#wordsages2

i'm izzy. 21. i love my friends and the house of atreus and comic books and a lot of other things too. please tag suicide. two things about me: i love to migraine-post & my memory is nonexistent. your good mother will not insult you anymore.

Finally, the greatest of the “Trojan Women,” Troy herself, is annihilated. There is no dramatic solution, no relief. The innocent suffer. Odysseus, the villain behind the scenes, triumphs, and of the persons who appear, only the stuffy, weak-willed Spartan Menelaus and Helen, his pretty, clever, faithless, worthless Spartan wife, come out safe and sound. For despite the predictions of wreck and hardship, all readers of The Odyssey knew that Helen, Menelaus, and Odysseus survived to a prosperous old age.

By contrast, the Odyssey is pitched at a much less intense level. Its first word, "andra," means man, and the poem really does focus on the fortunes and vicissitudes of its hero, as he tries to reach home. (His nostos is, so to speak, fueled by nostalgia.) Resourceful, cautious, and omnicompetent, Odysseus seems far more modern than Achilles or Agamemnon. He wants his glory to be recognized—why else would he finally reveal his real name to the blinded Polyphemus?—but his real talent is for survival. To do that requires all his talent for wariness and cunning. Over the course of the poem Odysseus smoothly gives out one phony account after another of who he is; sometimes he's Phoenician, other times a brother of Idomineus, and, with Polyphemus the Cyclops, he's at first Nobody at all. Above all, he's the man of many parts—even flirting with Athene and braving the land of the dead to consult the prophet Tiresias. For while arguably greater men, like Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax, and Hector die, Odysseus lives. There is his triumph, even if it lacks tragic grandeur.

[...]

How often does Odysseus land on an island and wonder what kind of welcome he will receive? And is there any other classical hero who talks so much about hunger, his belly, and the need for food?

[...]

Most of the second half of the poem takes place on Ithaca, and offers even greater, if quieter thrills: the moment when Odysseus's old dog, Argus, who has waited twenty years, recognizes his master; the moment when the nurse Euyclea touches the tell-tale scar and knows the identity of the stranger before her; the dramatic moment when the reviled beggar carefully examines the great bow for dry rot, then suddenly strings it and plucks it like a lyre, before notching an arrow: "Dogs, did you think that I should not come from Troy? You have wasted my substance, have forced my womenservants to lie with you, and have wooed my wife while I was still living. You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die."

And they do. Every last one.