The humility of Odysseus
a frieze by Alexander Stoddart
My students are often initially scandalized by what passes for humility in Homer’s Odyssey. The titular hero brags about everything from the skill of his aim to the size of the ram he clings to in escaping the lair of the cyclops Polyphemus. Crucially, though, he refuses to put himself on the same level as the gods. This seems, at first, to be enough. Other work I read with them reinforces this idea: a character in Euripides’ Bacchae is killed by dogs after claiming to be a better hunter than Artemis, and elsewhere in the Odyssey itself Ajax is killed by Poseidon immediately after bragging about how Poseidon couldn’t kill him. It seems like the only guardrail for the mortal ego is to remember its sub-god status. (With Odysseus, at least, the hype is not without merit: Athena herself suggests in Book 13 that Odysseus might be more cunning than even most gods. Several gods call him “godlike.”)
Throughout the work, Homer’s story of Odysseus is full of the stories Odysseus tells about himself, each one a testament to his own magnanimity. Odysseus is also brought to a fuller understanding of himself by the glorifying stories told about him by the Phaeacian bard Demodocus. The work becomes a sort of nesting doll of hype, a story about Odysseus full of stories about Odysseus, sometimes told by Odysseus himself. There seems to be almost no limit to the glorification of the hero, until Book 11 gives us a curious episode involving two oars, which suggests that Homer might have a different humility – a radically countercultural one for the time – in mind for the hero.
At this point in the story, Odysseus is told by Circe to journey to the Underworld to speak to the ghost of the prophet Tiresias. His first ghostly encounter, however, is with the shade of his crewman Elpenor, who has a request. The reader is expecting him, as we’ve been told of his death (hung over, he plummets from Circe’s roof and snaps his neck). Odysseus weeps at the sight (another thing that catches my students off-guard is how in-touch with his emotions he is) and assures his former crewman that he will do what he asks. Elpenor’s request to his former captain is that Odysseus mark his burial place with an oar. He wants passersby to associate this spot with a man of the sea, who rowed with strength and adventured with a crew. This marker will inform the assumptions of anyone passing by. We understand the oar, then, as an artifact of the sort of life to which a person who died in a stupid way might want to redirect attention.
Fewer than 50 lines later, Tiresias, the ghostly prophet endowed with perfect knowledge, prescribes another oar-related task. This time, Odysseus must take his own oar far enough inland that it is mistaken for a winnowing fan. There, he must fix it in the ground. Only then can he offer acceptable sacrifice to Poseidon, and only then can he ensure a peaceful death for himself (“gentle,” Stanley Lombardo translates this death’s description, Robert Fagles adds “painless” in his own translation) after his journeying and struggles. As an object, the oar has the same meaning as it does for Elpenor: strength and adventure and seafaring glory. Odysseus, however, must take his to a place where that meaning cannot be understood by anyone else.
To complete this task would require something closer to a modern, even Christian, understanding of humility than a classical Greek one. This is not merely drawing the line at comparing yourself to an immortal, Tiresias is calling on the hero not just to leave home and journey again, but to quite literally cast down his identity for the sake of his family and his relationship to the divine. Odysseus must takes his oar and his stories to a place where they won’t impress anyone. The blind prophet is suggesting that the only way our accomplished hero might achieve rest is to put his heroic accomplishments behind him.
Later in Book 11, another conversation unlocks this point even further. Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles, the ultimate example of a concept called Kleos, or battle glory. Achilles died at the peak of his powers, never having missed a step or suffered the indignity of advanced age. His funeral games paused the Trojan War so both sides could pay their respects. He represents everything that Odysseus’ society would expect him to want. It is a shock, then, that he has no regard for his reputation or the honor he continues to receive from the living and the dead alike, and cares only for news of his son. It’s a stunning reversal from Elpenor, who wants to disguise an inglorious death with the misleading trappings of a glorious life. Achilles would trade his epic hero’s funeral for life as a dirt farmer’s hired hand, if it meant being with his family.
Odysseus himself is narrating this part of the story, and by his inclusion of these details, we can see that his encounters with these spirits haven’t just provided him guidance, they have reframed his conception of the good life and what it means to flourish.
If one looks closely at the Odyssey, an undercurrent of humility could be said to permeate the entire work. Odysseus is, of course, tested throughout Homer’s tale. But in addition to physical contests with monsters and suitors is the crucial internal test of his ability to be No One. We see him fail in this task in a story of his own telling, in Book 9: Odysseus and his men are free and clear of the Cyclops, but Odysseus is unable to restrain himself from making sure Polyphemus knows that it was, in fact, Odysseus who bested him (before this moment, as the well-known story goes, Odysseus had led the monster to believe his name was “No One,” a tactic that protects his identity and limits the Cyclops’ ability to call for help). With this lapse in judgment – this failure of humility – Odysseus brings Poseidon’s wrath upon himself.
His capacity for anonymity is tested again after he makes it home to Ithaca, however, and his growth is evident. Odysseus, squalidly disguised, allows himself to be demeaned and physically assaulted by men who wouldn’t dare if they knew who he truly was. By the end of the story, we’re clearly dealing with a different hero than the one who left Troy. He is able to hold off revealing himself until no sooner than the moment ordained by Athena, and in doing so achieves both a moral and a physical victory.
Delightfully, though, even after all this growth the reader is left to wonder whether Odysseus can ultimately go through with Tiresias’ assignment. True, he remains No One at home and endures the physical and emotional aggression of the suitors, but he is still able to unveil himself gloriously to people who know him in the end. Has the Odysseus at the end of Odyssey been sufficiently humbled to bear his oar far enough inland that his stories won’t impress anyone? The bard asks this question but leaves it unanswered.
I’m optimistic, and I try to stir up some optimism in my students. I believe we can hope that Achilles’ words have sunk in, and that Homer is not just concerned with bringing his hero home, but also the health of his soul. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas calls on St. Isidore the Farmer in defining the humble man as one who is “bent to the ground.” I believe Homer has in mind an Odysseus bent groundward, burying his pride alongside his “winnowing fan.” I don’t think that seeking to align Homer with a higher moral vision is just the sentimentality of the aging teacher who wants to put a cool and enduring work in front of his students that might give them an imagination for heroic humility in a world that seems bent on rewarding arrogance and violence.
It is as countercultural now as it would have been in ancient Greece, as it was in the Roman Empire of the AD 30s, when Christ tells His disciples to be as children, and when He tells the gathered crowd that the humbled will be exalted. He defies expectations by choosing suffering over conquest. By casting a vision for Odysseus as someone who is free to choose to settle down rather than continue to explore and conquer, Homer’s participation in the truth is not limited to the foundational rhythms of story but in the articulation of true virtue as well.
