 1.3f.). And here he will have to draw on strengths outside himself, in this case the "hope" that Penelope opposes to his foreboding (23.286f.; cf. 23.248-50).57

In the proem Athena asks Zeus, in a striking phrase, why he has so hated Odysseus (TL vv ol TOOOV db65To6o, ZEv, 1.62). Zeus's dis- claimer at once imposes a moral structure on the tale: he recognizes Odysseus' piety and gives assurance of his safe return (1.63-67). Yet this same speech also opens a gap between Zeus's moral concerns (the respect for piety) and another kind of divinity, the purely anthropomor- phic vengefulness of Poseidon for Odysseus' blinding of his son (1.68- 75).

Viewed narratologically, Zeus could be regarded as an authorial function: the sign of the poet's intention to redefine the inherited mate- rial of his tale and stamp it with a moral meaning. Even Zeus's allusion to Poseidon's unceasing wrath could have been accommodated to this

56We may compare the great scene of reconciliation between Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24 or the gods' demand for the return of Hector's body at the beginning of that book; but the Iliad's reconciliation is more firmly grounded in the action and holds a more profoundly tragic sense.

57Penelope's expression of "hope" to Odysseus in a moment of discouragement also recalls Athena's similar "hope" to encourage Telemachus in 2.280.

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DIVINE JUSTICE IN THE ODYSSEY

moral interpretation of Odysseus' suffering, for the cause of this wrath might have been traced to Odysseus' own atasthaliai, on the analogy of Zeus's example of Aegisthus (1.32-43). The Cyclops episode, however, avoids this model, for Odysseus, not Zeus, is its narrator, and he never refers to his provocation of Polyphemus as atasthaliai. Yet the very fact of allowing the moralized interpretation of the whole poem to become visible in Zeus's explicit blaming of Poseidon also reveals the other possibility, that the poet might have sung a tale of divine wrath, cruelty, injustice, nonrationalized and nonmoralized misfortune, and that in fact the poem we are hearing exists as the negation of such a tale.

This "other" in the narrative-the possibility of a surd, malevo- lent, amoral blocking force or of uncontrollable violence-never fully disappears, even after Poseidon's effective exit from the action in book 13. We glimpse it through the chinks in the moralized tale that we have already noted: the doom of the companions in the Thrinacian episode and our sympathy for them, Odysseus' ruthless determination to extir- pate all the suitors, his vengeance on the maidservants, and his blood- thirstiness in the last battle. Interpreters have sometimes regarded these morally recalcitrant elements as part of the poem's myth of "na- ture's" refusal to assimilate to "culture" or as the clash between the

centripetally organized "high" mythic structure and the "lower" cen- trifugal material of folktale.58 However we conceptualize it, the tension remains as a disturbing but also dynamic force in the poem; and it becomes visible particularly when the Zeus narrative and the Poseidon narrative meet, as they do in Zeus's explanation of Odysseus' suffering in the proem, in the final, suspended fate of the Phaeacians, and (in displaced form) in the wrath of Helios.

Ending with the authority of Zeus and Athena together repeats the strategy of the proem, momentarily uncovering and then rejecting irra- tional violence. It also reaffirms the moral order enunciated by Zeus in the proem, once again in combination with Athena (1.44ff.). Indeed, the ending seems to look back directly to the proem in Athena's warning, in the last verse of direct speech in the poem, that Odysseus' disobedience will incur Zeus's wrath (24.544), thus potentially turning him into that object of Zeus's "hatred" that Zeus himself abjured there (1.62ff.).59 Odysseus' hesitation to obey also recreates the proem's chink or gap in

58 See J. Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey, Martin Classical Lectures, n.s. 1 (Princeton 1990) 75-93, especially 82f.

590n the echo between these passages see Peradotto (note 58 above) 166f.

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the smoothness of a completely rationalized, morally ordered narrative in which the hero is rewarded for following the justice of Zeus. In like manner we are reminded of the continuing wrath of Poseidon, in the domestic side of the return, as Odysseus tells Penelope of Teiresias' prophecy and his future, inland journey with the oar (23.248-53, 265- 84).

Both of the poem's movements toward closure, the domestic in book 23 and the martial in book 24, still leave a gap between fulfillment and suspension, analogous to the closure of the nostos narrative in book 13. Although husband and wife are reunited, there is the threat of future separation and "measureless suffering" (23.249). Although the hero has defeated the enemies of his house and won back his kingdom, there remain his closing recalcitrance to peace and the abruptness of a di- vinely imposed ending.

All of which is to say that the Odyssey is poetry, not moral philoso- phy. The model of a god's personal wrath as a blocking force is never entirely forgotten (cf. 23.276-79, 352f.), so that Zeus's justice emerges not as a flat certainty but often as a distant and precarious goal. The vision of a world governed ultimately by divine justice has the status of a vision, a kind of hypothesis set forth in the quasi-authorial voice of Zeus but still open to the other, harder, and more painful visions of how men and gods may behave and of why misery, violence, and suffering still continue to define the human condition.60

CHARLES SEGAL HARVARD UNIVERSITY

601 thank Gregory Nagy and Stephen Scully for friendly criticism. The research for this study was carried out during a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California, with financial support at the Center provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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