IV. Homer (1967)
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There he sits in his tent singing, again singing to his lyre, with his friend Patroklos. How does Homer trick him into the performance? His friend Patroklos finally says to him "now let me fight Hektor and give me your armament" (Achilles has wonderful weapons and armament).(2) "Give me your armament" he says, "and they will perhaps get afraid seeing me in it, and I will try my best to help the Hellenic forces". And Achilles, in a weak moment, agrees. Patroklos is then slain (by Hektor), and Achilles has to revenge him. It is human nature. He was his friend, and all of the Hellenes would spit on him if didn't go. He has to has to go, and so he goes and slays Hektor and with that the fall of Troy is assured. The story ends here, with this wonderful artistic trick. He does not tell the story of how Achilles dies, or of the final fall of Troy as it is in the sagas of the Greeks. He stops it short where Achilles has killed Hektor, and Priam, the King of Troy comes to ask him for the body of his dead son, and Achilles starts to weep.
A very short story so to speak. The life of man as a young man, and there is a symbol in the story which shows how world wide it is. It is the description of the shield of Achilles. In that description you will find that every detail on the shield makes a whole world as Homer was trying to compose it. I say trying, because this might have been the young Homer. The Odyssey was written for another purpose: Namely, the full life of man in its full length, with all of the possibilities there. Not man as a young man, but rather man as someone who grows old and achieves everything. It is a quite different topic. The story seems at once to became world wide. The idea is that man consciousness has become a consciousness of independence and of freedom at all costs. Homer has found a place for him in the middle, between nature and the gods. The consequence of this is that he can only describe him by more and more humanizing his description of the gods, even putting motives in their mouths which make them, as Plato will say later, "all too human".
How Zeus behaves is sometimes not very moralistic. The other gods are jealous of each other, and they fight like hell, almost like human beings. So a lowering of this God consciousness is required, in order to increase man consciousness and world consciousness. Now world consciousness means to develop a united view of the world, and here help comes to Homer again from Greek myth and from Greek language. He describes the world as a cosmos, but it is a cosmos that does not belong to the gods. To the cosmos belongs nature, to the cosmos belongs man, they all belong in the cosmos. There is no transcendent idea above the world, because the gods are suffering from the same curse that man suffers. Not, that they have to die, but that they might be dethroned. They run a risk. Above them lies moira (fate) who decides all, and the gods have a fate just as man has, and as nature has, and there is no getting away from it.
When we first meet Odysseus we find that he is sitting on an island with (the goddess) Calypso. He is paralyzed at the moment, because Calypso loves him, wants to keep him, and he cannot get away. He wants to go home to fulfill his life, and he cannot, because Calypso promises him immortality. He refuses immortality (to refuse immortality for a - Greek, for a Hellene: That is really fantastic). He rather wants to die with his wife (Penelope) than to be immortal and lie with Calypso. That is quite a rebuke, and he tells her "you are so much more beautiful, beautiful you are". "It would be so much more seducing but I have a purpose in life". What's the idea? The idea is that if he accepts immortality (and we must suppose, within the framework of Greek myth, that this could be done by Calypso) that he will become somebody other than Odysseus. He will be changed. He will not be the same man. He cannot pursue his purpose, which is to go home and be victorious over the suitors of his wife, and he prefers here clearly in Homer, to fulfill his fate. To die as a man instead of living as a God. It is almost an atheistic idea.
So we meet him there. He is paralyzed, he cannot move. This man who has gone everywhere, who has met every situation. He is at a dead point, as if he were in the center, where nothing moves, of a tremendous storm, a world storm. He sits there in complete stillness, paralyzed, so to speak, for his whole life. He is sitting in the center of all of his explorations. He has gone around the whole of the Mediterranean. He has achieved it already. There is only one wave of the past that must still go over him, and that is the wave that will put him on the shore of the Phaeacians. The very moment he is on that shore, and Nausicaa comes, his success is guaranteed, and his future is open. The last piece of the past is brought in by Homer with a storm that almost drowns Odysseus, after he has made a raft in order to sail that last piece of space between himself and the island of the Phaeacians. The gods intervene in the meantime. Athena loves him, and tells Zeus that they must help him in order that he may fulfill his promise. She has been busy working for him in Olympus (while Poseidon is away getting feasted and celebrated in Ethiopia) and since he cannot see what they are doing they are able to save Odysseus. Why do they help him to get away?
The story is that he defied a God. He defied Poseidon. Poseidon hates him from the beginning, and doesn't want to let him get home. He knows (the other gods tell him) that destiny (moira) will let him get home, and they indeed let him get home, without any companions or other conditions what so ever. But first Poseidon heaps suffering after suffering upon Odysseus, because he hates him. This hatred grows. What has Odysseus done? He has met the Cyclopes and the Cyclopes is the son of Poseidon. He has blinded the Cyclopes, and then, he was in a situation where the Cyclopes said to his comrades "no man has ever blinded me", and so Odysseus has to give out his name. He has (up until then) called himself no man, but now he sits in his little boat, and cannot draw back from himself the spelling of his name. Suddenly he shouts out "and that you might know who did that to you, Odysseus, son of Laertes". At that moment Poseidon knows that he can pursue him, the man who did that deed.
Why did Odysseus do that? We have met the cleverest man possible, who knows every situation. He is a guy who can wriggle himself out of every situation (with the help of the gods, with the presence of Athena, or, what we might call in the twentieth century, with this tremendous presence of mind that this man has). The presence of mind is always there and he can meet any situation. He is crafty, wiley, and another thing, just. He has been fighting for just causes, fighting with Athena for the right to found a new state in Ithaca. He sees it through, but why at this moment, does he risk to raise the scorn of Poseidon? Because he cannot resist. He has become what all Greek heroes want to become which makes him immortal. A monster slayer. He has blinded a monster, and that is eternal glory. When he comes home they all will have to sing about him, and this glory he cannot resist. That, in a way, is what does him in.