THE ODYSSEY ODYSSEY – EPISODE 20: “And Then There Was One...” 

Transcript 

So it's freshman year in college. It's the year of our Lord, 1978. It's the second week of the first semester, and I am a fairly earnest young English major in a class on literary analysis. And we've been assigned the first few chapters of Pride and Prejudice for this first class discussion.  

And the professor bounced into the room and rubbed his hands together with glee and looked at us all and said, so, what did you think? And there was this long silence. And one brave woman spoke up and she said, well, it was kind of hard to read.  

And I will never forget the professor's reaction. He was absolutely speechless. It was like someone had told him that water was hard to drink. He just stared at us. And then he said, and I remember this vividly, it's really the only thing I remember about this entire class. He said, “just for the record, I would like to say that I consider Pride and Prejudice one of the most delightfully readable novels that's ever been written.” 

 And that was a very great moment. It was really the big takeaway from that entire class for me. The reason that you read Jane Austen has nothing to do with your obligation as an English major, but you can read Austen in quest of delight. It's as if the professor was saying, there is a way of reading this where the difficulties just dissolve and the delight takes over and that we learn to read so that we can get to that level. It was my job as a student to get there.  

So why am I telling you this? A lot of people tell me that they find the Odyssey hard to read, it's hard to get through. And I think maybe I have that same reaction as my professor, what are you talking about? But really, there's any number of obstacles and any number of reasons why it might be hard to read. We could start with all the names. Who the hell is who? Who's this one now? Who's this one married to? Who's this one's father? And I think the fact that the hero doesn't appear for the first four books of the poem could be a little disorienting. It can be hard to slog through, especially when you're reading it silently by yourself to yourself instead of having it told to you as it was originally created.  

And I sometimes wonder if another reason for the difficulty might be the amount of repetition that occurs in the poem. We've talked a few times about the repetition of particular phrases. Rosy fingered dawn is certainly the most famous. And then you have what are called type scenes. these scenes where everything is prescribed, everything that's going to happen is prescribed. The scenes of hospitality, xenia, the stranger arrives at someone's door, he's welcomed unconditionally. There's a whole protocol that is gone through every single time in the same order and very often in exactly the same words. And I suspect if you're reading the poem in a slightly disengaged way, you might come to one of these passages and wonder if you've lost your place in the book. wait, I read this already. Is this where I was? Where am I? So I think the section of the poem that we're going to look at in this episode might contribute to that confusion. It might be one of the places where reading the poem can break down. It's a very short passage. We're still early on in book 10. And the whole thing is only about 50 lines. It's lines 80 to 130. But in one form or another, every single thing that's going to happen here has already happened somewhere else in the poem. But as we will talk about, everything that's repeating is worse. It's making things worse. It's a worse manifestation of what has happened before. And I should probably acknowledge that there has once again been quite a gap since the last episode. The fact is, gentle listeners, there is just no parking space available in my brain during the school year. It takes a fair portion of my mental bandwidth to drill down into these episodes. So for now, it looks like I will only be recording new episodes in the summer. So who knows how long it will take to finish this? I say that now, but of course, who knows? And thanks to everyone who has sent a note during this hiatus, especially Vanessa from Philadelphia, who wrote me a lovely note, assuming that I had walked away from the project entirely. The fan mail feature on the podcast page allows you to send me a note without sharing any of your personal information, which I think is great. But it also means I can't reply to these notes. So I was unable to respond directly to Vanessa and tell her to hang on, more was coming. But Miss Vanessa, you have galvanized me. And I hope you know that Samuel Barber has written an opera with your name as the title. So Gentle listener, if you have a question or a comment and you would like a response, you can always email me through my website, www . tomleestoryteller . net, and I promise to do my best to respond to you.  

Okay, so we're going to talk about the encounter with the Laestrigonians. (Laestrigonians, Laestrigonians, potato, potato.) I think it's worth a review of the arc of this journey so far. I've taken a year to tell it here, but the ancient Greeks would have heard this in one sitting. So our story so far, as they say, Odysseus has departed Troy at the end of the Trojan War with 12 ships, each with 50 sailors. And their first stop on their homeward journey is the Giacones, where at first it's just business as usual. They kill, they pillage. It's just like Troy. This is what they're good at. But even here, things start to go wrong. They discover that they are wildly outnumbered, and six men from every ship are killed. Across the 12 ships, that's 72 men who are dead. The wheels are not coming off yet, but they definitely might need some realignment. And then we encounter the lotus eaters, and no one actually dies here, but there is a sort of existential threat to the journey home. Everybody could just decide to say, the hell with heroism, let's stay here and eat lotus until we die. And there's also this idea that we're moving away from reality, where we're in a kind of fantasy realm, Odysseus, and co go through the looking glass, so to speak.  

And next comes Polyphemus, the Cyclops, the marquee villain. And we see for the first time what the critic Steve Reese calls the perversion of hospitality. It's a welcome, but it's a terrible, horrifying welcome where everything goes wrong. And a total of 6 men are eaten by Polyphemus in that cave. And that whole episode ends, of course, with Polyphemus calling down Poseidon's curse on Odysseus. This is all pretty terrible, but at least all of the ships managed to sail away from the Cyclops.  

And then they come to the floating island of Elis, the keeper of the winds. And nobody dies here, but it's kind of an emotional death blow. to Odysseus and the crew. Odysseus, for a moment, he actually considers throwing himself overboard. They are within sight of Ithaca, their homeland, when the crew's foolishness and the fact that the captain has chosen this exact moment to get a little shut-eye, it drives them all the way back to Aelis. They unleash the winds and they're back with Aelis and they get kicked out by their once so gracious host.  

So what happens next? What's next is the Lestergonians. A short episode. as I've said, but it's sort of a climax to this arc of death and destruction that we've been on. And bear with me, because before I tell this short story, I want to say a little bit more about repetition. As A storyteller, I have I've long learned to shut down what I think the very modern sort of copy editor part of my brain is that it's programmed to think repetition is boring, move on with the story. And that may be true in a sense when you're writing or reading a novel, the reader's mind kind of resents repetition. It's like being with somebody who always tells you the same thing all over again. You're wasting mental energy, you've already said this, let's move on. But I say with confidence, as a storyteller for 40 years, that when you are telling a good story to an audience, as opposed to reading it or hearing it in your own head, repetition can serve to make the listener much more deeply engaged. And this is certainly 1000% true with young listeners. There are so many stories, the Brothers Grimm have great examples of this, where a character is faced with some tremendous problem and has a dream. And the dream is narrated in great detail. All of the events, all of the encounters of the dream are talked through. And then, very shortly later in the story, all of the things in the dream happen in reality. And the storyteller's instinct might be to say, and everything just happened exactly the way it was in the dream, and sort of move on with the story. But I have learned, I am here to say, that there is tremendous power in throwing that story into first gear and really taking time with that repetition. The listeners Do not reject this as old news. We've heard this already. Instead, you almost feel them leaning in to the story, listening to the details again, but on a much deeper level. It can be scary to do this, to sort of stick to your guns and slow this repetition down. But if you do it with total conviction, not a hint of rushing, the audience will buy into that and they get into a sort of a trance-like state. So our intrepid band has been rowing constantly for six days with absolutely no win, no win for you, because they have offended Aeolus. When they arrive at yet another island, already you have the sense that they're not really thinking, oh great, you know, an island here, we can rest and recover, but there's a sense of what Disaster will it be this time. Now the strangest thing about this island is that it's a land where the sun never sets. It's always daylight here. The poet says that a really ambitious farmer, one who never needed any sleep, could actually earn 2 livings. He could bring cattle out to graze for half of the day, then turn around and bring them home and go back out to pasture with a flock of sheep, because the sun never sets. What the poem actually says is, the paths of night and day are close together. The paths of night and day are close together, which I think is kind of a lovely phrase. is my approximation of the ancient Greek. So let's just take a minute to talk about night and day. Night, Nyx, is one of the oldest gods, one of the sort of primordial gods. And we hear a lot about Nyx from Hesiod. 

Whenever we're talking about the origin of the Greeks thinking about these big ideas in nature, we're almost always quoting Hesiod, who was writing around 700 BCE. maybe even a little earlier than that. He was probably around the same time that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put into writing, maybe even a little bit before that. But Hesiod's Theogony tells the famous story of creation. But I think it's worth saying that Hesiod is the only account of creation that has survived from ancient times. And we tend to treat it as the definitive creation story from ancient Greece, but there's really no way to say that what we read in Hesiod is what everyone, everywhere in ancient Greece believed. Hesiod's Theogony, it's not the equivalent of the Bible. There really was no such text in ancient Greece. There was no single source that was accepted as outlining everything everyone believed. In fact, sometimes when you read Hesiod's creation story, it feels almost like an extended poetic metaphor. It begins with chaos. And that's not chaos in the way we use the word today, sort of a cosmic midtown Manhattan at rush hour. And it's not the chaos of get smart. It's a void. It's a gap. It's a space of nothingness, chaos. What do you picture when you picture nothingness? Do you picture darkness? because according to Hesiod, chaos came before darkness. So the nothing of chaos, the nothingness of chaos, at first it doesn't even include darkness. From chaos came forth Erebus, and Erebus is darkness. From chaos came forth Erebus and black nicks, the night. So darkness and night, are actually brother and sister. And I love that they're thought of independently of each other. Darkness has its own god, and night has its own god. But Nyx, the night, gives birth to ether and to day. And this being a Greek myth, of course, the father of Nyx's children is her brother, Erebus. So night and darkness have union in love and they give birth to day. Night and darkness give birth to day. I will say it again. Is this a myth or is this a poem? 

So this idea that we're on an island where it's always day is really intriguing, I think. It's funny that we've just been told that they rode for six days and six nights. We're not told that the nights get gradually shorter and shorter the way they do if you're heading north to Norway. They just suddenly come to this place where it's always daytime. And I love to think about some very, very ancient Greek mariner hearing a story from some other mariner who heard a story from someone who had actually traveled above the Arctic Circle, who had experienced this midnight sun. But here, it really just seems to be an aspect of this fantasy land. There is no geographic land of the midnight sun in the poet's understanding of the world. And also the fact that it's constantly day here is mentioned and then it never comes up again. It has nothing to do with the story. Now, the description of the harbor that they're about to enter in this island is very specific and is very important. On both sides, a sheer cliff runs continuously, and projecting headlands opposite to one another stretch out at the mouth, and the entrance is narrow. And we're told that within this harbor, no wave ever swelled, great or small, but all about was a bright calm. This harbor has a mouth. And that's the standard way to describe the harbor entrance, the mouth of the harbor. But in this case, and given what's about to happen here, the term takes on a special significance. In the Robert Fagel's translation, he refers to it as the “jaws” of the harbor, not the mouth of the harbor, but the jaws of the harbor. (You see where this is going. )There's a lot of eating that happens in the Odyssey. Some of it's good, and some of it is not so good. There are all kinds of feasts, celebrations, sacrifices, where everyone's eating, having a marvelous time. 

But there's also a dark side to feasting. At the very beginning of the poem, Penelope and Telemachus are home in Odysseus's palace, and they're watching as all of these unwanted suitors devour up Odysseus's sheep and cattle. The last meal that we've heard about in this program was the Cyclops, Polyphemus, devouring and even regurgitating, six of the sailors. They're all sailing right into the mouth of the harbor. And most of them are never going to sail out of it again. And it's beautiful in there. The harbor is so protected that there isn't even a ripple of a wave. You have that great phrase, all was bright calm. sounds lovely. You have this sense that all of these sailors, after all this trauma, all this horror, they come to what appears to be a safe, still, bright, calm harbor. We can finally relax.  

But one of those 12 ships does not enter through the mouth of the harbor. You guessed it, our hero Odysseus decides to stay outside and moors his ship to one of the great jutting rocks at the entrance. And the poem never explicitly says what Odysseus is thinking when he decides not to join the others. It's implied that he stays outside as a lookout. And the first thing he does is to survey the land. Does anyone live here? As this wonderful phrase, again, a repeated phrase, what men lived here? Who ate bread? The only indication that there's any habitation on this island is smoke rising from someone's fire rising in the distance. We've seen that before. So as is standard practice, three men go off to explore, to reconnoiter and come back with news.  

And the first thing they find is wagon tracks. Okay, this is a good sign. There are people living here, they must be civilized if they have wagons, if they have roads. Remember, the Cyclopes had none of that. They didn't cultivate the land, they didn't plant anything, they were wild. This is clearly somewhere civilized. And then they come to a spring of fresh water. Great. And they meet a girl at the spring, at this fountain, a charming stalwart girl who tells them everything they want to know. They've arrived at a place called Telepylos. The king is Lemos. And her own father, Antiphates, well, he lives right over there in that great big house. Can't miss it. Does any of this sound familiar? Now, if you remember back to when Odysseus washed ashore on Scheria, the island where, don't forget, he is, as he is telling this whole story, he's on the island of Scheria, telling the story to the king and queen, he meets two young women, and both of them are near water. The first is the daughter of the king, Nausicaa, and she arrives at the river where Odysseus is sleeping.  

And the second, of course, is actually Athena in disguise. She says she's come to the well to get water, and she points him off to the great big house of Alcinous. Can't miss it right over there. If you're a fan of the Hebrew Bible, there might be some little bells going off in your head here. There are several points in the Old Testament where the hero meets a woman at a well. There's Rebecca, there's Rachel, there's Zipporah. And all of these turn out to be really significant encounters, really significant turning points in the story. So keep your eye on those wells.  

Okay, things are looking up, (which of course is always a bad sign.) Off they go to the high roofed house of Mr. Antiphates. and they're sure they're going to be welcomed and fed, probably get a bath, everything's going to be great. They knock on the door. Who opens it? His wife, who happens to be a giant. She is as tall as a mountain. Now we see why it was such a high-roofed house. There's a giant standing in front of them. I hear the voice of my sainted father. listening to this story at this point and saying, oh ****.  

And then we have this sort of, I think of it as the invasion of the body snatchers moment where Mrs. Antiphates screams out for her husband, who is also a giant. And he comes running. Interestingly, he comes running from a council of the citizens of this island. So we are civilized, but we are still giants. And just to underscore the point, we are man-eating giants. Antipotes grabs one of these three men and eats him. Here we are again. The other two sailors escape. That's why it's always a good idea to send out three scouts.  

But suddenly this entire swarm of giants, the poem calls them numberless. They run to the top of the cliffs, they surround the harbor, and they start pelting the ships down there in that calm, bright water. They pelt them with these enormous boulders and they destroy them. I repeat, does this sound familiar? Not too many lines back, we had one blind giant hurling boulders at one of Odysseus's ships, his own ship. Now we have thousands of giants, and these sailors are sitting ducks. That beautiful harbor has turned into what in military terms, I have recently learned, is referred to as a kill box. there is only one narrow way in and the same narrow way out.  

And just like that, all 11 ships and all of the sailors in them are completely destroyed. And the poet gives us almost a completely auditory rather than a visual recounting of this slaughter. We're told about the sounds, the smashing of timbers of the ships and the screams of the dying men. It's really brilliant. There's not a lot of visual detail of this massacre, except when they start spearing the men like fish and hauling them up and devouring them or taking them home for a snack later. Now, Gentle listener, if you were Odysseus at this moment, what would you do? The odds here are completely insurmountable, unquestionably. There are 41 men, humans, versus literally thousands of giants. Now, as a teller of fairy tales, folk tales, I want Odysseus, the great hero, to somehow rush in and win the day, to overcome this obstacle. He outwitted the Cyclops. Maybe he can outwit thousands of giants. How's he going to save the day? Well, he can't. And he knows he can't. So what does he do? He quite literally cuts and runs. Or even more literally, he cuts and sails.  

“I meanwhile drew my sharp sword from beside my thigh, and with it cut the cables of my dark, proud ship, and quickly calling to my comrades, bade them fall to their oars, that we might escape from our evil plight. “ 

That is the Loeb translation. And to summarize: lots of luck, guys. I gotta go!  

Now, I was kind of outraged by this. I don't mind telling you. And I asked a couple of military people and they all said exactly the same thing. This is Odysseus's fault. But neither of these two people I spoke to faulted Odysseus for running away by cutting and running. That, I guess, is what you do in the face of truly overwhelming odds. You cut your losses and you get out of there. What these people found fault with was the fact that Odysseus lets his men enter that harbor at all in the 1st place without scoping out the situation. What's the level of threat in this bright, calm, beautiful kill box of a harbor? And I thought about this a lot.  

And I thought, if Odysseus has done something sort of out of protocol, right, not taking the time to assess the level of threat, Maybe it has something to do with the allure of this peaceful, quiet place after all. all the horrors his men have been through, maybe Odysseus just wants his men to have a little moment of peace and rest. He stays outside to arrange the reconnaissance, but it's a little too little and a little too late. And all 11 ships with all hands are completely destroyed.  

So I don't know. If you are or if you were in the military and you're listening to this, I would love to hear your take on this. I think Odysseus is at fault one way or another, but what's the take on abandoning these 11 ships? So all the men on that one surviving ship, they grab their oars and they get the hell out of dodge as fast as they can.  

And now we have one ship. Think back to the Cyclops' prayer to his father, Poseidon. Let Odysseus come home late, in evil case, having lost all his companions and without his own ships. We are well on our way to seeing that prayer come true. The fact is, as far as the story is concerned, we never really had much to do with those 11 ships. The story could function just the same if it all started out with just one ship. But of course, this is a poem about the return from Troy, and we know that Odysseus left for Troy with a dozen ships. So the poet has to start with a dozen ships, and his job is to whittle them away to reduce that number down to zero. And here we are.  

Now, I was wondering how I could help listeners visualize this harbor, this devouring feature of the topography. I was looking at pirate maps in old children's books. I was thinking of Pirate Cove and Peter Pan, but none of them really seemed to match up with that specific description of the very narrow entrance to the wide open harbor.  

But of course, classicists have been trying to pinpoint the real world location of the settings of the Odyssey for well over 2,000 years. Thucydides was convinced that this part of the story took place in Sicily. Okay, there's lots of meticulous studies from almost every century where every sort of navigational clue within the poem, what direction they were heading, how the wind was blowing, All of these are sort of put together to try to map out the story in the real world, which is funny. There are a number of actual identifiable locations in the poem. We already talked about Cape Malia, where Odysseus is blown off course. That's A well-known spot, and I would very much like to go there someday. But when people are trying to determine the location of the floating island of Aeolus or where the Cyclopes lived, a lot of ink has been spilled over those topics. And it's a bit like looking for the Land of Oz on Google Earth. I don't really see the point, but smarter minds than I have tackled the problem.  

However, it turns out there is at least one geographical location, probably many more, but one that matches more or less exactly Homer's description of the home of the Laestrygonians, and that is the Bay of Balaclava on the coast of the Crimean Peninsula near Sevastopol. In 1833, there was a Swiss naturalist and archaeologist. His name was Frederic du Bois du Montperot, and he traveled extensively through the southern part of the Russian Empire, including the Crimea. He was a student of one of my personal heroes, the great natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt, the man who Andrea Wolf, in her biography of him, called the most famous man nobody's ever heard of. And when he finished his travels, Monsieur Dubois du Montperot wrote one of these massive six-volume books called the Voyage Auteur du Caucas, A Voyage Around the Caucasus. This sort of travel literature elaborately produced with maps. This was a big, big seller in the 19th century. And when he came to the Bay of Balaclava, this is how he described it. If I had to give a description of your bay of Balaclava, I could scarcely make of it a truer and cleaner picture than the words of old Homer. The 2 high rocks that jut out in the midst of the waves and seem to rush toward one another as if to embrace are there, and leave only a narrow passage turned toward the south. Never spot Ulysses landed, to the right or to the left of the harbor of Balaclava, frightful rocks line the shore. In scaling them, he could have seen, just as one sees today, only an arid soil, only Jurassic rocks, with dismal fragments, strewn with black junipers, revealing neither the trace of man nor that of his labor. Whirling columns of smoke alone could indicate to him the city of the Laestrygonians hidden by the rocks. And he goes on to tell the whole episode and how every detail of it maps onto the geography of Balaclava Bay. Of course, the trouble is that Balaclava sits on the Black Sea, and there's just no plausible way you can reconstruct Odysseus's route. to include the Black Sea, but what fun is that? And I don't know if Dubois du Montparrot actually believed that this was where Odysseus came, but what I think is fascinating is how he has this immediately at his fingertips when he's looking for a description of a place, and he knows that his readers will be intimately familiar with the Odyssey, with this episode of the Laestrygonians.  

And a sad footnote to this, of course, this whole region right now is directly in the crosshairs of Russia's attack on Ukraine. So we haven't really progressed much. We've gone from giants hurling boulders to drone attacks. So Slava Ukraini.  

Now, all of this has taken me much longer to talk about than it would take you to read 50 lines. But I can't resist one more little rabbit hole. I was really struck by the fact that the character who opens the door at Antifati's house is his wife. The giant's wife opens the door.  

“He walked on, hoping to see a house where he might beg something to eat and drink. And soon, to his great joy, he espied a large mansion. a plain-looking woman was standing at the door. She expressed great surprise on seeing him, for it was well known that her husband was a large and powerful giant, and that he would never eat anything but human flesh...” 

And that cheerful tale, of course, is The History of Jack and the Beanstalk. That's the oldest surviving written version of that story, which is actually quite late. It's written down in 1807 by a man named Benjamin Tabert. But everyone is quite sure that the folktale itself is much, much older than that. And I don't know, I may be connecting dots where there are no connections, but this little detail of the man eating giant's wife opening the door to a hapless stranger appearing in both of these stories, The Odyssey and Jack and the Beanstalk, it gives me a little frisson. I am convinced these stories get into the human consciousness and there's just no telling how they're going to evolve, where they're going to wind up. The same way a pterodactyl can turn into a wren in our backyard, the giants of the Odyssey could very conceivably turn into a giant at the top of a beanstalk.  

So, there you go. The Lestergonians. Our hero sails off in his one remaining ship, and any of the sailors that happen to hear that prophecy and remember it, they can't be getting too much sleep here. But they're off to whatever lies ahead. And what lies immediately ahead is that feminist icon, heroine of her own, spin-off, New York Times best-selling novel, Circe, about whom we shall have much to say next time on The Odyssey Odyssey. I'm Tom Lee. Thanks for listening.