The Odyssey and the kalon kakon meaning

I - The role of the women in The Odyssey.
 

In the Odyssey, we see Odysseus recovering from his long military service, putting himself together again, and learning the more difficult arts of peace, above all how to deal with women. In the Iliad women play a small though memorable part; in The Odyssey they are everywhere -even the man-eating sea devil Skylla is female. Odysseus has, when we first see him to free himself from the amorous bondage of the goddess Kalypso, earlier on in his story, from the deadly-dangerous but alluring witch Kirke, besides Odysseus' comrade-in-arms, the great goddess Athena, and above all there is his wife, Penelope.

The paper designed for Athena, in the first songs, is to remove Telemakhos from Ithaka, and make him search for news of his father in Sparta. Telemakhos accompanied by the disguised Athena, is received with a courtesy so lacking in Ithaka. The persona of The Iliad reapears, the daughter of Zeus, the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. She is still as full of herself as she was in The Iliad and freely admits, not without satisfaction, that her conduct has left much to be desired: "Oh, I was terribly wicked, I know, but how bravely they all fought for me!". Menelaus describes another of her performances: on the evening of the night when Troy was to be sacked Helen was out with a new boyfriend and to amuse him as they strolled round the wooden horse in which the Akhaian comandos were crammed she imitated the voices of their wives. (Helen as a beautiful evil)

Later, as the company sits drinking wine before dinner, Helen pours into their cups a few drops of a drug described as nepenthes, which allays pain and makes men forget their sorrows.

Now another female character. Her name suggests that she is the Hider (kaluptein, to hide), for she has hidden Odysseus, withdrawing him from the life of heroic action. There may be something to learn from the name of her island., Ogygia, the adjective ogugios means in Greek "primeval". Had Odysseus stayed with Kalypso in Ogygia, he would have been not a god but godlike in his freedom from death. But Odysseus wanted to be a man, what Greek poetry calls a thnetos, a mortal being subject to death, thanatos, as distinct from the gods, the athanatoi, whose differentia is that they do not die. When Kalypso learns that he is resolved to leave her, she adresses him in full heroic style:

"after these years with me, you still desire

your old home? Even so, I wish you well.

If you could see it all, before you go

all the adversity you face at sea

you would stay here, and guard this house, and be

imortal -though you wanted her forever,

that bride for whom you pine each day.

Can I be less desirable than she is?

Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals

compare with goddesses in grace and form?"

Let's not forget the intervention of Athena, when the goddess had made a visit to Nausikaa in a dream. Nausikaa is a beautiful Young girl which through the intervention of Athena's dreams go to wash her laundry and play a ball game with some other girlfriends, and in that situation they find Odysseus naked, in a very comic scene.

Kirke is a stranger more sinister figure than Kalypso, and like other characters whom Odysseus meets, Kirke belongs to folklore, a type of the witch who lures travelers to her home, transforms them into animals and sometimes eats them. Yet if she is part witch, she is also a goddess, seemingly Young and beautiful.

Odysseus send his man to recognize territory. Approaching the house, they come on lions and wolves ensorcelled, we are told, by Kirke. She welcomes them into her house where she gives them a drugged potion "to make them lose desire of thought of their dear fatherland", then she waves her magic wand and transforms them into pigs. Kirke had tried to give the same drug for Odysseus, but he had met Hermes before, who gave the hero another drug to neutralize Kirke's.

Having failed to transform Odysseus, Kirke now proposes to use another weapon in her arsenal: she invites him into her bed. He rejects her offer until he has made her swear a great oath that she will not harm him, fearing that once she has him stripped she will take his manhood, to transform Odysseus by her evil drug into an animal.

After a travel to the world of Persephone, Odysseus' little company now returns to Kirke, no longer a dangerous figure, who welcome them warmly and tells of perils to come. First are the Sirens or Seirenes, who sing a man's mind away. The temptation to stay in the deadly shore of the Sirens strewn with the bones of those who let themselves be enchanted is so powerful that he must be tied to the mast and have the sailor's ears plugged with wax to prevent them from hearing The Siren Call or hearing him when he begs to be set free.

This is the keenest test that Odysseus has had to face, but something worse and stranger is coming, the encounter with Skylla. Kirke told him:

"That nightmare cannot die, being eternal

evil itself -horror, and pain, and chaos;

there is no fighting her, no power can fight her,

all that avails is flight."

II - The Presence of Athena, or a Theather of Terror in the Odyssey

Now Odysseus is already back in Ithaka disguised for Athena as a beggar. The atmosphere in Odysseus house is stranger than anything we have met so far, for divinity is at work in the house of the son of Laertes in the person of Athena and her presence creates a sense of psychic disquiet and even panic. The religious, their bumper stickers bearing the message "Jesus loves you", are likely to be puzzled. For the divine acts here with no care for our comfort and pursues ends of its own. However, we should never forget that The Odyssey is after all a poem, not a treatise on Homeric theology.

And then comes the famous scene in which Athena is disguised as a Young man answering the question of Odysseus about what kind of place was it. She tells him that the strange land he has come to is Ithaka. Ah yes, he says "far away in Krete I learned of Ithaka" and spins an entirely fictitious story. This amuses Athena and she reveals herself, then dispels the mist that had prevented him from recognizing his own country. They sit down together, clever goddess by clever man, planning "to work the suitors death and woe."

Revenge, the first of the three themes that dominate this half of the poem. She transforms Odysseus into a wrinkled old man, the poet's oblique way of introducing the second theme, Recognition. To be recognized in his home, he must go there in disguise. Athena tells him to make his way to the faithful swineherd Eumaios while she goes to Sparta to bring Telemakhos back, preparing for the third main theme, Reunion.

Athena has now set off to Sparta, where she finds Telemakhos still enjoying Menelaus' princely hospitality. She takes him to the steading, where father and son, reunited, fall into each other's arms and together they too begin to plan for the day of revenge. Athena tells Odysseus to see what he may get from the suitors:

"you may collect a few more loaves, and learn

who are the decente lads, and who are vicious-

although not one can be excused from death!"

We understand that the goddess intends to help Odysseus to recover his estate and punish the intruders who have been paying court to his wife, the bad and not so bad alike, it seems. But why is Athena so malignant? And why in later scenes do we find her leading them on and making them behave worse than they usually do? The reader is likely to miss the ancient mythical thinking that lies below the action. Athena is doing what churchgoers repeating the Lord's Prayer on Sunday morning ask God not to do: "lead us not into temptation." Heaven, working through involuntary mortal agents is bringing about the restoration of order. Disorder in the home or state shakes the very sum of things and cannot be allowed to continue.

The evilness of Athena is best observed on how she manipulated Penelope's mind:

"Eurýnome, I have a craving

I never had at all -I would be seen

Among those ruffians, hateful as they are."

Or in the same case, Penelope prompted by Athena, feels:

"a wish to show herself before the suitors;

for thus by fanning their desire again

Athena meant to set her beauty high

before her husband's eyes, before her son.

Knowing no reason, laughing confusedly, she said: Eurýnome, I have a craving (...)

No wonder she laughs confusedly, for the wish is not hers but Athena's; the goddess is using her to lead the suitors to their destruction. When she appears, her beauty heightened by the goddess, "their hearts grew faint with lust;/not one but swore to god to lie beside her." Or can it be, for we should let the deliberate ambiguity in these lines play both ways, that she herself wishes to woo the man who might just be her husband by flirting with the suitors in order to make him jealous? (kalon kakon?)

The daemonic seizure that Athena impels on the suitors has collapsed the walls that Shield mortals from the dread invasion of divinity. Athena is not the goddess of justice or even wisdom:

Pallas Athena touched off in the suitors

a fit of laughter, uncontrollable.

She drove them into nightmare, till they wheezed,

and neighed as though with jaws no longer theirs,

while blood defiled their meat,  and blurring tears

flooded their eyes, heart-sore with woe to come.


Clarissa Lake - The Odyssey and the kalon kakon meaning - If you wish to write in English, write correctly and well.