Welcome to the Odyssey Reading Group! Anyone is welcome to join, regardless of their Greek ability. If you’re itching to explore Homer’s epic tale of survival, adventure, love, lust, kinship, betrayal and spooky dead people, hop on in, you’ll be very welcome. People who have some Greek but have never tried reading Homer before are doubly welcome.
A great week for those interested in narrative structure! In this week’s section, we watch as Athena creates an anxiety dream for the Phaeacian princess Nausikaa (for those who haven’t read Books 1-5, this is the first time we meet her - the only character in Homer to be introduced for the first time while asleep). Dreams brought to mortals by gods are a repeated motif in Homer - there are seven of these god-dream sequences across the Iliad and the Odyssey, all of which follow a pretty regular pattern.
First, the god appears to the dreamer, either as themselves or in disguise, as in Nausikaa’s dream. The god chastises the dreamer for some kind of negligence. Then, the god explains what the situation is - in this case Nausikaa is made to feel negligent for not having washed her clothes when she is likely to be married soon, and is made to feel anxious that she isn’t living up to her parents’ expectations. Finally, the god offers advice to remedy the situation - in this case Athena, appearing as Nausikaa’s good friend, tells her to go to the washing pools to wash her clothes. As we learn very soon, this is where Odysseus is sleeping and so brings about their meeting.
Athena leaves to go to a particularly nice-sounding Olympus, described like a luxury weekend getaway, and at the very beginning of next week’s section (line 48) it is dawn and Nausikaa wakes up. The seven dream sequences in Homer all end with the god departing and Dawn arriving. We’ve already had one such sequence in Book 4, where Athena appears to Penelope in disguise, and we’ll get a very similar one in Book 15 when she appears to Telemachus. The dream itself is nestled inside a larger repeat structure in which the god arrives (in Nausikaa’s bedroom here) and then immediately departs after the dream.
So my question this week is: Do you think the poet creates a convincing-enough impetus for Nausikaa to go and wash her own clothes as soon as she wakes up through this dream sequence?
For me, the meaning of the following parts of the text, and their cultural context, heavily influence any answer to this question.
τί νύ… γείνατο μήτηρ (line 25)
σοὶ δὲ γάμος σχεδόν ἐστιν (line 27)
ἄγωνται (line 28)
φάτις ἀνθρώπους ἀναβαίνει ἐσθλή (line 29)
ἅμ ̓ ἠοῖ φαινομένηφι (line 31) - depending on the time of year!
οὔ τοι ἔτι δὴν παρθένος ἔσσεαι (line 33)
μνῶνται (line 34)
ὅθι τοι γένος ἐστὶ καὶ αὐτῇ (line 35)
As will always be the rule, please introduce your own discussion points if you have them.
I see my question has really set imaginations aflame! Please do step in and save this thread if you have a different (read: better) conversation starter, otherwise we might have to kick this one down the trap door.
No. It really seems like a pretext. Why would the princess need to go wash her clothes herself? And how is it possible that the city is built so far from running water? The whole point is that we need to get her meet Odysseus. The same goes for Telemachus’ journey: it’s utterly unmotivated, except from the point of view of the story (we get to meet Nestor, Menelaus and Helen). On both occasions it’s Athene who’s behind it all, so perhaps as a goddess she is particularly skilled at having people do stuff for no reason at all?
I’d say it’s “convincing” enough. Having had such a dream, she acts on it. That’s an experience I dare say most of us have had. And it’s the standard Homeric pattern, so we shouldn’t really expect anything else.
The prominent marriage motif sufficiently explains why she needs her clothes to be clean. There’s no plausibility to the details, but who cares? It’s obviously a contrivance on the part of the story-teller to get her and Od. together—and in such a deliciously embarrassing situation, as we’ll soon see. To look for “realism” would be a mistake.
And how is it possible that the city is built so far from running water?
I visited Cefalú in Sicily last year. There was a Lavatoio close to the beach but within the current town which has troughs for washing dating to the 16th century. Apparently the spring was known in antiquity. The ancient settlement is on a lofty hill a fair distance inland. Not quite as high as Acrocorinth but still quite a climb.
The whole set up and the proximity of the spring to the beach reminded me strongly of this scene.
Many ancient cities had cisterns and no running water from springs.
In any event I agree with mwh that to look for realism in Homer is to miss the point.
I should have said “further realism.” Such basic human things as emotions and reactions are remarkably realistic, even when it’s clear that it’s the poet who’s in control.
To play devil’s advocate here - the reason I thought that this was interesting is that it’s one of those passages in Homer where ‘realism’, at first, seems to have been suspended for the sake of the plot, when actually there would have been easy ways to alter Nausikaa’s circumstances to make her arrival at the beach later in Book 6 more ‘natural’. Which got me to thinking - what if these elements, which seem like mere contrivances at first, are actually much more convincing motivators in the social context of Bronze Age Greece (or whenever pre-700 you want to situate it)?
Nausikaa has to get married, but securing a good match requires some effort on her part. In the dream, it’s clear that her reputation has some impact on who she’ll marry, and that having sparkly clean clothes for her and her ‘attendants’ plays into this reputation.
But, perhaps because she’s a teenager (plus ça change), she’s not got round to doing it. I thought the idea of Nausikaa washing her own clothes was a bit silly but Sarah Pomeroy raises the good point that
To me, this makes sense. Clothes take a lot of work, and if these are the clothes she is going to wear to her wedding then they must be special in some way. Later in Book 6, Nausikaa leads a little troupe of clothes washers, which smacks of noblesse oblige, reinforcing that idea that this is more than a chore.
With Seneca’s very interesting point about the placement of washing pools being dependent on geography, this all suggests to me that actually there’s not much in this passage that is necessarily fanciful. A teenage girl, anxious to please, making a show of cleaning her lovingly-made wedding clothes seems to me very ‘realistic’ and I can believe she would have had this kind of dream even without a god handy. Psychological realism, but perhaps literary realism, too.
I agree, and that was the whole point of my post, but I thought you would sort of read it between the lines…
Talking about no running water in the city, I should have known that it’s not a good argument. Defensibility would have been the top priority. The Phaeacians have no enemies, but even their city has a defensive wall. I actually think that the island of Santorini/Thera depended entirely on rain water and cisterns, as it doesn’t have any kind of springs or other natural sources of fresh water other than rainfall. I guess they didn’t wash their clothes a lot, or maybe they did it with sea water?
Come to think about ancient Thera, there also the citadel (where you can see ancient cisterns) is built on a lofty hill. I visited it with a friend 11 years ago. We walked the whole way up almost from the shore. Even with the modern road, it took us an hour or two. That’s the correct way to visit ancient fortified towns, in my opinion - otherwise you’re missing the whole topography of the place. Also, taking the tourist bus right in front of the acropolis in Athens is just wrong if you’re fit enough to walk: you’re supposed walk the whole way up from the city like the ancients did with their processions!
I visited Thera many years ago and I think I took a bus or cab up a tarmac road but I walked down by another route passing a charming little chapel which reminded me of Leonora’s hermitage in La Forza del destino. This always seems to me the most sensible approach to visiting sites on a high elevation. I failed however to locate the erotic graffiti on the so-called terrace of festivals perhaps because the sun was too intense. I can see no reason not to walk up to the acropolis in Athens its not that difficult. On the other hand I have never walked up to AcroCorinth. But have always admired the who do as I glide past in a cab. Last time I was there I was content to admire it from afar.
A teenage girl, anxious to please, making a show of cleaning her lovingly-made wedding clothes seems to me very ‘realistic’ and I can believe she would have had this kind of dream even without a god handy. Psychological realism, but perhaps literary realism, too.
I have a great deal of difficulty with this kind of analysis.
As Mary Beard (amongst many) observes the one thing we know about the ancient world and its inhabitants is that they were utterly unlike us. Thats one of the attractions of studying them.
I have argued elsewhere about reception theory. I think we would all benefit from an awarenesses that all our interpretations are acts of reception and no different from other acts of reception in the past.
In this case projecting the apparently simple idea of “teenage girl” itself a construction of the twentieth century onto Homer is fraught with difficulties.
The idea that a text which depicts supernatural beings intervening in human affairs can be described as “realistic” or “naturalistic” is difficult to say the least. That there are parts of the text that we can engage with and characters with whom we can have some kind of empathy is a testament to the richness of the text and our imagination. The hope that we may discover some “historical” truth about “motivators in the social context of Bronze Age Greece (or whenever pre-700 you want to situate it)” shows more about a complex attitude to contemporary literary values than it does about the text.
As I have said many times I am in favour of a plurality of views. I would, however, like those views to to be accompanied by some awareness of the hidden assumptions we make when we offer views about the past. To many this will seem obvious and unnecessary. I wonder?
Blimey, you’ve raised enough questions here for a lifetime of PhDs. Without refighting the entire history of literary criticism, there are a few fundamental contradictions in this way of thinking that it’s worth pointing out.
That the people of the ancient world are “utterly unlike us”, you say, is their attraction. How are we to determine that they were “utterly unlike us” in the first place? Not from their physical remains (I can wear a χιτών or build an aqueduct while remaining myself), so surely this conclusion is based on the written evidence left by these people about themselves? Well, already implicit in “utterly unlike us”, then, we have the assumption that Mary Beard, in the 21st century, is able to decide whether these people were similar to or different from her.
This is the same Mary Beard, it’s worth reminding ourselves, who is also willing to make assertions like “the Romans would not have understood the concept of an illegal migrant. That would have been baffling to them” and that “they would have been horrified that some of the worst bits of what’s going on in the crisis over migration is happening in what was the Roman empire” - at a distance of 2000 years.
How are we able to perform this magical feat of divining what Greeks and Romans thought? Well, like you say, in one sense we’re not. These are the literary remains of dead people in a very different social context from our own, and our reception of these texts is inevitably coloured by our 20th/21st century experience, sometimes in ways that we become self-aware of and sometimes in ways that we don’t even consider.
And yet…
We have that depth of common human feeling that lets us feel we understand Achilles’ anger at the death of Patroclus, even if we’ve never fought alongside a friend on a foreign shore. We are able to come to our own conclusions about these people that we feel strongly are true, even if we can’t time travel and ask them to confirm or deny our assumptions.
This is always where the schoolboy interjection comes in - “but Miss, you don’t know that Shakespeare meant all those things!”. But we do, don’t we? Lear wandering the heath is “utterly unlike us”, and yet when we have a bit of life experience under our belt we begin to understand the truth in his situation. We are also bound to draw conclusions we later think of as mistakes - that Juliet is asking “where are you, Romeo”, to use a trivial example - when we learn more about the historical context of such texts.
So yes, the past is a foreign country, and those who live there are often “utterly unlike us”, but I don’t think that this presents a practical or theoretical obstacle to us feeling the truth (or lack thereof) in the literature of any age using our own experience of being human, and I don’t think it is a mistake to use “historical truth” (itself a construct of the present day, let’s not forget) to inform what we think is literary truth, realism or naturalism.
Franz Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez would beg to differ. The realistic and magical are sitting alongside each other in this passage quite amicably, it seems to me.
I often introduce this topic with the observation that at times the ancients seem very familiar to us and at other times frighteningly alien.
One of the reasons they feel familiar is that there is essentially an unbroken cultural tradition from their time to ours. It has been fed by many other streams, and over the centuries has been twisted and bent in many directions, but there are still going to be commonalities based on inherited cultural tropes and memes.
Then there is the literary tradition. We actually can read what they wrote, and we can read it in their own words. We feel like we can understand it. There’s a connection. At times it’s baffling and challenging. But is is really any more baffling and challenging than cross cultural encounters in modern times? Speaking of which, with some effort, we can attain to a certain level of understanding with the most alien of modern cultures. We can learn other languages. We can successfully communicate. It happens all the time, and we can successfully “communicate” with ancient writers as well, even if the communication is rather one sided. Why can we do this? Because there are certain universals that all human beings share in common, and that makes mutual understanding possible, though often with great effort. And don’t forget archeology, and the framework it can give us better to understand the overall context of the literature that captures our interest.
I think you strike at the heart of it here, Barry. What, after all, is the purpose of discussing these texts in a reading group or thinking more deeply about them under our own steam, if not to find ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘reality’ (imperfect as all of these terms are) in places that we haven’t found them before?
And what are the pieces of evidence we use to decide on the ‘truthiness’ (to borrow a phrase) or otherwise of things we find in these texts?
One is whether things that happen in the texts is justified in terms of the rest of the text (internal validity, as they call it in scientific journals). There are famous examples in the Iliad and Odyssey of ‘narrative inconsistencies’ where we don’t find this kind of ‘truth’ - Pylaemenes being killed in Book 5 but returning in Book 13, Schedios being killed twice, Chromios being killed three times, Homer ‘forgetting’ about the embassy to Achilles in Book 5 - which appear to provide insights into oral transmission, but which we don’t feel are ‘justified’ in terms of the rest of the text. On the other hand, we have Oedipus blinding himeself, which could either be considered alien, gratuitous, Greek body horror, or considered as justified by the narrative build-up to this event. We can enrich our understanding by arguing which it is.
Then we have those “universals that all human beings share in common”. We have to be careful here about projecting our own experiences onto a culture which can’t answer back (and with a mind to postcolonial theory), but our experience of a text is only made richer, I would argue, when we find these things in common. How are we to find ourselves moved by Odysseus weeping as he sees his son again for the first time in twenty years, except by connecting this with our own experiences? I can’t know if a Greek would have felt the same thing as me, but then I don’t know if what I call ‘blue’ is the same as what my wife calls blue and she’s sitting next to me.
Lastly, there are those cases where our attempts to empathise don’t succeed, and we’re just confused. As Barry says, archaeology (and historiography) can step in to give us new ways to access these texts. Who hasn’t thought about Greek tragedy differently after they’ve read more about the technology of the Greek stage, the history of Greek festivals, the function of the chorus? Or had their perspective on Josephus changed when thinking about the audience he was writing for?
I will agree that anything we aren’t able to empathise with after exhausting all of these strategies can be considered truly alien to us - I find E.R. Dodds is a good guide up that particular mountain.
How are we to determine that they were “utterly unlike us” in the first place?
Well I guess the first step is to discover what we mean by “us” and then narrow down who the “they” is. Just as “we” are not a homogenous group neither are “they”.
I am not sure your first post in reply to me does “point[ing] out” “a few fundamental contradictions in this way of thinking”.
Because The Greeks and Romans were “utterly unlike us” it doesn’t mean that we can’t know something about them and have opinions. So “illegal immigrants” means something in a system of nation states (largely a 19th century invention) but to a Roman who believed that Roman citizenship was available to all regardless of ethnicity or place of origin or indeed whether your patents were ex-slaves it is not a helpful/meaningful concept. Rome’s foundation myth relies on immigrants. I don’t see anything in Beard’s claim that one could take exception to. But it seems to me obvious that the Romans in this example to whom the idea is meaningless are nevertheless the Romans of our own reality.
I think you strike at the heart of it here, Barry. What, after all, is the purpose of discussing these texts in a reading group or thinking more deeply about them under our own steam, if not to find ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘reality’ (imperfect as all of these terms are) in places that we haven’t found them before?
If you are seriously interested in understanding the problems of “discovering some kind of objective meaning or truth” in the texts we read I would recommend that you read Martindale’s “redeeming the text: Latin poetry and hermeneutics of reception” 1997. Alternatively you could read Gadamer “Truth and Method”. We are stuck in our own time and culture and there is nothing we can do about that - there is simply no methodology for recovering the past in the way in which you hope for.
There are many other points made here that I disagree with especially the idea of that “there are certain universals that all human beings share in common”. I think its an attractive theory because superficially it seems plausible and it means that the “reality” we create for the past is somehow discrete from ours. Unfortunately there is no unmediated access to “reality” and such claims are bound to fail.
I don’t pretend that what I am trying to say is easy. I had to read Martindale several times before I could grasp his arguments.
