Odyssey Reading Group: Book 6 Lines 211-238

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
21

Even though Michael’s checked out of the thread, I’m just going to summarise here what I understand by what has been said so far. Rather than couching this in seems and appears, I’ll just say what I think people are saying and if you disagree then let me know!

Michael’s first post argues that Odysseus feels and is restrained by αιδώς, which in the contexts mentioned means something like ‘a sense of propriety’. He may be embarrassed by the state he’s in, but he would still feel this sense of αιδώς without being filthy and naked because of Nausicaa’s age (and possibly also the age of the ἀμφίπολοι, this isn’t clear).

Paul argues that Odysseus’ αιδώς is due to their distance from the megaron and that the age of the girls isn’t necessarily important. Paul also stresses that his nakedness is not a source of shame within Greek society. As such, αἰδέομαι means ‘I am embarrassed’.

Seneca reads αἰδέομαι as ‘I am ashamed’ and points out that in English at least shame and embarrassment are implicated in each other. Odysseus is disingenuous rather than expressing real shame. This was also my reading at the top of the thread.

So the two competing readings seem to be:

  1. ‘I, on account of a sense of propriety (αιδώς), do not want to be naked among you young girls, because this would be improper, though I feel no shame’ - i.e. ‘I scruple to be naked’

  2. ‘I am ashamed/embarrassed to be naked, so please leave me to bathe alone’ - which, in context, may be a lie.

Michael has mentioned “scholarship on aidos” - does this scholarship provide some kind of ‘code of αιδώς’ that we can make recourse to here or is it just an intuition that Odysseus being bathed would be ‘improper’ in the context of a broader attitude to propriety?

22

I’ve read the whole article now so this makes more sense - Jones is effectively saying that it doesn’t matter whether λοῦσθαι explicitly has the sense of ‘to wash himself’ vs ‘to wash’ because the ἀμφίπολοι make clear through their actions that they’re not going to do it even before he tells them not to.

I like Jones’s reading, which he openly admits is simply a justifiable way of interpreting the text rather than a definitive proof of its meaning because of the uniqueness of the situation. I think you could even further his argument about the refusal of the ἀμφίπολοι: thinking back to the lion simile (6.130) and their reaction when he first arrives (τρέσσαν 138), you could argue that they continue to treat him like a dangerous wild beast even though their mistress is supernaturally unafraid (ἐκ δέος εἵλετο γυίων), placing the necessary oil and clothes next to him and saying “go on then, have a wash” while keeping a safe distance. If you were really pushing the reading, you could even say that Odysseus’ reaction isn’t just to save Nausicaa’s blushes but to save face for δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς himself after being refused a bath by slaves.

23

Thank you for your summary and for you additional ideas which I think show the richness of this episode and the variety of possibilities which it can inspire through close reading

I recommend reading Jones’ article if you can. He is petty clear in his dismissal of the “modesty” theory: “This, emphatically, is not the world of Jane Austen”!

I continue to be perplexed by this distinction being made between “embarrassment” and " shame". Perhaps it is simply one of degree? I will continue to read about this and think further as clearly my understanding is wanting..

24

The one is a feeling that makes your face red and lasts for a few minutes. (Ἀστεῖόν γε, ἦ δ᾿ ὅς, ὅτι ἐρυθριᾷς, ὦ Ἱππόθαλες, καὶ ὀκνεῖς εἰπεῖν Σωκράτει τοὔνομα) The other is a social injury which can last for a lifetime. (αἰδὼς ὦ Λύκιοι: πόσε φεύγετε). They can be caused by the same thing, but often not.

25

Shame has a connotation of wrongdoing or of not being up to a standard, which embarrassment does not. If someone sees you in the toilet, it’s not shameful, just embarrassing; you did nothing wrong. If you get caught defecating on the carpet in your mother-in-law’s living room, you are likely to be not only embarrassed but ashamed as well.

26

Thanks for that. More formally, in shame based cultures, shame is the result of offending the cultural mores of the group, whereas embarrassment is a personal inward reaction not necessarily so related.

27

We seem to be having a lot of trouble not just with Greek but with English this week!

First of all, it’s important to say that I think Seneca is completely right that in British English at least (I can’t speak for American and other usage) “she felt ashamed” and “she felt embarrassed” are often used interchangeably not to refer to two distinct feelings experienced at the same time but to a single feeling. “He was ashamed to have wet himself in front of his classmates” and “He was embarrassed to have wet himself in front of his classmates” refer to the same feeling of shame/embarrassment (hot behind the ears, desperate to be somewhere else). To use one or the other is not to make some kind of meaningful distinction about the boy’s personal experience (in English).

But when I say “When he saw the faces of the parents of the boy he killed, he felt deeply ashamed”, this doesn’t seem to be the same thing as “When he saw the faces of the parents of the boy he killed, he felt deeply embarrassed”. The former suggests regret, the latter a kind of social awkwardness, although there is still some ambiguity.

It seems clear to me that the English ‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’ are not two separate Kantian things-in-themselves, but two words with quite wide semantic scope and a lot of crossover in their usage. ‘Shame’ has different scope in the phrases/collocations ‘be ashamed’, ‘be ashamed of someone else’, ‘to feel shame’, ‘to shame someone’, ‘to make someone feel ashamed’, ‘to do something shameful’, ‘to act shamefully’, ‘to bring shame to’. We can feel ashamed without doing something shameful, and we can shame someone without them feeling ashamed. We can bring shame to our family without them being ashamed of us. We can’t, however, impress someone without them being impressed. We can’t please someone without being pleasing, or without them being pleased.

Throw into this mix Guilt, Regret, Shyness, Awkwardness, Unease, Sheepishness, Humiliation… there’s a soup of English words which aren’t so easily distinguished from one another as is suggested above, and all of which have shifting meanings with different collocations.

So I don’t think we can talk about the Greek say ‘this is not shame’ or ‘this is embarrassment’ without expanding significantly on the particular use of those English words that we think is represented by the Greek in each case, because the distinction doesn’t clearly exist in English in the first place.

I’m currently wading through the first 100 pages of Cairn’s (1987) The concept of Aidos in Greek literature from Homer to 404 BC - I’ll report back if there are any epiphanies.

28

Are you sure about this? English is not my native language, but I think there is a difference of emphasis: it seems to me that “he was ashamed”, like I said earlier, puts more emphasis on the idea of not being up to a standard, while on the other hand, I feel that “he was embarrassed” is a more situational thing. But I agree that there is a lot of overlap.

29

Paul is correct about the two words. (I really think that Scandinavians only pretend that English is not their native language. Does a language like Finnish really exist, and can anyone really understand it? I have doubts.)

A person would be ashamed of his family’s slave-holding past, unless he thought slavery wasn’t really so bad of a thing, in which case he might simply be embarrassed about it.

A person would be embarrassed that his mother had sent him a care package during his Freshman year at college, but not ashamed of it.

In Sean’s example, the boy would be both ashamed and embarrassed at the time of the deed. However, later in the day, after he cleans up and the hot feeling of embarrassment begins to fade, the feeling of shame only grows as he thinks about it.

30

Like I say, I can’t speak for American usage here, but if an editor saw “He was ashamed and embarrassed to have wet himself in front of his classmates” they would tell me it was a gross tautology and have me remove one.

For the same reason, you would never say “She was anxious and nervous about the exam in the morning” - we may well pick apart the wider concepts of anxiety and nerves but in this usage they refer to exactly the same feeling. Whether she later gets diagnosed with anxiety is irrelevant to how it’s used here.

To bring this back to 6.66 and 6.221, what we’re talking about are their feelings in the moment of experience, as in my example, not feelings which develop later (reflective shame, embarrassment, cringe).

“Senator Fluffelfoofer’s slave-holding past is particularly embarrassing for him in light of his progressive policies” - cf. The Guardian headline “Ben Affleck admits embarrassment led him to try to hide slave-owning ancestor”

“He hid his mother’s care package in the drawer of the bedside table because he was ashamed to have it on show”

Fantastic Man Magazine (where I get all my news) - “Are You Embarrassed By Your Car?”

50 Dollar Detail (for anything not covered by Fantastic Man Magazine) - “I’m Ashamed of My Car”. The second sentence also says “I understand how embarrassing it can be…”

I see no problem with the crossover in either of these situations, and I don’t think it’s helpful trying to impose ideal distinctions onto the way language is actually used. This is why I’m arguing we need to be clearer than ‘shame’ and ‘embarrassment’ when we talk in English about the Greek - it’s a meaningless distinction on its own.

I think we can all agree, though, that Paul’s English is startlingly good and makes me ashamed of :wink: my own abilities in other languages.

31

Thank you Sean for your impressive and eclectic references. It has increased the range of my reading!

Although in English a clear distinction can be drawn between “embarrassment” and “being ashamed” its not easy and people will want to draw the line between meanings in different places, according to their cultural background.

Cairns says that αἰδώς is notoriously difficult to translate and I think that this is born out by our difficulties in this text.

Following Jones I can swerve the actual question of what is the “αἰδώς” that Odysseus feels at the prospect of being bathed by the “ἀμφίπολοι” because I simply do not believe that Odysseus is telling the truth. Those who think Odysseus is telling the truth will have to explain what exactly there is about his nakedness that he is ashamed of, given that he has been naked in full view of the “ἀμφίπολοι” throughout the scene. Joel has helpfully suggested that it is the filthiness of his body, but that is already evident to the “ἀμφίπολοι” - in part it is his monstrous appearance which led them to run away. It is possible I suppose that Odysseus is concerned about showing his body in the close proximity of the “ἀμφίπολοι” where they will see more clearly his filthiness and possibly his genitals might be exposed. Why he should be concerned about this isn’t clear given the low status of the “ἀμφίπολοι”. Jones explains the covering of the genitals as a sign that he posed no sexual threat to the women rather than being out of a sense of modesty. We would also need an explanation about why the “ἀμφίπολοι” refuse to bathe Odysseus before he tells them to stand apart (which confusingly they are already doing) and that he will not bathe in their presence.

Perhaps this episode is not the easiest on which to have a discussion about “αἰδώς” and related concepts. It will take some time for me to read Cairns and so understanding “αἰδώς” will have to be a longer term project. Interestingly I have now found Cairn’s PhD thesis which at first sight seems to address the problem of “αἰδώς” more directly.

32

I read Jones’ article, which has some interesting insights, and his idea that Odysseus is refusing the bath to save Nausicaa’s face is attractive. But in the same time I think Jones is not giving proper consideration to the context where the washing takes place. He says: “The conclusion must be that it was not modesty on Nausicaa’s part that prevented her bathing Odysseus. It was her youth, her immaturity: she did not know how to act properly in the circumstances.” But Nestor’s daughter washing Telemachus in the safety of her father’s palace is altogether different from this scene, which takes place in the wilderness. The element of danger is evident when a naked man surges upon a group of teenage girls on a lonely beach; at 130ff. Odysseus is even compared to hungry lion when he approaches them. It’s true enough that Odysseus lied to Alcinous that Nausicaa had washed him in the river. But when he says this, they are all in the security of the palace, where the normal rules of hospitality are back in place and where the threat that Odysseus posed to the girls is already forgotten.

As mwh noted earlier, it would be beneficial to pay attention to how αιδως operates; how, for example, it inhibits young men from questioning them elders in book 3. Translating it as “shame” is definitely misleading, and I’m beginning to wonder if “embarrassment” is misleading as well. LSJ has “respect for the feeling or opinion of others or for one’s own conscience”, which gives a better idea in my opinion. It seems to me that these misleading English words (shame, modesty etc.) make all this seem more complicated than it really is.

I’ll take one more non-Homeric example. Public swimming pools are omnipresent in Finland. Men and women have different changing areas (and saunas, of course!), but there are no cabins, just lockers to store your stuff and benches, and everyone changes in full view of other people. Until the age of 7 or so it’s perfectly normal to take children to the opposite sex’s changing area, until they’re old enough to go alone. So if I took my 7 year old daughter to the swimming pool without my wife, my daughter would come with me to the men’s changing area. Nobody would mind getting naked before her, nor would she mind doing the same (but that’s bound to change any moment now, and then she’d go alone to the other side!). On the other hand, if this same 7 year old daughter of mine brought her girl friend to our home, I would certainly make sure I didn’t walk out of the shower naked in front of them – not out of “modesty”, and not because I would be “ashamed” or “embarrassed” (I wouldn’t be, not in the least), but because my sense of propriety (or whatever I should call it) tells me so. Rules are different in the changing area of a swimming pool and at home when you have visitors, especially if they are little girls, who are likely to be easily intimidated. I think this is the sort of αιδως Odysseus felt (or perhaps rather pretended to feel) when he refused the bath; it’s true that they were just slave girls, but pace Jones I think they have some intimacy with Nausicaa (I think that the Odyssey often downplays slavery to show especially household slaves happy and in good terms with their masters). At the same time, it must be kept in mind that Odysseus is a master of cunning, and him acting the way he did must have seemed to him the best way to further his own case. But I don’t think acting “properly” and advancing one’s own cause are necessarily mutually exclusive (as Jones seems to think when he writes “My conclusion about 128-9 is that ‘modesty, tact or delicacy of feeling’ are not the primary reasons for Odysseus’ action. Self-preservation, and the desire not to be misunderstood, are in fact the motives.”)

One final note: it has been suggested in the context of this passage (although the wording was different :slight_smile: ) that if someone has seen your willy once there would be no point in ever hiding it again. I think that would be bad policy in life in general, and Odysseus is well aware of it in this particular passage.

33

Paul, I think you make the case very clearly for the translation I offered above of “I scruple to be naked” i.e. Odysseus’ own ‘feelings’ are not the important thing, but his ‘deportment’ and respect for the feelings of others. Thank you for spelling it out in full - I think you’re right that embarrassed isn’t the right word if that’s how you read it.

If I might borrow from the several examples of Finnish nudity you’ve offered up (I hope archive.org makes a copy of this thread for future generations) - given the knowledge that it is not seen as ‘indecent’ for students to run naked through the streets, and the knowledge that it’s not indecent to be naked in front of girls under 7 in the context of a swimming pool, I don’t think it’s possible for a non-Finn to infer that nudity would be indecent in front of visitors in the home. So we need more evidence - in your argument, Odysseus saying αἰδέομαι γὰρ γυμνοῦσθαι is the evidence that in this exceptional situation (away from the palace), a line has been crossed and his nakedness is indecent.

But how then do we interpret Nausicaa telling her ἀμφίπολοι to engage in something indecent? Does she not know the standard of decency here? To come back to your Finnish example - if you accidentally walked out naked in front of your visitors, apologised on account of it being indecent, but then they offered to give you a bath, where should I (the non-Finn) draw the line of decency? Based on your apology or their offer?

34

I still think that the αιδως here is about dirt and grime rather than nudity. (Paul, what is Finnish etiquette about a sauna right after a workout or backpacking trip? I assume people are supposed to wash themselves off first? And if they are dirty enough, might even be a bit embarrassed about washing themselves in front of others?)

In support of this, are ἀπολούσομαι and χρίσομαι really future? If they are aorist subjunctive, then Odysseus is saying “stay back until…” not “stay back in order that…”?

35

I thought that they are subjunctive with ὄφρα in a purpose clause. LSJ says the following about temporal ὄφρα:

“until:
1 with aor. ind., of a fact in past time, ὄ. καὶ αὐτὼ κατέκταθεν till at last they too were slain, Il. 5.557, cf. 588, 10.488, 13.329, Od. 5.57, 7.141, etc.; with τόφρα preceding, 4.289.
2 with aor. subj., of an event at an uncertain future time, ἔχει κότον, ὄ. τελέσσῃ he bears malice till he shall have satisfied it, Il. 1.82, cf. 14.87, 16.10: but in this case ἄν (κε or κεν) is commonly added, 6.258, 10.444, Od. 4.588, etc.; with τόφρα preceding, Il. 1.509.”

36

I never realized it was always an uncertain future time, but that makes sense, now that I think of places that I’ve seen it. Regardless, the reason that Odysseus vocalizes for being embarrassed to strip is that he has not cleaned or oiled himself for some time. We have to add something unstated if we think he’s worried about his nudity.

37

Well you are in good company as this is the view taken by Stanford and Hainsworth.

Jones’ reply to this is covered above ie that the girls are slaves and under instruction from Nausicaa and that she had “no qualms about asking her slaves to wash him”. But Jones also points out that proponents of this explanation also have to deal with 22.498 where “the slaves embrace and kiss the head, shoulders and hands of an Odysseus ‘spattered with blood and gore like a lion … all his chest and both cheeks were bloody; he was a terrible sight to look on’”. If gore was no barrier to embraces in book 22, grime should be no barrier to slaves bathing a man under their mistress’ instructions in Book 6."

38

I think that the comparison with Nestor’s daughter isn’t quite as you represent it. There is no question of Nausicaa washing Odysseus, she orders her slaves to do it. Although its not explicit presumably Nestor tells Polycaste to wash Telemachus just as Menelaus orders slaves to do the same at Sparta. Nausicaa is imitating these actions by a head of a household.

It is right to draw attention to the liminal space in which Nausicaa operates. (I have done this from the outset of the laundry episode).

Nausicaa’s authority in this space is uncertain as is her grasp of the operation of Xenia. As Jones says " … the young Nausikaa shows how they treat xenoi in Sheria, and we are amused as the young princess offers the grimy nude (of all people) a bath (of all things) on a beach (of all places). Telemachus was welcomed by Nestor on the beach in book 3, but his bath came later on in the palace." So Nausicaa has good intentions but gets it all wrong. The slaves are uncertain what to do because bathing a stranger at the beach doesn’t seem the correct procedure.

I think its wrong to elide with this as you do the sexual element. I think that this threat has been neutered (!) by Odysseus entreaty to Nausicaa at 149 onwards. As previously mentioned Jones argues that Odysseus covers his genitals to make it clear that he is not a sexual threat.

39

I think we should bring up γίγνωσκε δ’ ἄρα φρεσὶ πάσας and the context before deciding the two dramatic conceptions couldn’t fit one poet.

And, again, it is stomping all over the social distance that Homer has described to use this clunky mistress/slave language. As I said above, it should be obvious that Rhett Butler would never have said “αἰδέομαι γὰρ γυμνοῦσθαι κούρῃσιν ἐυπλοκάμοισι μετελθών” to house-slaves. To restate, this language to or about slaves would be impossible to imagine in an antebellum Southern gentleman, or a Golden Age Athenian, a Roman of any age, or even a Russian to serfs under the Czar. The Greeks called their slaves “man-footed”, as if they were cattle. In Homer’s more primitive age they were still worse off. Homer’s dramatic conception is far removed from this.

40

Well, when Jones writes “The conclusion must be that it was not modesty on Nausicaa’s part that prevented her bathing Odysseus”, the way I understand this is specifically that he is referring to why Nausicaa didn’t personally wash Odysseus but gave the task to the slave girls.

I didn’t mean to elide the sexual element, but thought it was included implicitly when wrote about an element of danger.