‘Her completely gorgeous bed of love’—Homer in English

Odyssey 10.336-407

How long do Odysseus and Circe make love to each other? What a rude and intrusive question, but science can have little regard for privacy if it is to be comprehensive. Unfortunately no one was around with a stopwatch, or any sort of atomic timepiece from a lab. But still available to us is the original, pre-Hellenic and pre-Western measure: the hexameter. Each of these was itself already measured by a dance step, the dactyl, into sets of sixes. But the hexameter was, I believe, the primary unity and unit of measurement, the reference for the word ἔπος, whence we derive ‘epic’.

ἔπος is often translated ‘word’, but Homer and the Greeks in fact had no word for ‘word’—or rather, they used a number of different words which covered ground which may have included the sort of dictionary entry we call a word. But all of them covered much more ground than the things we enter into dictionaries, like so many names atop tombstones inscribed in an alphabetised cemetery. λόγος is famously the word translated ‘word’ at the beginning of the Gospel of John, describing what was there at the beginning. But a λόγος is a speech or an account or a count. The material of each of these involves words, plural. Likewise, a μῦθος is a disclosure, in context sometimes a command. Usually more than one dictionary word is required for such a revelation from a speaker. Later these two words can mean ‘ratio’ and ‘myth’, respectively. In a similar way, ἔπος, also ‘speech’ or ‘a speech’, refers primarily—in Homer, I would suggest—to an hexameter line. It is hard to say how Homer himself might have further divided the interior of that line, apart from its musical division into bum-ba-da dactyls. Such a line, the ἔπος, it must be emphasised, is a musical, not a grammatical form.

The articulation of words is not the obvious thing it seems to those of us used to experiencing them as visible symbols separated on a page. Such an experience is a peculiar human pathology limited to the ‘literate’. (For those of you keeping score, the fetishising of equations is a pathology of the literate. Those who ‘plug in’ numbers need to be plugged in themselves, for a reboot. Teasing or fudging the data, is the one universal experience of the lab.) Researchers into living oral poetry, hoping to illuminate the composition of Homeric music, observe the following about the non-literate experience of ‘words’:

In their field work among the guslari, the traditional oral singers of Yugoslavia, for example, Milman Parry and Albert Lord discovered that these singers thought in terms of sound groups, not individual words; the two do not necessarily coincide. Only after a Serbian or Croatian guslar had seen a printed copy of his dictated song on a sheet of paper, with the individual words set apart by the white space between them, could he understand what Parry and Lord meant by the term “word.”

Prior to the work of the Alexandrian scholars, who edited the transmitted texts of Homer in the Hellenistic era, the late centuries BCE, a line of Homer’s might have looked something like this in writing:

ΚΑΙΤΟΤΕΓΩΚΙΡΚΗΣΕΠΕΒΗΝΠΕΡΙΚΑΛΛΕΟΣΕΥΝΗΣ

The different individual symbols represent a continuous stream of sound, some of them standing for the vowels and some for the consonant stops in between them in that stream. There is no indication of melody, or stress patterns. Earlier writing, including earlier Greek writing called Linear B, used such symbols to represent whole syllables only by their leading consonants; often there was no indication of the vowel sounds at all. Such writing, using a syllabary, is therefore a shorthand, not a full recording, made for users of a language who already knew what vowels to fill in, and how to intone them. The Greek invention of the alphabet, where the symbols of a Phoenician syllabary were for the first time used to record, and hence recognise, elements more fundamental than a syllable, was a key reason the word-music of Homer could be preserved, unlike, sadly, the word-music of the psalms of David.

The recording of vowels was not enough, however, to save this music for posterity. The line above describes the moment Odysseus actually climbed on Circe’s bed. (Start your stopwatch.)

‘Exactly then was when I got up on Circe, her completely gorgeous bed of love.’

Here’s how the same ἔπος might have looked in a Byzantine manuscript, descended from the Alexandrian version, whence our modern texts emerge after modern editing and fonts:

καὶ τότ’ ἐγὼ Κίρκης ἐπέβην περικαλλέος εὐνῆς. (Od.10.347)

Aside from the introduction of lower case letters, we note the separation of what we have come to call ‘words’ by spaces, and the addition of accent and punctuation marks. It turns out that the separation of words and the addition of accentual diacritics is not, as you might suppose from modern grammars, a mere and historical coincidence. The Greek accent, a disyllabic tonal arc, up and then down in pitch, was felt to be terminal; that is, its place of commencement, the rise in pitch immediately before the fall, was limited to the last three syllables of an expression. Such expressions were therefore self-demarcating subunits of the line, the string of connected sounds recorded in the more ancient written version of the text. In other words, the recurring accentual contonation itself demarcated internal units within the whole line. Hence what were separated in the Alexandrian texts of Homer were the natural Greek prosodic units within the larger unity of the hexameter line.

Punctuation also dramatically affected accentuation, in that pauses released some otherwise suppressed rises in pitch. Hence punctuation must very much have been a planned thing in musical composition, although to be clear, the present commas and colons are often a modern editor’s choice in the texts of Homer. These editors are, in general, not trained to assess the musical implications and effects of their chosen pauses, only the grammatical ones. Thankfully, the disjunction between grammatical and musical form is not complete; but the two are not identical. An epic line is not also necessarily a sentence. These editors seem to register the accent marks, if at all, as merely visual parts of a word. Whatever the case, not only the addition of accent marks and punctuation, but also the separation of prosodic units (nascent ‘words’) appear to have been part of a single project: to make clear the tonal contours and emphases of Homer’s music. The accentual culminations of these prosodic units brought rhythmic life to the hexameter, which was otherwise an endlessly repeating dance movement. These culminations reinforced but also, crucially, syncopated its beat.

Most likely the Alexandrian scholars introduced accentuation into Homer’s text, entailing the division and separation of what we call words, to guard against a living change in the accentuation of Greek. At some time in their period, a period of the international spread and adoption of Greek, the accent became a monosyllabic stress rather than a contonation with an often disyllabic arc of pitch change. The Greek accent remains a monosyllabic stress to this day, like the English one; the stress lands on the syllable where in the ancient language, the voice rose in pitch. But in the ancient pattern, the voice also fell in pitch on the next syllable, often emphatically. Therefore, unfortunately, the new monosyllabic stress habit could not make sense of the ancient compositions, whose metres had been reinforced (and syncopated) by an often disyllabic tonal arc. The unmarked syllable following the one bearing the accent mark, was often the most tonally prominent one in its reinforcing relationship to the underlying dance beat.

To be clear, the introduction of graphic accent marks indicating the location of a culminating tonal pattern, and the momentous separation of prosodic units which resulted, were part of an attempt to preserve the original rhythmic and rhetorical movement of Homer and the other pre-Alexandrian, classical authors; but it must be said that the attempt failed, until my recent reinterpretation of the accentual reality. (My explication of the ‘law of tonal prominence’ for Greek and Latin can most easily be found here.) Hence what we who read and write have come to regard as obvious and self-evident beings, ‘words’, were once prosodic units within larger unities, such as metrical periods like the hexameter line, or grammatical ‘sentences’. Hence such different things as verbs and nouns are all, equally to us, words. In ancient Greek a single such word can constitute a whole sentence, but also an almost meaningless particle. I believe this wild ambiguity is a legacy of the literate origin of the concept of the ‘word’ in the tonal units demarcated by spaces in our Medieval Greek texts. This was an innovation advanced by Alexandrian scholars not to invent the concept of words but to preserve the melodic and rhythmic actuality of Homeric composition.

‘Show me the meaning of the word.’—The Pretenders

‘Word’ is another one of our woolly-minded, Dark Age concepts. Go ahead, try to define ‘word’ without using the word ‘word’. No joke. When my grandson learns a word, before he can read and write, what is that thing, that barely recognisable sequence of sounds coming out his mouth, which gestates in the caves of his mind?

Perhaps you think I am avoiding talking about Odysseus and Circe having sex. I’m not the only one. These are the lines that follow Odysseus’ announcement that he got on Circe’s bed:

Her attendants, meanwhile, got busy in her rooms:

Four of them, who were the working women in the house.

They were born, these lasses, from the springs and from the groves

And from the holy rivers, who flow forth into the salt sea.

Of these women one was throwing on the chairs some pretty rugs,

Sea-purple on the top, and underneath she threw a cloth cover;

The other began stretching dinner trays out in front of the chairs,

Made of silver, and on them she was putting golden baskets:

The third was by the big bowl, mixing wine of honeyed intent,

Delightful against the silver, and distributing the golden goblets.

The fourth was carrying water and lighting the fire,

A lively one under the big tripod: and the water began to warm. (Od.10.348-59)

Note the ‘meanwhile’. Homer himself is counting the time: first, second, third, fourth. Except every number is a woman, a house servant whose work gets two lines each, a fresh-water lass born from springs and groves and sacred rivers who immerse in the salt sea. We do not learn their names, only their numbers. In the lines immediately following, Odysseus gets into that preheated bath. The demarcation is the moment the water boils. So there’s our answer: these lines are timing the lovers’ encounter from beginning to end. Circe and Odysseus go at it for twelve hexameter lines, those twelve rendered in prosaic English above.

Homer is no stranger to this kind of aesthetic-mimetic move. Homer never directly describes Helen’s beauty, for example. He describes instead the effect it has around her; famously, how her presence makes the old men on Ilium’s walls have young thoughts, as they mutter among themselves like summer cicadas (Il.III.146-60). This method is ultimately far more effective than any direct attempt at word-painting; instead, vividly to the foreground, are these verbal reactions in the old men, which fence the wondrous unicorn where she lives in our imagination, quite beyond the ability of words to sell her short.

But something is off with Odysseus’ use of the quartet of riverine serving women setting tables and warming baths, one by one. Compare what is, to my mind, the most beautiful of Homeric examples of the technique in question. When Achilles first hears from Antinous, Nestor’s son, the news that Patroclus is actually dead, and that Hector has his armour, he is grimly distraught. He lies outstretched in the dust and tears out his hair. We are told also of the reactions of the people around him: even the enslaved women he and Patroclus had gathered as booty in their raids across the Troad, shrieked aloud in pain, ran outside and then around Achilles, beat their breasts and dropped to their knees. Antilochus himself

wept where he stood, bending to hold the hero’s

hands when groaning shook his heart: he feared

the man might use sharp iron to slash his throat.

(Il.XVIII.32-4, tr. Fitzgerald)

At last Achilles utters a dreadful cry (σμερδαλέον δ’ ᾤμωξεν), so outrageous that his mother Thetis heard him in the depths of the sea. She also cries out in mourning and becomes a second focal point of grief as the goddesses, the Nereids, also gather round:

… all Nêrêïdês,

who haunted the green chambers of the sea.

Glaukê, Thaleia, and Kymodokê,

Nesaiê, Speiô, Thoê, Haliê

with her wide eyes; Kymothoê, Aktaiê,

Limnôreia, Melitêm and Iaira,

Amphitoê, Agauê, Dôtô, Prôtô,

Pherousa, Dynaménê, Dexaménê,

Amphinomê, Kallianeira, Dôris,

Panopê, and storied Galateia,

Nêmertês and Apseudês, Kallianassa,

Klyméne, Ianeira, Ianassa,

Maira, Oreithyia, Amathyia,

and other Nêrêïdês of the deep sea,

filling her glimmering silvery cave …

(Il.XVIII.37-50, tr. Fitzgerald)

The words for ‘cried out’ (ᾤμωξεν, κώκυσεν) are onomatopoeic: they sound out groans and moans. But at the moment Achilles releases his primal scream of agony, we enter an area beyond the possibility of visual stimulation of the dramatic scene, and especially its vocal representation. Art fails. Instead we are transported to a place impossibly far, under the sea, where the whirlpool of human figures around the prostrate Achilles is resonantly recreated, like an induced field or ‘quantum entanglement’, by these Nereids around Thetis. Our immersion in their names, syllable by syllable, is Homer’s most extraordinary reversion to catalogue poetry, not this time to remember or memorialise, but for its unique aesthetic effect. In chanting these names in their deeply Greek sonority, like saying a rosary, we focus our minds as though in meditation, so that the grief itself and its existential expression can go on pure and untouched by our verbal and imaginative limits—in the off-stage-left of our consciousness, as it were. There it resounds more mightily than words can hope to do, from the bottom of the salt sea to the peaks of heaven.

Note the dwelling on the names. We get no names at all in Odysseus’ catalogue of fresh-water femmes. Instead they each have an ordinal number and a domestic duty. It is a most basic catalogue, like the names of the counting numbers, first, second, third, fourth. This seems to be more a cheating of expectations than an aesthetic strategy, perhaps even a sendup. Consider that Odysseus has just mounted Circe’s bed. (Yes, like a horse.) A considerable segment of us in audience are on the edge of our seats, looking for a bit of action. A tasteful sex scene might have been nice, but for some, only god-and-man pornography would have sufficed. Odysseus’ aesthetic here is almost Brechtian. If Odysseus had meant the water goddesses as a substitute for us leering plebs, he might have given them pretty names and evocative epithets for us to savour. Instead we get the tensest of the many getting-ready-for-dinner tableaux in the Odyssey, as timeless and elegant as the details always are. Always it is the objects, the bowls and baskets, pitchers and ewers of silver and gold, and the soothing, professional operations in such scenes—never the labourers themselves—which come into focus. It adds only weirdness to make the servants goddesses (especially if imagined diaphanously-clothed). We get twelve hexameters of setting the table, while God conjoins with mortal man just over there, behind the master bedroom door.

To get the measure of how this kind of thing can be done, consider the following:

Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause, her companion added, ‘You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.’

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never felt before, and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eyes, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.

They walked on, without knowing in what direction.

In comparison to Homer, Jane Austen is a pornographer. Mr. D’Arcy is literature’s proudest erection. But generations of Janeites will continue to dress up rather than down, because suppression and sublimation allow the soul to orgasm free of the body, in the face of the sublime. As sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. The genius is in the supposal. Just how sensibly and warmly, and violently, is that? Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eyes … Ah the power of a negative conditional. It is like saying ‘don’t think of pink elephants.’ Never have the eyes of erotic passion been more compellingly portrayed—with the compulsion of the forbidden or impossible, upon an ambitious child: she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight diffused over his face became him. If the reader keeps track of Darcy’s and especially Elizabeth’s walks and walk-taking through the course of the story, they will sink back in amazement at this line: They walked on, without knowing in what direction. The whole scene ends in this way:

After walking several miles in a leisurely manner, and too busy to know anything about it, they found at last, on examining their watches, that it was time to be at home.

Now that’s how you time a love scene. Am I the only one who does not generally imagine either Elizabeth or D’Arcy wearing a watch? ‘Examining their watches’: these two compare their readings, likely a necessary precaution with the timepieces of Austen’s day. But for D’Arcy and Elizabeth, coordinating their timekeeping—sharing a joint measurement of the extraordinary moment they have just spent—is itself an erotic act.

When I used to teach Pride and Prejudice, once upon a time, I would begin by pointing out that in the view from space, but also in every detail of its fabric and lace, this is a work of dramatic art about the French Revolution. Give that book a re-read. The action of the novel depends on the movements of soldiers, due to actions on the continent. You will find a confrontation in a garden, unheard by anyone else, between the privilege of nobility and the rights of man. This author needs, sympathetically and generously, to be rescued from the Janeites. Call her Austen.

There may also be the grooming of a certain kind of reader in Homer as well. We remember Odysseus’ favourite Polites, ‘Citizen’, who was in the initial expedition of Odysseus’ men to Circe’s house, and who is not again mentioned. He must have become a pig. He was the one who incited the men to call out in response to the singing voice of Circe. Polites does not conceal his interest in the idea that the singer might be a woman. Perhaps it is, in part anyway, lust that turns men into pigs. In that case perhaps Homer’s Brechtian turn is not an aesthetic misdirection the better to capture the union of Circe and Odysseus, so much as a bridle or warning against such prurient interest. We have no natural right to the wisdom of the moly for protection. There are perhaps enough of us streaming our movies and television shows, and fellow gawpers and groupies in Homer’s own audience, who have become swine at the trough without knowing it. Whereas the substance of Achilles’ raging grief is something Homer wishes to render by all the means his music can engender, the depiction of Odysseus sleeping with Circe perhaps brings a danger to the enchanted listener.

This is snipped from James Joyce’s Portrait:

The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

The singer’s business is literally enchantment. In the case of Homer’s performer, the staff-bearing rhapsode, he is an enchanter with a wand, just like Circe. But it may be that for Hermes’ initiate, the enchantment of either singer or goddess is not one that renders his swinish soul into an acorn-eating pig. His is a state of union and communion which cannot be depicted like sex in a porno.

The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.

Impishly undermining Joyce’s Thomistic rapture, at least in this case, is the ever-present spirit of comedy in the Odyssey. Indeed there is a way in which our eye seems consciously blurred to Odysseus’ nakedness. In the line, ‘She sat me in the tub and started washing from the big tripod,’ there is oddly no ‘me’ in the Greek. (M. L. West, feeling the absence, suggests in the apparatus restoring an elided ‘me’—μ’—in place of an ῥ’.) Odysseus has slipped into the scene of the servants’ preparations without anyone noticing. But as it is, the line could actually hint, with an ambiguity of voice between active and middle in the form of ‘she sat’, that it is Circe sitting in the tub. Now that’s a kinetic thought. These are, after all, Circe’s servants, who must be used to bathing her. But could Homer (or Odysseus) be cheeky enough to conjure her for us naked? It is only two lines later, after water has cascaded down the bather’s head and shoulders, that we can be sure that the bather is the speaker being washed by a handmaiden: ‘Until she took the life-destroying weariness from my limbs.’ We are certainly used by now to Odysseus’ suffering and weariness; but isn’t it slightly uproarious that the labour he is just now recovering from, has been his twelve epic lines’ worth of business on Circe’s bed?

Dinner is served. New functionaries emerge, or perhaps a couple of the fresh-water lasses doing double duty, as an attendant who pours water for washing and a house manager who brings out the bread and short eats, from her store. It is stunning to me that the anthropomorphism of Homer’s gods extends to all their classes and castes. There’s an upstairs and a downstairs, wherever you are, it seems. The notion that these roles could be eternal is more than a little chilling, and perhaps intended to be. We shall have reason to visit the idea of whether Homer thinks a mortal human being can ever move up in the world—if not to immortality, at least in social station.

When we first heard these lines about the golden pitcher and the silver basin, and the conscientious house manager, it was for the suitors’ dinner in Ithaca. But there were more lines then, and in the dynamics of musical discourse and registration, we especially note the differences when melodic passages recur.

The carver lifted and set by platters of meats,

From every kind of cut, and placed by them golden cups.

A herald checked on them often, pouring wine. (Od.1.141-3)

These two functionaries, carver and herald, are both male, and perhaps for that reason not wanted in Circe’s entourage. But the omission raises a question or two. Circe’s meal for Odysseus’ men had been vegetarian. There was honey and cheese in the mix, so perhaps she has a cow and a hive out back. We know there’ll be wine despite there being no herald, because the third of her water nymphs has already mixed it and distributed the goblets. Ah, but will there be meat? Oh dear. There’s those lovely hogs in Circe’s pens. Those of you familiar with The Rocky Horror Picture Show will know what I mean, when in answer to the question posed on screen, ‘what’s for dinner?’, the audience resoundingly responds, ‘Meatloaf!’

That a host might serve his guest the flesh of that guest’s beloveds, in the soup, is not a scenario unknown to Greek storytelling. Homer, it seems to me, is an adept at creating subliminal tensions in his Odyssean scene-painting, with just such a whiff of the macabre. Odysseus himself telegraphs this unease, vividly, but with no specificity:

ἀλλ’ ἥμην ἀλλοφρονέων, κακὰ δ’ ὄσσετο θυμός. (Od.10.374)

‘No: I sat distracted, my mind elsewhere; and my spirit foreboded ill.’

The omission of what is expected, an omission especially felt in the recurrence of a passage of music, is the source of the effect in the aural medium of Homeric poetry. ‘Something’s missing,’ or ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ is always the prelude to discovery, often of a gruesome kind. The possibilities for the development of a scene all brood in the consciousness, until the definite action is realised. Before then, how can we know for sure how diabolical Circe’s imagination may be? Trust me, says the witch. We expect a carver to carve some meat.

‘Yet the mind within stayed steady—the way things were before, in fact.’ (10.240) This is the present condition of Odysseus’ men. It’s still them, but now looking through fattened hogs’ eyes. We remember also the thirsty stag, whom Odysseus ambushed when first venturing into Circe’s isle, to feed his crew a dinner. (I have christened him ‘Fred’, without his permission.) I cannot resist the idea that Homer may impute consciousness to the various species of mortality that we eat. What is lacking is their ability to express themselves in a way we can understand, including to express their feelings about that very mortality.

Odysseus will not touch his food. The scene plays so drolly as post-coital repartée.

“Why this way, Odysseus? You’re worth as much, sat for dinner, as a mute,

Devouring life’s breath, and you don’t touch the food—or the drink.

Or I suppose you’re expecting another trick? But there’s no need for you

To be afraid: for I already swore you a mighty oath.” (10.378-81)

And he finally lets it out:

“Ah Circe, for what man is there, who’s on the level,

Could endure to taste of food and of drink,

Before his comrades were released and he could see it with his own eyes?

No, if you mean well when you order me to drink and eat,

Free them—so I see with these eyes my trusty comrades.” (10.383-7)

The reunion with his men is sweet and tearful, but the comic imp is still buzzing around with his little stinger.

‘So I spoke, and Circe walked across and out the room

Holding the wand in her hand, and she opened the doors of the pigsty

And drove out what looked like fattened nine-year-old hogs.’ (10.388-90)

We are reminded that Odysseus is still pretty hungry. He looks at his men and sees succulent pork, like Elmer Fudd contemplating Bugs Bunny. This time Circe applies a drug like an ointment, baptising them with holy oil. Their pig hairs start flowing off.

They became men again, younger than they were before,

Both more handsome and taller to look at.

They recognised me, those fellows, and hugged me root and branch, one at a time.

And under all of them entered a longed-for ability to mourn; the house on both sides

Resounded terribly: and the goddess started to pity them—even her! (10.395-9)

They’ve gone from being good to eat to being good lookers. These men have clearly been through something. It’s too bad Odysseus did not interview them. I’m reminded of John 12:9: ‘… and they came not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead.’ Jesus was still an attraction, to be sure, but Lazarus had been dead four days! (Jesus never broke this World Record.) People wanted to check this guy out, hear what he had to say. ‘What did you see there?’ ‘Did ya meet yer Mum?’ ‘Did ya meet my Mum?’

The story goes that in the Eleusinian mysteries, a pig was sacrificed as the initiate’s surrogate. The initiate emerges reborn. It does not seem unlikely to me that Homer is here profaning a mystery in sending it up. When he has Menelaus say to Telemachus, ‘do this in memory of me’ (4.591-2), in relation to a wine ritual, it seems to me that sacramental wine in memorial was already a thing, a quiddity in Homer’s day, and though it reemerges with profundity in Christian ritual and theology, Homer and his comedy are already post-Christian and post-Eleusinian. They are, even today, post-religious. That prospect I find exciting in both kinetic and contemplative ways. It is something new for the history of religions, which has never thought to see Homer as anything but given, somehow, and traditional. He is an anomaly in any alleged human timeline, not at all at the beginning of things. Everywhere I turn in the Odyssey, I meet the deepest comedy, which is always a post facto thing—not only post-Iliad.

In rendering ‘hugged me root and branch (ἔφυν τ’ ἐν χερσίν)’ I am translating the verb φύω, ‘grow’ or ‘sprout’, which is often used in this context of greeting by Homer. ἔφυν ἐν χερσίν is ‘grew into [my] arms’, hence ‘hugged’, ‘embraced’. The abstract noun from this verb is φύσις, the ‘word’ that later became ‘nature’. The mourning (γόος) of the men returned reechoes round the house. This time it does not reach the depths of the sea, but it does reach the heart of Circe:

… and the goddess started to pity them—even her!

It is striking that the men’s lamentation is described as ἱμερόεις, ‘longed-for’, ‘lovely’, usually to be taken in an erotic sense. I assume that such mourning was impossible in their porcine condition. Hence I interpret ‘a longed-for ability to mourn.’ These men have come back younger and more beautiful. Why are they still unhappy? ‘In truth I know not why I am so sad …’ The implication is that there is something characteristically human in lamentation, not generally imputed to the animals we kill and eat, like pigs and cows and potatoes. We like to think they do not mourn each other. To be human again is to mourn again, to be mortals is to mourn. But first comes the embrace, clasping each other root and branch in the awareness of our shared nature: ‘They recognised me, those fellows.’

Perhaps there is hope in the idea that if we could sleep with God, as woman and man, She might also begin to recognise us, and over a cigarette and a restorative meal, take an interest in our feelings, what it is we care about—which, in a democratic world, is each other. Not at all to acknowledge our merits, or choose us for any reason, but to pity us. Her laugh in sympathy would be better, anyway, than a deserving mockery, or wanton sport.

For Katia Mitova

Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. In Greek: