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The Bow and the Lyre: a Platonic Reading of the Odyssey

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The Bow and the Lyre: a Platonic Reading of the Odyssey 08-0302.Benardete.The Bow.qxd 9/11/08 6:09 AM Page 1 For orders and information please contact the publisher Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 • www.rowmanlittlefield.com Cover design by Deborah Clark The Bow and the Lyre The Bow and the Lyre A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey Seth Benardete ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright ᭧ 1997 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. First paperback edition, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benardete, Seth. The bow and the lyre : a Platonic reading of the Odyssey / Seth Benardete. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–10 0–8476–8367–2 (cl. : alk. paper) ISBN–13 978–0–8476–8367–3 (cl. : alk. paper) ISBN–10: 0–7425–6596–3 (alk. paper) ISBN–13: 978–0–7425–6596–8 (alk. paper) eISBN–10: 0–7425–6597–1 eISBN–13: 978–0–7425–6597–5 1. Homer. Odyssey. 2. Odysseus (Greek mythology) in literature. 3. Epic poetry, Greek—History and criticism. 4. Philosophy, Ancient, in literature. 5. Plato. I. Title. PA4037.B42 1997 96-32657 883Ј.01—dc20 CIP Printed in the United States of America ⅜ϱ ீThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. The Odyssey: Depth of thought with a surface simplicity Eustathius Contents Notice to the Reader ix Preface xi 1 The Beginnings 1 Theodicy, 1 Politics, 6 Telemachus, 11 2 Pattern and Will 17 Nestor, 17 Helen and Menelaus, 24 3 Odysseus’s Choice 33 4 Among the Phaeacians 45 Shame, 45 Paradise, 49 Pride, 52 5 Odysseus’s Own Story 63 Memory and Mind, 63 Nature, 80 Hades, 90 Destiny, 98 6 Odysseus’s Lies 103 7 Nonfated Things 117 Theoclymenus and Eumaeus, 117 The Slave Girls, 124 The Name and the Scar, 128 vii viii Contents 8 The Suitors and the City 131 The Suitors, 131 The City, 137 9 Recognitions 143 Penelope, 143 Hades, 146 Laertes, 150 Notes 153 Index 173 About the Author 179 Notice to the Reader The text used for the Odyssey is Peter von der Mu¨ hll’s third Teubner edition (1984). I have followed, largely, its readings and punctuation, but have not necessarily followed its indications of interpolation. In translating passages, I have omitted words and phrases if they are not essential for the interpretation. Passages I believe are interpolated are passed over without comment. Most citations in the text refer to either the Odyssey or the Iliad. Arabic numbers designate the books of the Odyssey, Roman numerals, those of the Iliad. ix Preface More than forty years ago, when I first studied Homer, I used something I found in Plato in order to understand the plot of the Iliad; and later, when I studied Aeschylus and Sophocles, the ways in which Plato laid bare the prepolitical and the political elements that constitute the struc- ture of the city, seemed to me to be a guide for the interpretation of Prometheus, Seven against Thebes, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Antigone.In all these cases, Plato was there as a map or grid that allowed me to trace out faint trails in older authors who could not guide me, through no fault of their own, as well as Plato could. He seemed to me to have given the arguments for what Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles had only shown. Logos, one might say, opened the way to the understanding of paradigm. Although I was vaguely aware that it could seem forced and willful if Plato was always there ahead of me, it never bothered me very much, any more than if one is wandering in a dark wood one questions one’s luck if one comes across a clearing in which one can again take one’s bearings. So Plato did not have for me a history that could explain the uncanny match between map and terrain. It did not occur to me that Plato had learned from the poets, and what for me was a projection backward in- verted the indebtedness of philosophy to poetry. I was still under the spell of the opposition between them, which Plato himself had established when he had Socrates speak of ‘‘the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.’’ The poets had originally been the wise before the philosophers had denied them the title and, despite the philosophers’ own protests, had had it bestowed on themselves. The poets’ wisdom was vulgar wisdom, made to dazzle a crowd of thirty thousand or more but incapable of standing up to a private argument (Symposium 175e2–6). If, however, there had been this constant anticipation in the poets of what Plato made explicit, xi xii Preface it seemed one would have to resort to the notion that the poets said many beautiful things but did not know what they meant (Apology of Socrates 22c2–3). An occasional hit can well be artless, but a pattern of success makes one suspect that the dice are loaded. If they are loaded, the simple separation of poetry from philosophy is no longer possible. In principle, the blurring of the cut could entail the intrusion of the irrational into the rational rather than the spread of the rational over what formerly looked irrational; but I saw no reason to cast doubt on philosophic thinking, and rather I thought I saw a way to redraw the line between poetry and philosophy, or better, between some poets and Plato. This way involved Socrates’ ‘‘second sailing,’’ his own term for the turnaround in his own thinking when he abandoned a direct approach to cosmology and turned instead to speeches rather than to the beings. It was this turn in which I thought the poets had preceded him, for it had always been a puzzle to me how the principle of telling lies like the truth, upon which all of Greek poetry rests, could precede the telling of the truth, for it seemed obvious to me, as it had to Socrates, that one cannot lie knowingly unless one knows the truth. The Muses who tell Hesiod that they speak lies like the truth say they also tell the truth when they wish. If they do not separate them com- pletely, the songs they sing should contain both lies and truth. In the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, Odysseus impersonates before Penelope a Cretan. He tells a story about Odysseus’s stay with him when he was on his way to Troy. The story could well be completely true if Odysseus were not Odysseus. If Idomeneus had a younger brother, who did not go to Troy, and Idomeneus had left for Troy ten or eleven days before the arrival of Odysseus, then it could have happened that Odysseus stayed in Crete for twelve days and was kindly received by the Cretan Odysseus claims to be (19.171–202). Immediately after Odysseus’s tale, which, Homer says, was false but like the truth, he reports that Penelope on hearing it was streaming tears, and her skin was melting, ‘‘just as when snow melts on the top of mountains; the East wind soon melts it when the West wind pours down, and the rivers are full when it melts; so her fair cheeks were melting as she poured out tears’’ (19.203–8). Homer jux- taposes his own lie with Odysseus’s. Homer’s lie is in the speech; Odys- seus’s is in the speaker. Homer’s lie is an image that Homer declares through the simile to be an image and false. The simile gives the context for the literal meaning of ‘‘melt’’ after the verb has been extended to cover Penelope’s tears. The tears are presented as if they were the overflow from a face in dissolution, and nothing would remain of Penelope herself except water. Homer’s image sets the truth alongside the lie. The lie thus seems Preface xiii superfluous; the passage could be rephrased and eliminate both the lie and the proof of the lie. It is unclear, however, whether the truth in the re- phrasing would be any truer than the false in the lie. Penelope would not melt, but in not melting she could not account for Odysseus’s pity in his heart as he looked upon her, or for his eyes standing fast as if they were of horn or iron (19.209–12; cf. 262–4). One lie leads to another; together they make plain what the truth would not. Homer lets us look at two forms of the impossible. His own shows an impossibility that can never but be impossible; Odysseus’s is conditionally impossible and could be the case if the speakers were different. Were we to generalize from our example, the poet puts together what never happened with what never happens; but if we stick to our example, the conditionally impossible involves the strictly impossible, since it as- sumes that Odysseus is himself and another, and this does not differ from the strictly impossible, for it too assumes that snow and cheek are not two but one.
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