Stephanie Lindeborg’s study of the Homeric scholia shows how
disturbing Odysseus’s behavior in Iliad
8 was to ancient scholars, and how it continued to occupy medieval scribes as
well (see her series of three posts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). Whether Odysseus hears Diomedes and disregards him, or simply does not
hear him, his brief appearance in the episode in Iliad 8, far from bringing him any glory, seems intended to
undermine his reputation, and for no apparent reason. To be sure, there is no
blame if Odysseus did not hear Diomedes, and this is how his reputation is
defended in the scholia. The defense, however, is anything but iron-clad, and I
side with those who understand the crucial words oud’ esakousen as “he did not listen,” and not “he did not hear” (the
preverb es, in and of itself, indicates
where Odysseus directed his attention, namely, not to Diomedes, and not what he did not hear from that direction). But this point, too, is uncertain, given
counterexamples of the meaning of the compound verb in later authors. The
difficulty with Odysseus’s action was not resolved in
ancient or medieval times, and arguments continue to be made on both sides
today as well. A scholar whom Stephanie cites presents both sides of the
argument and concludes that “any audience is perfectly at liberty to assume
that Odysseus ignores the cry, but it is impossible to be certain that this was
the poet’s intention” (Adrian Kelly 2007; see Stephanie’s bibliography and the second
installment of her study).
The poet’s intention in a wider sense is the real question
here. Why does the poet put Odysseus in a position where “any audience is
perfectly at liberty” to think the worst of him? Surely the poet was not so
tone-deaf to his own poem as not to realize that this is absolutely the case,
whatever may be said to defend Odysseus in this episode and in general. We can
in fact tell that the poet knew that this episode risked blackening Odysseus’s
name by the measures taken later in the poem to set the record straight. This
does not happen immediately. In fact Odysseus is left out of account later in
Book 8 when the retreating Greeks turn and make a stand (8.245–266). The Venetus
A scholia, as discussed by Stephanie, took this second “no show” by Odysseus as
confirmation that it was his deliberate choice to play the coward earlier as well.
I don’t disagree with the scholia (Stephanie suggests it may have been the
scribe himself who made the argument) that there is a connection between the
two incidents in Book 8, but the object of the second incident, which is a
non-incident after all, was not to draw attention to Odysseus for shirking yet
again, but simply to leave him out of account for the time being, allowing him,
as it were, to cool off after his disturbing action on the battlefield. It is
not until Book 11 that Odysseus’s reputation is redeemed (Book 10, where Diomedes
slays sleeping Trojan allies, but Odysseus is ready to do it, does not count, and
in Book 9 words rather than deeds are at issue). In Book 11, during another
Greek retreat, Odysseus has a peculiar soliloquy as he alone is left to face
the oncoming Trojans, and he asks himself, Hamlet-like, whether to flee or not
to flee, and then answers, with no Hamlet-like hesitation, that cowards (kakoi) flee but a champion stands his
ground. He then awaits the Trojans as they surround him like hunters surrounding
a wild boar. After showing his mettle by dispatching several Trojans he is
finally wounded and helped from the field by others who come to his aid (Odysseus’s
soliloquy, Iliad 11.404–410; note
that in the immediately preceding lines the last to leave Odysseus in the lurch
is the wounded Diomedes—tit for tat after Iliad
8).
Calculated to remove any stain from Odysseus’s earlier
behavior (if you thought he was a kakos,
think again), the episode in Iliad 11
only deepens the mystery of that earlier behavior. Something must be going on
that does not meet the eye. The episode in Iliad
8 has three protagonists, and Odysseus’s role is by far the shortest. Nestor
and Diomedes are the main actors, and the scene that they play out together is
apparently based on a similar scene in which Nestor’s son Antilochus dies.
Antilochus’s death lies outside the time frame of the Iliad, but it is mentioned in the Odyssey, when Nestor receives Telemachus in Pylos and tells him of
the Trojan war and its aftermath. The actual story of Antilochus’s death is not
told in Homer, but we know it from fragments of the epic cycle and, especially,
a Pindaric ode. Nestor’s horse is again shot by Paris’s arrow, and this time
Antilochus instead of Diomedes rescues him. But Antilochus pays for his father’s life with his own when
Memnon (who now champions the Trojans in place of the dead Hector) slays him
standing at his father’s defense. Diomedes, who is young like Antilochus,
reenacts the episode in advance (this can happen in traditional poetry), but
with a crucial change of outcome. Together Diomedes and Nestor rout the Trojans
on Diomedes’ chariot, which Nestor drives, until Zeus hurls a thunderbolt in
front of them that stops the horses short, and Diomedes, persuaded by Nestor,
reluctantly retreats. This episode ends the terrific run Diomedes has had on
the battlefield since Book 5, when Athena herself was his charioteer and he
wounded even immortals. But Zeus’s plan is to have the Greeks defeated, so that
at the end of Book 8 the Trojans are able to camp outside their city walls for
the first time. Nestor, who restrains Diomedes in Book 8, is a direct contrast
to Athena, who incites him in Book 5, and this plays on Nestor’s own
traditions, when he was young and impetuous himself. These traditions are
evoked in his stories about his youth in Iliad
11 and Iliad 23, but the aged Nestor
in Iliad 8 has long since learned his
lesson, and he imparts that lesson to his young companion.
But there is more. The episode in Iliad 8, as mentioned, looks ahead to Antilochus’s death. It does
so not by direct reference, but by poetic allusion—by the parallelism between
the two situations. In the same way the episode in Iliad 8 looks even further ahead to Diomedes’ fate, which is not to
be slain in Troy like Antilochus, but to return home. Unlike the death of Antilochus,
this story is told in Homer, and it is Nestor himself who tells it. It is again
in the Odyssey, when Telemachus
visits Nestor to find out what happened to his father, that we hear the story. After
the fall of Troy the Greeks, in a drunken and disorderly assembly, were divided
as to their course, whether to return home immediately, or to stay at Troy to
appease Athena, who was clearly angry about what some of the Greeks had done in
their moment of victory. The brothers Agamemnon and Menelaos were themselves
divided, Agamemnon keeping half the army at Troy to appease Athena, Menelaos
leading the other half of the army to Tenedos, where a second quarrel broke
out. Nestor, who went with Menelaos, was in no doubt about the right course to
take at this point, and fled at once for home. Diomedes, we learn, went with
him, and together they reached Lesbos, where again they made the right
decision, taking the fast route across the Aegean rather than the slow route by
way of islands—the slow route would have been the safe route except for Athena’s
anger. Diomedes, accompanying Nestor, was home in Argos in a matter of days
after leaving Troy. Diomedes in fact owed his swift, safe return to his older
companion, who correctly read the signs at every turn on their way home—or so
we can infer from clear indirect evidence. Nestor’s name, which is closely
related to the noun noos, “mind,”
makes him a bred-in-the-bone interpreter of signs. His name in fact means “he
who brings back,” and this meaning, which did not survive after Homer, was
still very much alive in Homer. In Iliad
8, when Diomedes saves Nestor—“he who
brings home”—on the battlefield, he in effect saves his own nostos—“return home”—at the end of the
war.
 |
| Nestor performing a sacrifice back home in Pylos after the war. Red-figure calyx crater by the Meleager painter, 400–380 BCE, photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons. |
Odysseus, too, is part of this story. In Odyssey 3 Telemachus comes to Pylos to
hear what happened to his father, and Nestor tells him all, but some of it only
indirectly. Nestor explicitly narrates the quarrel between Agamemnon and
Menelaos that split the army in two. The second quarrel, on Tenedos, is left
vague, except for its immediate effect: when Nestor fled for home, taking
Diomedes with him, Odysseus—this is the crucial point in Nestor’s account—turned
around and returned to Troy and Agamemnon. The second quarrel must have been
between Nestor and Odysseus, though Nestor does not say so directly to
Odysseus’s son. But he does so indirectly when, at the very start of his
account to Telemachus, he says that he and Odysseus never disagreed with each
other in counsel during the war. After the war, as we learn at the end of his
account, this was no longer the case. The disagreement between Nestor and
Odysseus on Tenedos could not have been sharper to judge by their opposite actions.
When Odysseus does not respond to Diomedes’ call to save
Nestor on the battlefield in Iliad 8,
he completes the triad of characters who will replay everything in reverse in
their return from Troy: Diomedes saves Nestor on the battlefield, but Nestor
saves Diomedes in their nostos; Odysseus
does not save Nestor on the battlefield, but Nestor—this is the point of his
account in Odyssey 3—fails to save
Odysseus in their nostos. For the triple
allusion to the return home of all three heroes to work, Odysseus must be seen
as pointedly not saving Nestor in Iliad
8, even if this risks Odysseus’s reputation in the short run. A bigger poetic point
justifies the risk to Odysseus’s reputation: unlike Diomedes, who will stick
with Nestor and reach home immediately without any great tale to tell,
Odysseus, by separating from Nestor, will take ten years to find his own way
home, and have an outstanding tale to tell. If he too had followed Nestor from
Tenedos there would be no Odyssey,
and this, it seems to me, is the underlying poetic motive for Odysseus’s
questionable behavior in Iliad 8. To
put it somewhat differently—and somewhat bluntly—Odysseus, unlike Diomedes,
simply does not need Nestor.
If the episode in Iliad
8 alludes specifically to Nestor’s account in Odyssey 3, as I have argued (Hippota Nestor, chs. 6 and 11), it would mean that the Iliad and the Odyssey must
have been composed together in performance. There are good indirect reasons for
thinking that this was the case, but Iliad
8, if my argument is correct, constructs a point-for-point correspondence with
the Odyssey, and that, I think, is
unique.
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