Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay Page B

the wind king. They row for days and nights with no idea where they are. On the seventh day they find a steep-walled fjord with a narrow mouth that keeps out the ocean waves, wind, and currents. The tired sailors pull into the glassy-calm harbor and moor close together.
    Only Odysseus ties up outside, on the seaward side of the headlands. Did he have another premonition, like the one that led him to take strong wine to the Cyclops’ cave? He sends a small scouting party overland. Survivors rush back to warn that scouts have discovered and been eaten by the giant, cannibal Laestrygonians. The Laestrygonians swarm from their town to the top of the cliffs that hem the fjord and rain down boulders, smashing the fragile wooden hulls lashed below.
    They speared the crews like fish
and whisked them away home to make their grisly meal.
    But while they killed them off …
I pulled the sword from beside my hip and hacked away
at the ropes that moored my blue-prowed ship …
and shouted …
‘Put your backs in the oars—now row or die!’
In terror of death they ripped the swells …
    Phaeacian Court
    Raid on lsmarus
    Lotus Land
    Cyclops
    King of the Winds
    Deadly Fjord
    Circe
    Among the Dead
    Sirens
    Scylla and Charybdis
    Sun God’s Cattle
    Whirlpool
    Calypso
    At Home, Ithaca
    clear of those beetling cliffs … my ship alone.
But the rest went down en masse. Our squadron sank.
… we sailed on, glad to escape our death
yet sick at heart for the dear companions we had lost.
    (10:135ff, Fagles)
    Eleven of twelve ships and crews are now lost.
    We now look at Odysseus as a military leader. What can we say now about this hero, Odysseus, their commander? What are we to believe about the narrator in the first lines of the poem (1:5ff, Fagles), who, announcing Odysseus as its subject, blames the men for their own deaths? He says they ate the sun god’s cattle. The men in these eleven ships who drowned beneath the rocks rained down on them or were butchered for the Laestrygonian meal had never even reached the island where the sun god kept his cattle. Is Homer just careless, or is he saying that troops—as a category, not individually—are always the cause of their own deaths, never the commander? 1
    So far the portrait of Odysseus is complex and many-sided. We have learned from the
Iliad
and the song of Demodocus about the Trojan Horse that he is a brilliant planner and strategist—that counts for a lot—and he’s brave and effective in a fight. That counts for a lot, too. But we also know that as an independent troop commander, he doesn’t keep control of his men (allowing them to get drunk and ignore his withdrawal order from Ismarus), shows impulsiveness and poor judgment (entering and then remaining in the Cyclops’ cave, and perhaps attacking Ismarus to begin with), unable to delegate authority (sole helmsman for the nine-day sail home from Aeolia), and lacks consistent leadership backbone. While he did not indulge his troops in the free and abundant narcotics in Lotus Land, he lacked the leader’s will to deny his men the comforts of the Laestrygonian fjord, even though he apparently suspected it was a death trap and moored his own ship outside. Odysseus and the rest of his own crew might well have felt claustrophobic in the fjord, for what is a fjord if not like a roofless marine cave. Now more than nine-tenths of his men, the flower of the Ithacan region’s youth that sailed with him ten years earlier, are at the bottom of the fjord—or worse, at the bottom of a cannibal stew pot. If I am unforgiving about Odysseus’ failures as a leader that caused the deaths of his men, I am mirroring not only the angry criticism of enlisted soldiers who pay the butcher’s bill, but also the demanding standards of the current American officer corps. They make no allowances at all for fellow officers who lose lives in their command out of self-serving or