Across all the books, seventeen through
twenty, there is an interesting new language that is afoot in the story.
The story starts to mo-, move, by secret signs and secret codes.
We've already seen Odysseus and Athena especially share some secret codes.
They do their winks and their nods back and forth.
And, there's an intimate circle of knowledge that, that creates.
But there's further kinds of richness in, in secret languages, that gets built into
seventeen through twenty. And it's worth us paying a little bit of
attention to what this is all about. In antiquity it was understood that
messages from the gods were built into the world around us.
And that they were not just leaving us hanging, that we had to figure everything
out on our own. But they were purposely trying to send us
messages in the otherwise innocuous things that seem to be happening around us.
So if there was a strange coincidence, something fell off of a, a, of a
mantelpiece or something, we would say to ourselves, oh my god, you know, there must
be a god trying to talk to us. The gods talked to us in certain types of
ways. They talk to us through the behaviors of
animals, so the flights of birds, the croak of a frog before a storm, the
screeches of a bird or the flight path, the darting to the left or to the right.
They also were interested in things like thunder and lightning.
Overheard words were also important. So if you were walking past a window and
someone just happened to be saying you'll win the lottery today to their friend that
was a message for you if you just happened to hear it and then indeed you were
supposed to win the lottery that day so you want to make sure you hear that
overhead word. There are direct visions that sometimes
people get. So if you see something and then there's a
vision of, that has. Resonate for you in your future somehow
about a revealing, about future state of events.
There are dreams that the ancients are interested in.
The gods were thought to send messages this way to us.
So we could hear what was going on in their own minds, and what was going to
happen in the universe, as long as we paid attention to what we saw in our dreams.
So things like birds, lightning, thunder the gods visiting us in dreams.
These were thought not just to be, you know, strange coincidences, or kind of,
you know, intuitive. Things that we might use our intuition to
draw conclusions from so you know, I just don't like the feel of this place or this
seems a little bit strange to me, I'm not sure why.
When you and I start talking about intuition, it's during those moments that
the Greeks start talking about signs. They don't talk about intuitive knowing,
they talk about knowing by signs. There are signs that show up throughout
all these books, the divine ones I want to talk about in just a second, but also
there are signs that show up just physically that are, they are giving
information that sometimes some people are able to see and other times other people
are not. Take a look at what happens around just
the body of Odysseus. It itself is a kind of sign.
The Greeks thought that great person would have a marvelous physique and would be
beautiful. So, when we see this beggar, and on
occasion we get little glimpses that there is amazing physique underneath all those
rags. We should be thinking to ourselves, if
we're smart Greeks, well this can't be just any beggar.
This must be someone really important. Well the suitors get chance to see this
happening. At a couple really interesting points and
they sort of blow it. They don't draw the right conclusion.
Page 361 Melanthius is the goat herd who is giving Odysseus a hard time at the
time. And, and he hauls off and kicks Odysseus,
you know, really hard right in the hip. And the, the kick, though, doesn't leave
any mark. It just kind of bounces off.
If you went ahead and kicked someone in the hip, you would think that it would
destabilize them, but Odysseus is so strong that the kick basically just
bounces off. He is impervious to that blow.
No one around seems to notice that, that just happened.
The suitors are not good at drawing conclusions from the signs around them.
Then we have Antinous, who is this lead suitor, this aw, the most awful of the
awful suitors. Antinous on page 369 picks up a stool and
hurls it at Odysseus. Well, this just bounces off of him.
Again, doesn't leave a mark, and the suitors don't draw the right conclusion
that there is probably someone other than just a wayward beggar here.
We have in his fight with Iris on page 377, we see Odysseus you know, Picking up
the rags that are forming his garment. And we see huge thigh muscles rippling.
The suitors take note of this, but they don't draw any conclusions from it.
That, hey, this guy might not be, the guy we think it is.
So there are signs coursing around in these events.
Some of them are purposeful and intentional.
Like when Athena gives the wink to Odysseus, and Odysseus is ready to give a
wink back. Telemachus gets in on these kind of signs,
eventually. There are the signs, that are being
registered in the events around us. Like, Odysseus' body, and it's sort of
revealing itself, if you know how to draw the conclusion.
But I wanted to close this consideration of signs by looking at what the Greeks
would have thought of as the most important of the signs, and those are the
ones thought to come from the gods. We see an example of a portent when
Theoclymenus just jumps into the, basically almost interrupting a
conversation with Penelope, on page 359, book seventeen.
Theoclymenus jumps in and gives a kind of portentous statement to Penelope.
And says, he swears by Zeus that Odysseus is already here.
Remember Theoclymenus. He's this person who's come with us,
escaping a blood guilt, links up with Telemachus in Pylos and comes back to us
Ithaca. A kind of stranger in our midst who's good
at reading divine signs. When he lays down this remark we take
note. We Greeks notice that some slightly spooky
stranger, whose name means the one who can hear the gods or the one who hears the
gods, when that kind of a person says something like Odysseus is already here,
well, gosh, we're going to take note. The sign that we see on book, signs that
we see in book seventeen also show up when we hear the statement made that if only
Odysseus would come back that would be you know, a grand thing.
We miss Odysseus. At that point we get a sneeze from
Telemachus, right at the end, as a punctuation mark to that statement.
This comes on page 372. Now a sneeze in classical Greek times was
thought to be a divine sign and it was thought to be, a punctuation mark that
said that what was just said was indeed true.
So, when the sneeze comes, whatever was just said just before is marked as being a
sign from the Gods and as being indeed true.
So when Telemachus on page 372 sneezes right after the statement, if only
Odysseus would come back, that's a divine sign, telling us oh my gosh, that's about
to happen. There's something, something powerful in
that remark and the Gods are under, underlining it.
Now in case we missed that connection between sneezes and divine signs, Homer
adds another one for us because the sneeze of Telemachus is like a thunder clap.
It's compared, in other words, to the most, well known sign from Zeus, the
thunderbolt. This is how Zeus sends us messages.
Sadly the thunderbolt is not too, semantically complicated.
It doesn't say you should choose green instead of purple.
It says instead, thrum, so what's, you know, it gives a strong sense of
meaningfulness to whatever is happening, or just happened or is about to happen,
but it doesn't exactly tell you what the meaning is.
But in any case, this authorization that Telemachus gives to his sneeze is
underlined by having it being compared to, assigned from Zeus, a thunder clap.
In book eighteen, there is a strong speech that comes after Odysseus beats the other
beggar, and he speaks in a full-throated ominous way to the suitors, on page 380.
Roar, roar, roar, roar, roar. He's gotten his, his gumption up, because
he's bested the other beggar in a contest, a fighting contest.
So now he got, feels, he's feeling his oats.
He's got, sort of, his energy is coursing through his body.
But when he lays down that to the Suitors. Now just how awful they'll be and the
trouble that they're about to face, it has a kind of heir of a, of a divine
pronouncement almost. Because it's so strongly worded it's not
normal. It sounds almost like something
Theoclymenus would say, doesn't it? It has that kind of tone to it and that
tonality. Odysseus is becoming that kind of seer now
and reading the right act to the, to the to the suitors.
Again, they don't notice. So we've got example of examples of
thunder. That shows up itself on page 413.
Then we have the overheard words. The, the example that we mentioned.
Plus also another example on page 413. We see birds being talked about in, on
page 418. And then Theoclymenus has this really
spooky direct vision, page 422. You know, blood, blood, you're all washed
in blood. You suitors here in huge trouble.
When he says that the suitors are like. Yeah, I can't quite understand what that's
suppose to mean. Bring out some more wine.
Bring out another goat. Every time these signs come to the
suitors, they just brush them off. Odysseus' inner circle sees what's
happening. They feel what's happening.
They see the coursing of the energy building toward the, the sense that you
know the suitors' days are numbered. The only ones that don't see it are the
suitors themselves. They're just blind to this.
They can't read these signs. They're out of the circle of knowledge.
The most important one of these signs, I think, and the most lengthy and detailed
one comes in book nineteen. I wanna talk about a couple of other
things before we close our discussion of seventeen through twenty, with a careful
consideration of what goes on in book nineteen.
Lots of moving parts to that book. A few other preliminaries I wanna look at,
but in closing off our remarks in a couple of lectures, we're gonna return to
Penelope's dream in book nineteen. But before we do, there's a couple of
other things I wanna make sure we cover