Homer - The Odyssey - Episode 4 - The Importance Of ”Oikos” And Why Odysseus Pursues It!

Homer - The Odyssey - Episode 4 - The Importance Of "Oikos" And Why Odysseus Pursues It!

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us.   

And I’m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast. This is our third episode in our discussion of this influential classic, however else you might like to call it.  In the first episode we started our discussion introducing just a few of the issues surrounding Homer, the poet himself, the Mycenean people and the semi-mythical age in which the story is set.  Both of which are full of mystery.  Archeology just does not fully answer questions like if Homer was a real person, or even if Ithaca existed. So, we are left with complicated pieces of a strange large game of sudoku, if you want to look at it as a puzzle.  We tried to clearly portray that the Homeric poems are not historical accounts but creative pieces.  This of course becomes very obvious in the chapters about the wanderings. Six-headed monsters and glamorous witches are obviously imaginative.  But even the parts that seem to reflect “real life”, they still cannot possibly represent the reality of the Bronze age or the Dark age.  Homer didn’t know those realities.  We did suggest that there likely was a Trojan war of some sorts, and perhaps King Agamemnon was a real person, but that’s just about as far as we can extrapolate with any certainty.  So, the Odyssey, nor the Iliad for that matter, was NOT trying to be a paint a picture of the current society of the period, but they do reflect the values and in episodes 2 and 3 we looked at a few of these values.   

 So true- In the second episode, we tried to give an overview and a discussion of books 1-4, the Telemachy.  That coming of age story where Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus left, arrives at a moment where he wants to embrace adulthood- or manhood as they called it.  And yet, for Telemachus, as for every other teenager that has lived on this planet, that transition is not smooth.  He’s awkward, he’s confrontational with his mother, he cries in public, but ultimately he leaves home and takes chances in the outside world.  And although, he doesn’t come back a hero, he does develop or maybe grow up a little as we see in his homecoming in chapter 15.  He learns what a “real man” is, to use their term.  He learns how to talk to adults and practice proper xenia.  He sees relationships between men and women that are functional and relationships that are dysfunctional.  We even see him at the end of the Telemachy, asserting some agency by giving shelter to a homeless man himself. 

And of course, last episode, we spent almost the entire time talking about Xenia, or hospitality.  We talked about the examples of good xenia, like we saw in the Telemachy, but we also saw examples of bad xenia, most notably, in book nine through both the character of Polyphemus but even Odysseus really.  We finished last episode leaving the island of the winds or Aeolia and arriving at the house of Circe.  Christy, this is not the first woman we have met in the Odyssey, but she is one of your favorites, so before we get to Circe and why you seem to like her, as a woman, what do you see in general how we should understand these female characters?  Or should men and women see these characters similarly.   

Ha!  Well, that’s an interesting question to raise, as today we look at the role of gender in the book as well as in ancient Greek life.  But we must remember that gender roles are not isolated things.  They are not simple things as we clearly see in these wandering chapters.  We also have to be honest with ourselves and admit that when we read texts from other cultures, we have trouble understanding what things mean in the broader context of society as a whole.  Even something as seemingly straightforward as sexism cannot be just read into a text, although there’s a temptation to do just that.  One aspect of this narrative that I find fascinating is that Homer in the Odyssey does explore the very raw and honest reality that no matter how patriarchial you may think a society is. 

What do you mean by that? 

Sure, so, if you want to, you could say this this is simply an old story about a man who leaves his family to fight for another man’s woman because she’s the most beautiful woman in the world and his friend wants his woman back back, so he dumps his own wife and son for twenty years, then wanders around sleeping with a bunch of evil women who are all madly in love with him until he finally comes back  to an objectified wife who has been perfectly faithful.  This said hero swoops in, kills all the bad guys and lives happily ever after.  That’s a brazen really uninteresting story, especially for women, especially for modern educated women.  But we know highly educated modern women DO like the Odyssey, as well as other classics, and how do we know that- currently over half of students who study and teach classical studies are highly educated modern women.  But beyond that, nothing that survives 3000 years survives because it’s uninteresting. So, obviously, that’s not the right way to approach the story- even if you want to focus on the dynamic between men and women in the story.  This last week I wanted to explore that perspective a little more, so I read the analysis and commentary by Dr. Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania, who, in my humble view, is perhaps the most famous expert on gender in the Odyssey. 

Oh wow, you rarely give these kinds of shout-outs.  What should we know about Dr. Wilson.   

Dr. Emily Wilson, in 2017, became the first woman to ever translate the Odyssey into English.  She is not the first woman to translate the Odyssey it’s been translated by women into other languages, just not English.   

To put that in perspective, how many English translations are there? 

Oh my goodness, a lot, well over 60 and we keep translating it, but the translators had all been men.  So obviously, I was interested in the idea if Dr. Wilson thought her gender made any difference at all as to how she translated the ancient Greek.  I mean, as a higly respected translator, she was not trying to interpret the text but literally just translate it as faithfully to the original as possible.   

What did she say on the topic after all   She literally thought about every single word in the entire text.  

 Exactly, and I was surprised that everyone asked her that same question- which seemed a little odd, honestly.  I mean over and over again, “As a woman, how did you translate blah blah blah” I mean you could suggest it makes no difference, I mean after all, Google translate doesn’t have a gender.   

Ha!  I assume that was not Dr. Wilson’s perspective.   

No, it isn’t.  She makes a very convincing argument that, unless translators are reading each other and copying each others ideas, no two people will or should see things the same for a variety of reasons- not just gender.  Our experiences and personal culture absolutely cannot help but color our lives and this affects even how we translate words from one language to another.  One example she gives that we’ve already seen, but I didn’t pay attention to from the part we’ve already read is in how you translate the word “maid” in section one.  Fagles and other translators have used the word “women” or “maids” to reference these women.  Wilson points out the word in the Greek clearly expresses that these women were slaves- and for her that is an important point not to gloss over- they were not maids- they were slaves.  They were not free- and since in the end they are killed, the understanding of this nuance of text can influence how one interprets their role in the stories and ultimately how you understand what happens to them in the end, which we’ll save for next episode.  The way we understand who Circe and Calypso are can also be influenced by certain word choices.  In her view, Homer, is neutral in his descriptions of these women and does not judge Circe or Calypso negatively but some translations do use heavy-handed negative language in English that just isn’t connotated the same in the Greek, from her view.  So, understanding that our biases and perspectives are always part of our interpretation doesn’t make one person’s translation necessarily better or worse, but just something to take into consideration- something to think about.  So, let’s think about it.  What do you make of a story about a man who wanders around the ocean and pretty much all of his antagonists or impediments to getting home are female? 

HA!  Well, for starters, for me that tells you a lot about female power.  There are few societies today that are as patriarchal as the societies of 3000 years ago, and yet…look at the emphasis placed on navigating a world of women! If we assume that this is a story written by a man and the audiences were primarily male, which I think we can assume both fairly easily- at the very least the first statement of fact is that women cannot nor will not be overlooked- regardless of any formalized power arrangement.  To simplify it, perhaps Homer is saying something as simple as,  to underestimate women is to be destroyed by them. 

HA!  I think that’s a good starting point- because of course that goes without saying.  But obviously, there’s more to it than that. So, let’s begin by looking at the power arrangement or social structure in The Odyssey?  Last week we talked about the Greek concept of xenia, today let’s introduce a new term.   Develop for us this Greek concept of the “oikos”..or the household- the basic unit of community life.  Life in the Greek world centered around a man building his oikos, a man with no oikos was no man at all.   

Exactly, so word “oikos” means household- a person’s oikos is everyone and every THING within his orbit of influence- and oikos were led by strong men.  One way to think of it maybe like the godfather in the godfather movies, without the crime element, of course- the head of the family.  Remember this is a pre-city world, as we understand cities today.  A man of means, a good word may be an aristocratic man or a noble man would build his oikos, his home, his household- he would have his wife, his children, but that’s just the beginning, he would also have his slaves- of all sorts.  And even these slaves, as we see in the Odyssey had levels in the hierarchy.  So, in a social sense, home, or oikos, is much more than a physical space, although obviously, it contains physical space, but it is a place within personal relationships, the father/son, husband-wife, master-slave, king-competitors- and of course, in this society, the man of the household would be the leader, but the household or the home is a collection of relationships.   An oikos is an economic unit as well as a social one, and since men were often at war, a lot of the economy or the business of running the oikos would be run by women.  Notice all the weaving that goes on, just as one example- weaving is an economic industry.  This is industry in a pre-industrial society.  But it’s not just weaving, there is agriculture, as we’ll see when Odysseus gets back to Ithaca.  Archeological evidence shows these households were running olive presses, building furniture, doing all kinds of self-sustaining and maybe even commercial ventures.  So, a nobleman of means is absolutely defined by how he governs his household.  The bigger the household: more slaves, more land, more live stock, more gifts he accumulates, the more successful he is as a man- a more respected oikos.   

Okay, so, let’s go back to page one, what do we know about Odysseus, well if we go by the Wilson translation, this is a story about a complicated man, but what is he trying to do, he wants to get back to his wife.  Odysseus has proved his manhood by winning at war.  He got lots of glory on the battlefield which he is very proud to talk about with King Alcinous, but that is not enough- in fact, maybe it’s only half enough.   Penelope is central to the entire storyline because she is at the center of his oikos.  She is at the heart of the story because Homer is suggesting a man without a good wife will struggle in building a good oikos.  Odysseus’ manhood is not complete; his glory is not complete if he does not have a well-ordered oikos that will outlive him.  What does a man have if he loses his oikos?  A man with no oikos is not a nobleman anymore- if we want to say it that way.   In Book 11, which we’re going to get to in a second, Odysseus goes down to Hades and runs into all sorts of people, one of which is Achilles and he calls Achilles blessed- he says there is no one more blest than him, that there never has been nor ever was, and Achilles responds protesting.  Let’s read his response.. 

“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!  By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man- some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to Keep alive- than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”   

So, in other words, I hate it so much down here, I’d rather be a person without an oikos than be down here.  Which suggests to me that a man without an oikos is as low as a man can go- regardless of glory. 

Yeah- Achilles doesn’t seem to be that impressed with his Hades lifestyle.  So, getting back to Odysseus, we might assume that since he wants to get home, it’s because he’s so in love with his wife and their marriage is so ideal- we might also assume that on her side that’s exactly what Penelope wants as well- that their love story is at the heart of this story. But THAT is never stated- and that is what Dr. Wilson means by being careful about the complexities of the text and drawing conclusions based on our time period.  Odysseus’ return to Penelope is wrapped up in his return to his household, his little kingdom.  There is no doubt that Penelope is a part of that, but Odysseus’ does not to go to the grave without reclaiming and establishing his oikos. 

Yes- I think so.  Another thing to notice is that all these noble women, the ones we’re supposed to respect- are identified through their relationship with their male oikos.  Arete is Wife of Alcinous the king, daughter of King Rhexenor- no one of merit can exist outside this oikos system- and the head of the oikos is always going to be a male.  Circe and Calypso are independent women and unattached, BUT they only exist in the mythological world- and that is part of why they are dangerous.  The Sirens are mythological and definitely dangerous.  The monsters Scylla and Chrarybdis are mythological and nothing but lethal.  To live well in humanity is to live well in community.   Men must express success within the oikos system and so must women.   At the end of the day, not even if you are endlessly spectacularly gorgeous, powerful, and sexually seductive; if you are unattached, it appears you are dangerous and you function outside the normal order of things.  In some ways, you are incomplete.   

To be honest, there are those that would say that’s true even today-maybe even me- I would word it differently, we would say something like balancing career and personal life- but it’s not all that different, especially if we take the gendered terms out of the equation. 

Maybe, that’s slightly controversial, and something worth thinking about, or if you’re listening to this with a class, discussing, but let’s talk about these “dangerous women”.   

Well, Circe is independent, and she does turn men into pigs, but she is not unkind.  I guess that’s why I like her.  Last episode, we left Odysseus upset because he’d been blown back to King Aeolus and was told he wasn’t getting another bag of winds.  At this point, Odysseus still has quite a large group of men he’s responsible for.  They leave King Aeolus as a group of 12 ships, and they row for a week only to have a nasty encounter with a disagreeable Laestrygonian woman, one described as being “huge as a mountain crag” and who filled them with horror.  Like Polyphemus, the Laestrygonian people, instead of feeding guests, eat them.  They also fling rocks at Odysseus’ crew, spear them like fish, and kill most of them. Unfortunately, eleven of the 12 ships go down. ONLY Odysseus’ ship survives this onslaught.  So by the time, he meets Circe, he’s down to one ship and about 45 men.  When they get to her island, they split up in two groups.  Eurylochus, one of his crewmen, takes 22 men and they find her palace.  But when they find it, they see it’s surrounded by all these wild animals that should be wild but are actually tame: wolves and lions.  We ultimately understand that they are tame because they are not animals at all, but men she’s turned into animals.  Anyway, when we. Meet Circe she’s playing the part of a good woman, she’s weaving- these women and their weaving, they all do it.  Anyway, Circe invites them in, like a good hostess gives them wine, cheese, barley, all the good stuff…but in the wine she put a drug, then she struck her wand and turns them into pigs.  Only the leader, Eurylochus, who didn’t drink the wine escapes to warn the others. 

HA!!  You know Circe is magical.  She’s a witch, an enchantress, a goddess, otherworldly, and yet she’s also very much expressed as a woman.  Perhaps that’s what makes her so dangerous to Odysseus.  Even her weaving is described as divine.  There are two sides to Circe.  She’s the sexual temptress or evil witch, but she also excels at the art of being a woman in the traditional or domestic sense.   

Either way, She is too much for Odysseus, to the point that Hermes, the messenger of the gods intervenes and helps him.  Let’s read what Hermes tells Odysseus. 

Page 239 

So, is the goal to trick or subjugate Circe? 

I don’t think so.  We’ll see later that Circe’s oath is conceded from a position of honor.  Odysseus’ asks for it; he doesn’t demand it.  She’s always above him, she’s a goddess- he’s not.  Hermes helps him get on Circe’s good side, and when he does, she speaks to him with a human voice and uses her magic for good.  She turns the men back into men from pigs, but look what she does, she makes them better versions of their former selves.  That’s nice and she treats them really well, after the small issue of exposing them as the pigs they were got resolved.  At the end, even though, she really wants Odysseus to stay, she not only lets him go, but she also tells him how to get home.  He’s got to go to Hades.  But the broader point is that he needs to WANT to go home.  Life with Circe would be really nice, but to stay there would be a distraction- it would keep him from his goal of building his oikos.  It would be getting away from the main thing.  And as my daddy has repeated to all of us kids all my life, “You gotta keep the main thing the main thing.”   

Well, if the main thing is to get home, they have to go through Hades to get there.  We’ve seen that before.   

Yes, your buddy Carl Jung would say it’s inevitable.  Let’s read where Odysseus delivers the bad news to his men.  

“You think we are headed home, our own dear land?  Well, Circe sets us a rather different course…down to the House of Death and the awesome one Persephone, there to consult the ghost of Tiresias, seer of Thebes.” So I said and it broke my shipmates’ hearts.  They sank down on the ground, moaning, tore their hair.  But it gained us nothing- what good can come of grief?  Back to the swift ship at the water’s edge we went, our spirits deep in anguish, faces wet with tears.  But Circe got to the dark hull before us, tethered a ram and black ewe close by- slipping past unseen.  Who can glimpse a god who wants to be invisible gliding here and there?” 

And of course, off they go.  Persephone, btw, is Hades wife, queen of the Underworld.  The Underworld itself is a place you can sail to,  in the Homeric world.  It is located beyond the river that encircles the world.  In other places of Greek mythology, we see it as being split up and really not just one place, with some levels being way better than others.  However, in this story, it doesn’t seem that awesome, at least we don’t see Achilles liking it very much.  But they go, Odysseus meets quite a few people including his mother Anticleia, Agamemnon, Hercules, Ajax, Jocasta, Oedipus’ mom, as well as quite a long list of other women.  We really don’t have time to focus on all the little stories about Hades.  Suffice it to say, that Tiresias tells him what to do and what NOT to do to get home.  Let’s read the advice. 

Page 252 

In other words, stay focused!!  Keep the main thing the main thing.  Don’t listen to the voices that can distract and seduce you.  It seems, the difference between the one man who makes it versus the 44 men, who die, in large part has to do with their ability to stay focused.  And so, it happens pretty much like he said.  They go back by Circe’s, they go by Sirens, those temptresses who sing and coax men to come close but to come near them is to to be lured men to their deaths.  They avoid that pitfall but Odysseus putting wax into the ears of his men, and then tying himself up with ropes.  But then there are the female monsters Scylla and Charybdis- Scylla is a six-headed sea monster who rapidly and unexpectedly snatches six men at a time as they go by.  Charybdis is an enormous whirlpool that swallows Odysseus’ ship.  Charybdis swallows her victims slowly while Scylla gets them by surprise.  I guess you can interpret those metaphors any number of ways.   Either way, by the time Odysseus gets to the end of chapter 12 he is literally hanging to a fig tree trunk for dear life- alone.  Everyone else is dead.   

Odysseus has resisted all the temptations of the mythological world, but he has one more temptation.  Calypso will keep him for seven years, there’s an archetypal number, and he’s tempted with the most tempting thing anyone could ever be offered- eternal life. What is the value of an oikos?  Is an oikos worth that?  Odysseus has a long time to sit around and think about that, and in the end, he is unequivocal. He wants to go home.  With Zeus’ permission, he drifts back to the world of men- of humans, he’s made it.  He’s resisted all the challenges, the temptations, the darkness; he’s made his personal journey.  He’s found the king who will help him finally restore his own oikos, not just get home, but restore his oikos.   

And there is one person who is not happy about that.  Let’s hear Poseidon’s complaint to Zeus. 

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Poseidon is outraged not that Odysseus is alive, but that his oikos will be restored.  He punishes the Phaeacians by turning their boat to stone and  by building a mountain ridge around their home, but we don’t seem to care all that much about them, poor things, because our attention is now redirected to Ithaca.  What’s it going to be like when he gets there. 

You know I’ve heard that a lot of servicemen can really identify with conundrum expressed here in Odysseus’ homecoming.  After all, what is Odysseus if not a veteran combatant.  Yes, Odysseus is home, but home isn’t how he left it.  In fact, when he looks at it, he doesn’t even recognize it. It must be reclaimed.  Homecomings as anyone knows who’s been away for a long time, aren’t always as we have imagined them in our heads.  We’re different people; the people we left are different.  And if Odysseus is going to restore his world, reclaim or perhaps recreate his oikos, he will have to listen to the voice of wisdom, Athena.   

When we started the book, we met two other nobles who came back from war.  In many ways Penelope has been compared to Helen.  Now Odysseus’ homecoming will be compared to Agamemnon’s (who we met in Hades), to Menelaus and Nestor.  It’s interesting to notice, if we’re going to look at it this way that Odysseus wanderings are expressed through a series of female aggressions- distractions, traps, sexuality, deceitful voices, apparently all kinds of things we’ve seen displayed in this world of imagination- and personified by female monsters, in large part.  And so now, he’s made it…maybe…and the nature of the aggression changes as well.   

I was actually surprised to see that only a portion of the story is about the wanderings and it’s told in a backstory- the wanderings is really what we think of the story being about.  But we’re only in book 12 and there are literally 12 more to go.   The climax is not getting home- not really.  It’s the external homecoming versus the internal homecoming.  He’s home externally, but that doesn’t mean much at this point- it’s just the halfway point.  Things have to be ordered for relationships to be right. There must be a second homecoming;  it’s a little unsettling really- it ain’t over.  

Oh, and there’s one more thing-  because we’re talking gender today- let’s not forget- what about Penelope?  Interestingly enough, Homer NEVER let’s us see inside Penelope’s head, and in fact, he very intentionally conceals from the reader any insight into what Penelope really wants.  What will this homecoming mean for her? Penelope has spent 20 years weaving- now think about this- that is before headphones and podcasts.  The time she spends weaving is time she’s spending primarily thinking and Penelope, if she is described as anything in this story, is described as a person who thinks carefully.    In that she is her husbands well-suited mate- she matches him with her cunning.  Except in her case, her options have been much more reduced.  She has needed way more cunning to navigate her world of men, then Odysseus has needed to navigate the wild sea and the assortment of female dangers.   

So, where do you think that will leave these two when they meet up?   

The short answer is- in different places.  And that’s where we are going to pick up next episode.  The Grand finale will consist of all these recognition scenes that lead us to Homer’s vision of the promise that no matter how far out of sorts your life has gotten, there’s always home—not just a physical place, but an established and recognized place within meaningful relationships-  that each of us can restore our oikos.  And although, what we call an oikos today isn’t the same as the Greeks, the good Lord knows our households have more configurations than even Odysseus could imagine- it’s a nice idea- this idea that hope of building ours is always alive- no matter how far away it feels, so lost, so screwed up we think we’ve made out of our world-  if we just hang on to the fig tree over the whilepool trying to kill us- we too can restore our oikos- and build a home once again.   

Yes, and that is regardless of our gender!   

For sure-  

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Peace out! 

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