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PROEM
(Invocation)

1964–2011

The plot of the Odyssey is not long in the telling. A man has been away from home for many years; Poseidon is always on the watch for him; he is all alone. As for the situation at home, his goods are being laid waste by the Suitors, who plot against his son. After a storm-tossed journey, he returns home, where he reveals himself, destroys his enemies, and is saved.

—ARISTOTLE, Poetics

One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired research scientist who was then aged eighty-one, asked me, for reasons I thought I understood at the time, if he might sit in on the course, and I said yes. Once a week for the next sixteen weeks he would make the trip between the house in the Long Island suburbs where I grew up, a modest split-level in which he still lived with my mother, to the riverside campus of the small college where I teach, which is called Bard. At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.

It was deep winter when that term began, and when my father wasn’t trying to persuade me that the poem’s hero, Odysseus, wasn’t in fact a “real” hero (because, he would say, he’s a liar and he cheated on his wife!), he was worrying a great deal about the weather: the snow on the windshield, the sleet on the roads, the ice on the walkways. He was afraid of falling, he said, his vowels still marked by his Bronx childhood: fawling. Because of his fear of falling, we would make our way gingerly along the narrow asphalt paths that led to the building where the class met, a brick box as studiedly inoffensive as a Marriott, or up the little walkway to the steep-gabled house at the edge of campus that for a few days each week was my home. To avoid having to make the three-hour trip twice in one day, he would often spend the night in that house, sleeping in the extra bedroom that serves as my study, stretched out on a narrow daybed that had been my childhood bed—a low wooden bed that my father built for me with his own hands when I was old enough to leave my crib. Now there was something about this bed that only my father and I knew: it was made out of a door, a cheap hollow door to which he’d screwed four sturdy wooden legs, securing them with metal brackets that are as solidly attached today as they were fifty years ago when he first joined the steel to the wood. This bed, with its amusing little secret, unknowable unless you hauled off the mattress and saw the paneled door beneath, was the bed on which my father would sleep that spring semester of the Odyssey seminar, not long before he became ill and my brothers and sister and I had to start fathering my father, anxiously watching him as he slept fitfully in a series of enormous, elaborately mechanized contraptions that hardly seemed like beds at all, whirring noisily as they inclined and declined, like cranes. But that came later.

It used to amuse my father that for a long time I divided my time among so many different places: this house on the rural campus; the mellow old home in New Jersey where my boys and their mother lived and where I would spend long weekends; my apartment in New York City, which, as time passed and my life expanded, first to include a family and then to teach, had become little more than a pit stop between train trips. You’re always on the road, my father would sometimes say at the end of a phone conversation, and as he said the word “road” I could picture him shaking his head from side to side in gentle bewilderment. For nearly all of his life my father lived in one house: the one he moved into a month before I was born, and which he left for the last time one January day in 2012, a year to the day after he started my class on the Odyssey.

The Odyssey course ran from late January to early May. A week or so after it ended, I happened to be on the phone with my friend Froma, a Classics scholar who had been my mentor in graduate school and had lately enjoyed hearing my periodic reports about Daddy’s progress over the course of the Odyssey seminar. At some point in the conversation she mentioned a Mediterranean cruise that she’d taken a couple of years before, called “Retracing the Odyssey.” You should do it! Froma exclaimed. After this semester, after teaching the Odyssey to your father, how could you not go? Not everyone agreed: when I e-mailed a travel agent friend of mine, a brisk blond Ukrainian called Yelena, to ask her what she thought, her response came back within a minute: “AVOID THEME CRUISES AT ALL COSTS!” But Froma had been my teacher, and I was still in the habit of obeying her. The next morning, when I called my father and told him about my conversation with her, he made a noncommittal noise and said, Let’s see.

We went online to look at the cruise line’s website. As I slumped on the sofa in my apartment in New York, a little worn out by another week of traveling up and down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, staring at my laptop, I could picture him sitting in the crowded home office that had once been the bedroom I shared with my older brother, Andrew: the simple low beds that he’d built and the plain oak desk long since replaced by particle-board desks from Staples whose slick black surfaces were already bowed by the weight of the computer equipment on top, the desktops and monitors and laptops and printers and scanners, the looping cables and swags of cords and winking lights giving it all the air of a hospital room. The cruise, we read, would follow the mythic hero’s convoluted, decade-long itinerary as he made his way home from the Trojan War, plagued by shipwrecks and monsters. It would begin at Troy, the site of which is located in what is now Turkey, and end on Itháki, a small island in the western Greek sea that purports to be Ithaca, the place Odysseus called home. “Retracing the Odyssey” was an “educational” cruise, and although he was contemptuous of anything that struck him as a needless luxury—cruises and sightseeing and vacations—my father was a great believer in education. And so a few weeks later, in June, fresh from our recent immersion in the text of the Homeric epic, we took the cruise, which lasted ten days in all, one day for each year of Odysseus’ long journey home.

During our voyage we saw nearly everything we’d hoped to see, the strange new landscapes and the debris of the various civilizations that had occupied them. We saw Troy, which to our untrained eye looked like nothing so much as a sand castle that’s been kicked in by a malicious child, its legendary heights reduced by now to a random agglomeration of columns and huge stones blindly facing the sea below. We saw the Neolithic monoliths on the island of Gozo, off Malta, where there is also a cave that is said to have been the home of Calypso, the beautiful nymph on whose island Odysseus was stranded for seven years during his travels, and who offered him immortality if only he would forsake his wife for her, but he refused. We saw the elegantly severe columns of a Doric temple left unfinished, for reasons impossible to know, by some Greeks of the classical era in Segesta, on Sicily—the island where, toward the end of their homeward voyage, Odysseus’ crew ate the forbidden meat of the cattle that belong to the sun god Hyperion, a sin for which they all died. We visited the desolate spot on the Campanian coast near Naples that, the ancients believed, was the entrance to Hades, the Land of the Dead—that being another, unexpected stop on Odysseus’ journey toward home, but perhaps not so unexpected because, after all, we must settle our accounts with the dead before we can get on with our living. We saw fat Venetian forts, squatting on parched Peloponnesian meadows like frogs on a heath after a fire, near Pílos in southern Greece, Homer’s Pylos, a town where, according to the poet, a kindly if somewhat long-winded old king named Nestor is said to have reigned and where he once entertained the young son of Odysseus, who had come there in search of information about his long-lost father: which is how the Odyssey begins, a son gone in search of an absent parent. And of course we saw the sea, too, with its many faces, glass smooth and stone rough, at certain times blithely open and at others tightly inscrutable, sometimes of a weak blue so clear that you could see straight down to the sea urchins at the bottom, as spiked and expectant as mines left over from some war whose causes and combatants no one any longer remembers, and sometimes of an impenetrable purple that is the color of the wine that we refer to as red but the Greeks call black.

We saw all those things during our travels, all those places, and learned a great deal about the peoples who had lived there. My father, in whom a crabbed cautiousness about the dangers of going pretty much anywhere had given rise to certain notorious sayings that his five children loved to mock (the most dangerous place in the world is a parking lot, people drive like maniacs!), came to relish his stint as a Mediterranean tourist. But in the end, as the result of a string of irritating events beyond the control of the captain or his crew, which I will describe presently, we were unable to make the last stop on the itinerary. And so we never saw Ithaca, the place to which Odysseus strove so famously to return; never reached what may be the best-known destination in literature. But then, the Odyssey itself, filled as it is with sudden mishaps and surprising detours, schools its hero in disappointment, and teaches its audience to expect the unexpected. For this reason, our not reaching Ithaca may have been the most Odyssean aspect of our educational cruise.

Expect the unexpected. Late in the autumn that same year, a few months after my father and I returned home from our trip—which, I would sometimes joke with Daddy, because we had never reached our goal, could still be considered to be incomplete, could be thought of as ongoing—my father fell.

There is a term that comes up when you study ancient Greek literature, occurring equally in both imaginative and historical works, used to describe the remote origins of some disaster: arkhê kakôn, “the beginning of the bad things.” Most often the “bad things” in question are wars. The historian Herodotus, for instance, trying to determine the cause of a great war between the Greeks and the Persians that took place in the 480s B.C., says that a decision taken by the Athenians to send ships to some allies many years before the actual opening of hostilities was the arkhê kakôn of that conflict. (Herodotus was writing in the late 400s B.C., approximately three and a half centuries after Homer composed his poems about the Trojan War—which, according to some ancient scholars, had taken place three centuries before Homer lived.) But arkhê kakôn can be used to describe the origins of other kinds of events, too. The tragic playwright Euripides, for instance, uses it in one of his dramas to describe an unhappy marriage, an ill-fated union that set in motion a sequence of events whose disastrous outcome furnishes the climax of his play.

Both war and bad marriages come together in the most famous arkhê kakôn of them all: the moment when a prince of Troy called Paris stole away with a Greek queen called Helen, another man’s wife. So, according to the myth, began the Trojan War, the decade-long conflict waged by the Greeks to win back the wayward Helen and punish the inhabitants of Troy. (One of the reasons the war took so long to prosecute was that Troy was surrounded by impregnable walls; these finally yielded, after a ten-year siege, only because of a trick—the Trojan Horse—devised by the Odyssey’s notoriously crafty hero.) Whatever its basis in remote history may have been—there had indeed been an ancient city located on the Turkish site that my father and I visited, and it was destroyed violently, but beyond that we can only guess—the mythic cataclysm that resulted from Helen’s adultery with Paris has furnished poets and playwrights and novelists with material for the past three and a half millennia: countless deaths on both sides, the shocking sack of the great city, the enslavements and humiliations and infanticides and suicides, and then, finally, the wretchedly prolonged homecomings of those Greeks clever or lucky enough to survive the war itself.

Arkhê kakôn. The second word in that phrase is a form of the Greek kakos, “bad,” which survives in the English “cacophony,” a “bad sound”—a reasonable way to describe the noise made by women as their young children are thrown over the walls of a defeated city, which is one of the bad things that happened after Troy fell. The first word in the phrase, arkhê, which means “beginning”—sometimes it has the sense of “early” or “ancient”—also makes its presence felt in certain English words, for instance “archetype,” which literally means “first model.” An archetype is the earliest instance of a thing, so ancient in its authority that it sets an example for all time. Anything can be an archetype: a weapon, a building, a poem.

For my father, the arkhê kakôn was a minor accident, a single false step that he took in the parking lot of a California supermarket where he and my brother Andrew had gone to get groceries for a long-awaited family reunion. All five of his children were coming with their families to join him and Mother for a long weekend at Andrew and Ginny’s place in the Bay Area; all were traveling great distances to get there. My parenting partner, Lily, and our two boys and I were flying in from New Jersey, my younger brother Matt and his wife and daughter were coming from DC, my youngest brother, Eric, from New York City, our sister, Jennifer, and her husband and small sons from Baltimore. But before any of us got there, my father fell. Like some unlucky character in a myth, he had unwittingly fulfilled his own glum warnings in a way no one could have guessed: for him, a parking lot had turned out to be the most dangerous place of all, but not because of the cars, the people who drive like maniacs. He and Andrew had finished loading the car with groceries, and as Daddy was returning the empty cart he tripped on a metal stanchion and fell. He couldn’t get up, Andrew told me later, he just sat there looking dazed. By the time we all arrived my father was confined to a wheelchair. He’d fractured a bone in his pelvis, an injury from which it would take him months to recover; but of course we knew he would recover, since, as everyone used to say, Jay is tough!

And he was indeed tough, mastering first the wheelchair and then the walker and then the cane. But the fall he’d feared for so long set in motion a series of complications whose outcome was grossly disproportionate to the mishap that had triggered them, the hairline fracture leading to a small blood clot, the blood clot requiring blood thinners, the blood thinners causing, ultimately, a massive stroke that left my father helpless, unrecognizable: unable to breathe on his own, to open his eyes, to move, to speak. At a certain point we were told it would soon be over, but he fought his way back yet again. He was tough, after all, and for a brief period he was well enough to converse about ball games and Mother and a certain Bach piece that he was eager to practice on his electronic keyboard although, he said, he knew it was too hard for him. This last period was one in which (as we would say later on, retelling the remarkable story over and over as if to convince ourselves that it was all real) “his old self” had reappeared: a term that raises questions first posed, as it happens, in the Odyssey, a work whose hero must, at the end of his decades-long absence from home, prove to those who once knew him that he is still “his old self.”

But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have? As I learned the year my father took my Odyssey course and we retraced the journeys of its hero, the answers can be surprising.

All classical epics begin with what scholars call a proem: the introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about—what will be the scope of its action, the identities of its characters, the nature of its themes. These proems, while formal in tone, perhaps a bit stiffer than the stories that follow, are never very long. Some are almost disingenuously terse, such as the proem of the Iliad, an epic poem of fifteen thousand six hundred and ninety-three lines devoted to a single episode that takes place in the final year of the Trojan War: a bitter quarrel between two Greek warriors—the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon, son of Atreus, and his greatest warrior, Achilles, son of Peleus—that threatened the mission to destroy Troy and avenge the abduction of Helen. (For Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, the war is personal: Helen’s cuckolded husband, Menelaus, the king of Sparta, is his younger brother. Achilles, for his part, fights only for glory. “The Trojans never did any harm to me,” he bitterly remarks.) In the end, the two warriors reconcile and their mission is successful—although it should be said that the destruction of Troy, the ruse of the Trojan Horse, the nighttime ambush, the slaughter of the city’s warriors and enslavement of its women and children, the razing of its once-impregnable walls, an outcome familiar to the Greek audiences of the epic from their real-life wars and made famous through many literary and artistic representations of the Fall of Troy, is not actually narrated in the course of the Iliad’s fifteen-thousand-some-odd lines. Epics, despite their great length, are in fact tightly focused on whatever theme is announced in their proems. The proem of the Iliad is concerned simply with the quarrel between the two Greek warriors, its causes and effects, and what it reveals about the characters’ understanding of honor and heroism and duty and death. But because epic has a sophisticated array of narrative devices—because it can hint, and foreshadow, and even flash forward into the future—the Iliad leaves us in no doubt as to how things will end.

The proem of the Iliad consists of seven lines:

Rage! Sing the rage, O goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles—

devastating rage, which put countless pains upon the Greeks

and hurled to Hades many sturdy souls of

heroes, while making their bodies into pickings for dogs

and all manner of birds, as Zeus’ plan was achieving its fulfillment—

from the moment when first the two stood forth in strife,

Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and Achilles, a man like a god.

In themselves, these seven lines tell us fairly little about the plot of the epic. We know simply that there is rage, death, and a divine plan; Agamemnon and Achilles. The reference to Zeus’ plan is arrestingly coy: what exactly is it? How are the rage and the pain and the dogs and birds helping to fulfill it? We aren’t told right away, and there’s no doubt that part of the reason the poet hints without explaining is to make us keep listening—to make us find out what this plan is. But it’s also hard not to feel that the reference to a “plan” is slyly pointed: for it implies that the poet, at least, has a plan, even though at this early point we have only the dimmest idea of what it might be. In epic, we need the proem because it reassures us, at the very moment we set out upon what might look like a vast ocean of words, that this expanse is not a “formless void” (like the one with which another great story, Genesis, begins) but a route, a path that will take us someplace worth going.

“Someplace worth going” is a good way to summarize the great preoccupation of the Odyssey, which in certain ways is a sequel to the Iliad. A poem of twelve thousand one hundred and ten lines, it takes as its subject the convoluted and adventure-filled return home of one of the Greeks who took part in the war against Troy. This particular Greek is Odysseus, the ruler of a small island kingdom called Ithaca; he is a trickster about whose ruses and ploys, some successful, others not, the Greeks loved to tell tales. One of the most popular of these legends concerns the run-up to the Trojan War. We are told that when the Greeks came asking Odysseus to join their coalition in the war against Troy, Odysseus—“a clever man,” as an ancient commentator on the Odyssey drily observed, “who perceived how vast the conflict would be”—tried to avoid conscription by pretending to be crazy: in the presence of the Greek scout he yoked an ass and an ox together and began to plow salt into his fields. Familiar with his reputation, the scout took Telemachus, Odysseus’ infant son, and placed the baby on the soil in front of the plow; when Odysseus swerved to avoid his child, the scout concluded that he couldn’t be all that crazy, and took him away to the war.

The conflict was indeed vast—but so are Odysseus’ trials during his protracted homeward voyage. For he is continually harassed and delayed, shipwrecked and castaway, by the machinations of the angry sea god, Poseidon, whom Odysseus has offended (for reasons we learn later in the poem) and whom the hero will learn to appease only after he finally gets home. Odysseus’ far-flung wanderings over ten years as he struggles to return to his wife, Penelope, and their son—to get back to his family and home—stand in stark contrast to the immobility of the Greeks as they sat before the walls of Troy during the ten years of their war. So, too, does the mutual devotion of the couple at the heart of the Odyssey—Odysseus, whose allegiance to the wife he hasn’t seen in twenty years withstands the seductive attentions of various goddesses and nymphs whom he encounters on his way home, and Penelope, who remains true to him in the face of the aggressive attentions of the Suitors, the dozens of young men who have taken up residence in her palace, intent on marrying her—stand in sharply ironic contrast to the adulterous affair between Paris and Helen that was the cause of the war in the first place: the arkhê kakôn.

Most classicists agree that the proem of the Odyssey consists of its first ten lines:

A man—track his tale for me, Muse, the twisty one who

wandered widely, once he’d sacked Troy’s holy citadel;

he saw the cities of many men and knew their minds,

and suffered deeply in his soul upon the sea

try as he might to protect his life and the day of his men’s return;

but he could not save his men, although he longed to;

for they perished through their wanton recklessness,

fools who ate of the cattle of Hyperion,

the Sun; and so they lost the day of their return.

From some point or another, Daughter of Zeus, tell us the tale.

It is an odd way to begin. After modestly introducing his subject as, simply, “a man”—Odysseus’ name isn’t mentioned—the poet seems to wander away from this “man” to other men: that is, the men whom he had commanded and who, this proem tells us, died through their own recklessness. Just as the man himself had widely wandered, so does the proem.

Perhaps inevitably, in the case of this meandering work about a meandering and unexpectedly prolonged homecoming, some scholars have argued that the proem of the Odyssey itself strays: that, in fact, it runs for the first twenty-one lines of the poem. The eleven additional lines describe the circumstances in which Odysseus’ divine patroness, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, urges her father, Zeus, king of the gods, to bring Odysseus home at last despite the implacable opposition of the enraged sea god:

… tell us the tale.

Now all the others—those who’d fled steep death—

were home at last, safe from war and sea;

but he alone, yearning for home and wife,

was detained—by the Lady Calypso, most heavenly of goddesses,

in her hollow caves: she longed to marry him.

But then the time came in the course of the whirling years

when the gods devised a way to bring him home

to Ithaca; but even there he was hardly free of woe,

even when he was back among his people. All the gods felt pity

for him except Poseidon, who raged hotly against

Odysseus, that godlike man, until he reached his homeland.

And so, again very much like Odysseus, the proem not only wanders, but may wander on longer than it had intended to.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are the most famous epics in the Western tradition, but they are far from being the only ones to come down to us from Greek and Roman days. The landscape of classical Greek and Roman literature, from the two Homeric poems in the eighth century B.C. to Christian verse epics composed in the fifth century A.D., was dotted with epic poems, which reared up from those landscapes much the way that Troy must have risen from its smooth plain above the sea, seemingly unassailable and permanent. Even when the poems themselves were lost over the millennia, as many of them were, the proems often survived, precisely because of their gripping succinctness.

A proem could memorialize other poems. Take, for example, the proem of Virgil’s Aeneid, which knowingly alludes to the opening lines of both the Iliad and Odyssey:

Wars and a man I sing: the first who came

from Troy to Italy and to Latium’s shores,

exiled by Fate: tossed about on land and sea

by the violence of the gods above, all because

of the ever-wakeful wrath of savage Juno;

he suffered greatly too in war, so he could found

his city and bring his gods to Latium, whence arose

the Latin people, the Alban fathers, and the walls of lofty Rome.

The Aeneid revisits the world of Homer’s poems but radically shifts their point of view to that of the losers: it retails the adventures of Aeneas, one of the few Trojans to survive the Greek obliteration of Troy. After escaping the burning wreckage of his city with (this is one of the epic’s most famous and touching details) his father strapped to his back and his young son in tow, Aeneas first undergoes a series of elaborate wanderings (meanderings that remind us of the Odyssey) before he settles in Italy, the land that has been promised to him as the homeland of the new state that he will found, where he must then fight a series of grim battles against the locals (warfare that reminds us of the Iliad) in order to establish himself and his people forever. While he lacks the cruel glamour of the Iliad’s Achilles or the seductive slyness of Odysseus, Aeneas does embody a dogged sense of filial obligation, a quality much prized in Roman culture and signaled by the Latin adjective most often used of Virgil’s hero: pius, which means not “pious,” as might seem natural to an English-speaker’s eye, but “dutiful.” The proem of the Aeneid is seven lines long; the first of these, in which the poet announces that he will sing of “wars and a man,” arma virumque, is itself a nod to both the Iliad, which is above all about “wars” or “arms,” arma, and to the Odyssey, whose own first line, as we know, announces that it is about “a man.”