Post #178: Epic Grief

6 May 2025

   Earlier today, as I was pondering Book IV of the Odyssey for a morning class, it occurred to me to give it a subtitle: the Book of Grief. What a maelstrom of misery it is, on all sides! Perhaps it is only fitting that the teacher, too, should add his share to the bog of despond that is this chapter.

     Menelaus, younger brother to a powerful but tainted king, and rich, though otherwise without much distinction, was out of his depth and out of his league when he married Helen, a demi-goddess said to be the most beautiful woman of her times. Tellingly, it was not her own choice but her stepfather’s, and Menelaus paid the price soon enough: she ran off with an equally useless, but far more dashing and charming (and even wealthier and more powerful) prince of Troy, Paris. The charm wore off before long, to be sure, but at least the two of them had their steamy honeymoon period, unlike Helen and Menelaus. The most that can be said of the match is that it produced a suitably beautiful daughter, Hermione; a son and heir Helen never bore. (Megapenthes, introduced as Menelaus’s son at the outset of the chapter, was born of a slave-woman: his very name translates as great grief.)

     Although Agamemnon had his own ideas (centering on power and plunder) when he organized the Greek expeditionary force, Menelaus blames himself alone for a disastrous war, calamitous in all respects except that the city did at last fall, not to heroic strength but to Odysseus’s cunning: the famous Trojan Horse, an act of gross impiety inasmuch as horses were sacred to Poseidon and Odysseus counted on exploiting religious sensitivities to make the ploy work. Poseidon never forgot or forgave, with good reason, even before the scoundrel Ithacan went on to blind Polyphemus the cyclops—a wretched creature, admittedly, but still son to a great and resentful god—and, worse still, thought fit to boast of it before the world at the top of his voice.

     When Agamemnon made his fateful return, to be butchered in his welcoming bath (or else in the manner of a sacrificial animal: accounts differ) by a faithless wife and her treacherous lover, Menelaus was off roaming, seeking more treasure, in the typical delusion of the Atreids that riches could set things right, even an ill-considered and by now irredeemably dysfunctional marriage. As usual the gods are blamed (for a seven year delay!), but as with Odysseus, the reader should know to be wary of such accusations: “Mortals like to find fault with us gods,” Zeus flashes a red sign at the very opening of the epic: “They say it is from us that all evil things come, yet it is by their own recklessness that they suffer hardship beyond their destiny.” (Od. 1.32–34) Mark it well, ye mortals, and keep it in mind as you read on about the sea of woes that the narrative attributes, on the most salient and deceptive level, so readily to an adverse fate. There is always more to it in Greek epic and tragedy, always a human explanation alongside the divine one.

     Menelaus, who already blames himself for not being able to hold on to his wife (and allowing her to become the cause of a disastrous war*), and even more for being abroad chasing gold when his brother was killed so ignominiously, must now also confess to Odysseus’s son that despite his travels far and wide (he returned to Sparta only a few years earlier) he has nothing to report about the lost hero’s whereabouts or his end. Thus the grief passes to Telemachus, whose last hope lay with Nestor in Pylos and here with Menelaus in Sparta: he has long come to doubt that his father could still be alive (Od. 1.235-40), but with Menelaus’s admission of ignorance, the lights go out and Telemachus too tumbles into grief, tears and all.

     Helen, though far from faultless, must bear her own cruel punishment: dragged back from Troy more or less as a slave, though treated with the courtesies due to a lady of divine descent, she is now in her forties and losing by the day what used to set her so very visibly above others. Worse still, to make up for her transgressions, at least superficially, she must now play the part of chaste Artemis (or better, chastened), sitting with unconvincing modesty at her spinning wheel in long robes that hide what she was once so proud of (Od. 4.122, 305), and cursing herself strategically, though not without a defiant side-glance at the fact that it was once she, after all, who set it all in motion, disaster or not (Od. 4.145-46, 152-53, 261-62). Before Menelaus, from whom she evidently eloped on account of his inadequacies, she must now profess her admiration, declaring him inferior to no man in understanding or beauty (Od. 4.264). If only.

     At the same time, Helen has not forgotten her wilder days (how could she), and the tale she presents as particularly appropriate to the occasion (Od. 4.239) is nothing of the sort, but rather an implicit confession of just how little her current circumstances suit her. With a sigh of pleasure, almost, she recounts how once she detected Odysseus while he was spying in Troy, disguised as a beggar who had just received a good lashing (Od. 4.244-51). The discovery made, holding the intruder’s life in her hands, what does she do but give him a bath—an all-too intimate ritual reserved for the hands (and eyes) of maidservants, not errant queens. In a similar vein, when Helen first spots Telemachus, she marks the resemblance between father and son not by voice or carriage, but by the eyes and hair of the youth (Od. 4.150). She is also the first to burst into tears and set off a cascade of lamentation when the man of many twists and turns is given up for lost (Od. 4.181-84). Go figure.

     Menelaus retaliates by recounting Helen’s treachery around the hollow Horse, with a new Trojan hubby in tow after Paris had been slain (Od. 272-84). The assembled dinner-guests fall silent with embarrassment (Od. 4.285), as if having walked in on a scene of marital warfare thinly disguised as bantering. And these two have all eternity to look forward to, though with the consoling benefit of powerful drugs (Od. 4.227-30). The collective spell of mourning that follows Menelaus’s confession of ignorance and powerlessness (Od. 4.182) culminates in a series of would-have-beens that are pitiable at best, blatantly idiotic at worst: he would have made Odysseus king in Argos, he boasts, as if the Ithacan had cared a fig for that, or he proposes to send Telemachus home with a gift of horses and a chariot to a hardscrabble island of goats (Od. 4.605-608)! Perhaps it is not only the memory of Odysseus that prompts Helen to burst out crying, though all follow in turn (Od. 4.183-85), even Nestor’s stalwart son, the fruit of happier climes, who is not normally given to such weeping over supper (Od. 4.193-94).

     Back in Ithaca, meanwhile, Penelope, not to be outdone, collapses under the weight of “spirit-devouring grief” when she discovers that her only child has snuck off and that the suitors, who before were more obnoxious than threatening, have black murder on their minds now (Od. 4.660-74, 703-705, 716-20). All the while Odysseus himself, having long wearied of Calypso’s caresses (though they did apparently captivate him for years: how else to explain that the wiliest of men could not contrive any way to free himself from the clutches of a lone woman, and be she ever so divine?**), is weeping his heart out on the beach, looking across the waters and pining for Ithaca (Od. 5.151-55).

     It is a spectacularly bleak and brutal chapter when you piece it together and read between the lines a little: love, hate, betrayal, treason, murder, sex, drugs, you name it—all there for anyone with a trace of imagination to see, even if it is not fully spelled out. Alas, it is just such materials that can try a teacher’s soul the most, when, after thirty years in front of classrooms, and some good ones, all you are able to elicit in response to such a story are vacant stares. One could go further and say that something in a teacher dies when, standing before such human abysses, he cannot get the late-born lambs to feel so much as a faint shudder…

     But wait, perhaps one should not make too much of such impressions: what others are feeling does not always communicate itself reliably, as we all know, especially in classrooms, and when one looks back at these dispiriting moments with a bit more inner distance, one is reminded that mental effects are neither always visible on the surface, nor immediate. Teachers know from experience that the fruits of one’s labors in this particular vineyard, barren as it may seem at times, can take weeks or months, or longer still, to reveal themselves. Even situations when no spark seems to be catching at all—nothing but soap and wet straw—can turn out to be good for a surprise, sometimes years later. Stranger things have happened.

     Even so, with little but appearances to go by, the darkness of such moments can easily crowd out the rays of hope, if not the little flame that keeps flickering desperately but refuses to go out. “Can you not hear it?” one feels like crying out in protest at the sheer incuriosity of ostensible young adults. (The dusk was repeating the words in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. The horror! The horror!) But no, they really cannot hear: congenital and generational factors are leaving them all but deaf to the low frequencies in question. There would be little point in blaming them for their insipid innocence, let alone in getting angry; but that does not make such scenes any less exasperating and heartbreaking to witness from a teacher’s perspective. Only one thing is reliably worse than such glimpses of the void, namely discovering what noisome and debased trash does get the digitalized herd excited in the year of our grace 2025.

     Alas, there is nothing for it: we must keep buggering on (#149). And so, with a groan perhaps, we put our shoulders to the boulder again, and our backs into rowing forth upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea—all of us long-suffering Odysseuses in our different ways, except inasmuch as we lesser mortals will usually have to do without the attentions and favors that Athena lavishes so generously on her hero, and also, for the most part, without the considerable compensations of his great adventures. Worst of all, we may not even have an Ithaca to steer towards or look forward to…

     Approached from its bleak side, the book of life can indeed appear a book of grief, and existence, a mere vale of tears through which we must drag our wary feet in the shadow of death. Fortunately there are other angles, other handles to grasp the problem of life by, as Epictetus might have put it (#93), some of which I have been tracing here for the past two years on my own twisting and turning voyage of discovery. Whether there is any Ithaca awaiting at the end of my troubles remains to be seen. I doubt it, though I wouldn’t rule it out. So it goes.

*As Herodotus observes at the outset of his Histories (1.4.2), there was always a good case against making a fuss in such instances, since doing so meant chasing after faithless women who were almost certainly compliant in their own abductions and therefore not worth running after.

**Before the Phaeacians, Odysseus urges the defense that he was at all times compelled by divine force—never the least bit tempted, let alone won over, by the “awesome” goddess’s lovely hair, her kind attentions, her many charms, or the promise of immortality. Signature Odyssean dissimulation, not to be trusted for a minute (Od. 7.246–58)! When Menelaus makes a comparable plea to the daughter of Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, she dismisses it out of hand: “Are you a fool, and slack-witted too, or have you chosen to give up and enjoy your torment, that you are confined to this island and cannot find a means of escape?“ (4.371-74) And that was speaking of Menelaus, a man without discernible wit or cunning: how much more applicable to Odysseus, the greatest schemer of all!