I didn’t have a classical education as such but in keeping with most of my generation I picked up bits and pieces from time to time from here and there, starting when my older brother once told me that if I didn’t read The Iliad and The Odyssey I would go through life as an ignoramus and a philistine.
I have a vague memory of reading one or the other, or possibly both because I do remember about the anger of Achilles sending countless souls hurrying down to Hades and rosy-fingered dawn rising from the wine-dark sea.
I loved that poetic language, and whenever the subject of our reading came up our dad would declaim ‘is this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’* which I found curiously thrilling.
That face, as I’m sure you know, was that of Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, whose abduction by the Trojan prince Paris sparked the war which featured all those wonderful legendary characters Achilles and Hector and Priam and Cassandra and of course, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, hero of the Greeks and the brains behind the wooden horse trick – beware of Greeks bearing gifts! – which eventually got the Greeks inside Troy where they laid waste to the city after a ten-year siege.
All this is described in The Iliad. After the war they went home, or they tried to. The Odyssey is Homer’s account of how Odysseus takes ten years to get back to Ithaca, encountering along the way assorted obstacles like Scylla and Charybdis (a rock and a hard place), the one-eyed monster Cyclops, and Circe the witch who warns Odysseus to plug his ears so he won’t be tempted by the song of the Sirens to deviate from his homeward path.
The Return is a retelling of the final part of Homer’s tale when Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) finally makes it back to Ithaca, where things are pretty dire.
His faithful wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is being plagued by suitors who want her to choose one of them as a husband in place of Odysseus who they tell her is surely dead. They’re after the wealth of the kingdom, which has become impoverished due to the king’s absence and their rapacious behaviour. She keeps putting them off, telling them she’ll make her choice when she’s finished weaving the funeral shroud for the old king Laertes, who’s gone mad with grief for his lost son.
She sends her son Telemachus off to the mainland to see if he can find any news of Odysseus’ fate. When the old king dies and the suitors’ threats become more insistent, and when Telemachus returns with no more than rumours about Odysseus being shacked up with some woman – Circe? – on a distant island, she tells the suitors she’ll make her choice once she’s turned the funerary shroud into a wedding robe. She weaves it by day, but by night undoes her work so as to put off the moment of reckoning.
She’s discovered in this trick and the suitors become more menacing. They threaten to kill Telemachus and the few remaining loyal retainers unless she gives in.
Meanwhile Odysseus, who’d fetched up wounded, naked and half-drowned on the shore, the debris of a wrecked vessel floating nearby, is nursed back to health by the swineherd Eumaeus, one of the faithful. He doesn’t reveal himself straight away because for a start he’s lost all the crew who sailed away with him twenty years ago and is not sure of the reception he’ll get.
He can’t get near the palace because these aggressive intruders have taken it over. He must bide his time, collect information, work out the lie of the land.
He disguises himself as a beggar and war veteran and eventually manages to contrive a showdown with the suitors, the result of which we all know, or should.
There is of course no point googling to find out how historically true the story is, but I did want to know how true it was to Homer’s text. Pretty true, it seems, right down to the details about how only his old nurse and his faithful old hunting dog recognise him straight away.
It does change the story about his father, but the most notable departure from Homer is that it takes out the supernatural elements. The gods are not players, as they are in Homer’s telling. It’s as if this version is told by Bronze Age storytellers as they might have heard it at the time, before the mythologising kicked in. Don’t forget – these stories were getting about in oral versions for hundreds of years even before Homer wrote them down in the 6th or 7th century BCE.
There’s a scene where Odysseus describes to an audience of peasants how they implemented the wooden horse trick. It’s slow, it’s ponderous, but in a rude hut lit only by crude oil lamps you can imagine the effect it would have had on illiterate people hungry for knowledge about what happened in the war now so far off in place and time.
The Return is no corny sword-and-sandal epic like 2004’s Troy which popped up in my streaming feed the other night – amazing how the computer overlord knows what you’ve been up to – so I started watching it again but gave up halfway through because despite the all-star cast it struck me this time as a mess of overblown CGI-enhanced cliché. The only thing it had going for it was seeing Brad Pitt buffed up as Achilles. Oh, and Peter O’Toole’s dignified turn as Priam, begging for the body of his slain son Hector (Eric Bana).
By contrast, The Return manages to capture something of the epic spirit of Homer’s story, along with a modicum of historical verisimilitude. Metal weapons were rare during the Bronze Age; swords were creations of the later Iron Age. Some of Odysseus’ enemies have short daggers, but when he gets hold of a powerful longbow that only he can bend and string, and the quiverful of arrows that go with it, it’s as though he’s got a semi-automatic weapon against their puny popguns.
As we were leaving the cinema I was waxing lyrical about the faithful recreation of ancient life – the crude huts, the coarse clothing, the primitive metallurgy – when my companion pointed out that Penelope appeared to have access to some fine tailoring and cosmetics. Yeah, yeah, fair point, but I suppose she had to look a bit queenly sometimes.
Incidentally, the screenplay was written by Scottish/Australian writer John Collee who has a gift for recreating other worlds and times: he wrote the screenplay for 2003’s Master and Commander, as well as 2015’s Tanna, which took us deep into the culture and customs of Vanuatu.
The Iliad ends with Odysseus and his father winning a final battle with the suitors’ vengeful kinsfolk, with the help of the goddess Athena. The Return leaves us at an earlier point, with Odysseus reclaiming his family and his kingdom.
These are both essentially happy endings, but Tennyson went further even than Homer and in his poem ‘Ulysses’ imagines our hero as an old man, living out his days meditating mournfully on war and death and the meaning of life. Rumpole of the Bailey often quoted from it, coming home at night in melancholy mood to the flat he shared with She Who Must Be Obeyed: ‘Matched with an aged wife I meet and dole/unequal laws unto a savage race/that hoard and sleep and feed/and know not me.’
From loving Rumpole and looking up the reference I learned that the meaning of life, according to Odysseus/Ulysses, was ‘to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’
Who says TV rots the brain? Look what it did for MY classical education!
*from Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play Dr Faustus.