In our next trip taking adventures, two
shorts and a long. Again, we've got, short episode with Elias
and other one with Laestrygonians and then the longer one with Circe.
With Elias, we have a pretty strange environment.
We run across a foreign king that has somehow control of all the winds, and he's
got them all stuffed into a single bag, how did that happen?
And then also, reading closely, looking at the details in the episode, Elias's sons
and daughters marry one another. That's not quite normal, the lines that
get drawn around incest taboos are sometimes tangible from society to
society, but in most of them, brother and sister marriage counts as prohibited.
And in Elias that's, or in Homer's time that's surely the case.
So, representing Elias this way represents things as being a bit strange.
They, again, Odysseus men's curiosity leads to a problem, they can't wait to see
what's inside that bag, leaves them to get blown back to Elias who says, my goodness,
you must really be cursed. I don't want you here anymore, and sends
them off on their way. And we get to the Laestrygonians where we
have some bloody battle. And, again, we get this introduction to
the creature, the monster that eats human beings.
The Laestrygonians eat some of Odysseus's men.
An awful thing, the revulsion of that carries forward through these episodes.
Moving on to our next larger piece of what our story's all about and the episode
involving Circe. We get an even more full meditation on
some of these themes. The episode begins in the same kind of way
with some variations, there's a wash up on an unknown shore.
A search party goes off to see what's happening there, Odysseus himself stays
behind. We get tales of strange, awful things
happening. Odysseus, then sets out to make sure that
we can set things right there in the, in the, in the hut in Circe's village.
And, things are quite wrong there in profound ways.
The most powerful piece of this episode is that Odysseus's men get turned into pigs,
and that's terrible. The turning of a human being into a pig is
a kind of shape-shifting that makes us, you know, just feel awful that someone
should have their humanity taken away from them.
But, I think, there is even more whole piece of what is awful about the scene in
that its not just that men are turning into animals, its that men are turned into
animals that are in a standard repertoire of food.
Pigs are raised domestically in order for one thing, just for one thing.
In order to be eaten. And now, Odysseus's men are taking that
role of becoming these kind of edible parts of a normal food chain which is
really adds to the horrific nature of this.
Now, in the Circe episode, we see Odysseus's men wondering themselves, you
know, how is that a, a woman can turn a man into a swine.
It could be that there's a kind of psychological reason that's possible here.
It may be that what is really the case is that men who made up this myth, Homer's
gender is male, such as we know, made, made up this myth and who liked to hear it
from each other, may well fear that women have the power to turn men into some other
kind of creature, a beguiling magical power.
Circe's not the first female gender character that we've seen that has a, a
witching power to her and a power to un-man, in this case, literally the, the,
the men that approach her. This is mixed up also with the erotic
dimension to Circe. Remember that in the end, after Odysseus
wins her over, she carries forward with an erotic relationship with Odysseus that
lasts fully over a year. So, this kind of cluster of ideas of
dangerous women that have magical powers that can do shape-shifting with men and
that have erotic lock, an erotic lock on the male creatures is something that's a
standard piece of, of ancient myth. We've already seen two characters like
this. The, Odysseus's way of overcoming Circe's
power pretty straightforward, he pulls his sword on her, sure, but he also remember,
you know, it's not just his manly heroic prowess that's coming through here.
He has this special magical potion that he gets from Hermes on his way to Circes's
hut. And when he gets that magical potion, he
now has a power to resist her magic. So, she can mix up her herbs as she does
in this beautiful scene from Greek, Greek pottery, mix up her herbs, hand it off to
the other men but the other men get turned into pigs.
Odysseus himself is now, because of his counter-magic, is impervious to her
spells. Because of this now, he can rush at her
with her sword. When he does, she falls for him, seems
kind of weakly characterized. But, yeah, that seems to be what Circe
wanted all along was just for Odysseus to love her.
So, when he does, she's wonderfully overjoyed at being overpowered and then
she has this long tryst, this long relationship with him.
Notice in this case, this thing goes on for nearly a year, and Odysseus's men have
to talk Odysseus out of this one. He's just kind of going along, day by day,
enjoying this relationship and they say, now, come on, Odysseus, it's time to go.
They push and get him ready to, to move on to the next step.
Now, when they do, Odysseus then says, we're going to leave, she says, well, you
know, there's some stuff you need to know. Circe is now going to fill him in with
special kind, with a special kind of secret knowledge.
She is going to give him clues that he needs to use in order to find his way
home. There's a problem with his journey home
that Odysseus is ignorant of. He is going to need to find, she says, the
smartest man around, Tiresias. There's one unfortunate thing, Tiresias
just happens to be dead. So, in order to talk to Tiresias.
Odysseus is going to have to make his way to the underworld.
In order to do that, she gives him the, the basic formula that he needs the place
to go, how to lay out a trench and lay out an attractive, kind of, bait for the
shades to come out of the underworld and then he can interview them, find his way
to Tiresias and get the information he needs to make his way home.
Now, on this, before they leave the island of Circe, there is this one little loose
end that doesn't quite get tied up. Remember, there's, one of the men in
Odysseus's crew, Elpenor, is drinking too much up on the roof, falls off the roof
and dies. Dies completely alone.
No one realizes what's happened. They're off on their next adventure and
they don't even know he's dead, poor Elpenor.
He's going to be someone who helps us tie the next couple of books together.
So, keep an eye on his story.