Banke Choudhry

Professor Jeff Peer

English 2800

First Draft Due October 3

Priority of the living over the dead in the odyssey

In Book 11 of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus speaks with several ghosts from Hades, Homer presents the theme of value of life on Earth versus the lost cause of those who have fallen to Hades. Odysseus, his family, and his crew’s wellbeing are presented as having value worth persevering for as they are still alive in flesh and blood. The prosperity of those in Hades is suggested to have lesser incentive over the living’s, for example, Odysseus organizing contact with Tiresias over contact with his own particular mother. With everything taken into account, it is smarter to work to help and spare those still on Earth at that point to give slight alleviation to the individuals who are as of now lost to Hades.

Odysseus’s interaction with the ghost of his mother displays the division between the living and the dead by playing on the reader’s emotions. Homer does this with Odysseus’ mom in two ways. To begin with, when Odysseus held the ability to pick which apparitions moved toward the blood, when his mom showed up he didn’t let even her approach the blood. He could not let her approach the blood because he needed to speak with Tiresias’s ghost; he needed to speak with Tiresias because Odysseus was set on achieving his goal which concerns the living, of making it back to Ithica. Odysseus chose to persevere in reaching his earthly goal of making it back to Ithica instead of allowing his mother, who is of no practical use, to approach the blood.

Second, Homer uses the part where Odysseus tries to embrace his mother to emphasize the division between the living and the dead with an emotional argument. Odysseus tries to grasp his mom and bombs each time, and his mom discloses to him that once you pass away, “the ghost flutters off and is gone like a dream.” Odysseus cannot connect with his mother in a way more meaningful than a temporary ritual; she is in Hades and he is amongst the living. This is an exceptional exhibition of the subject of partition between the living and the dead since it utilizes a passionate ramifications rather than a plain, coherent one. Odysseus is made to feel dismal about his partition from his mom which may acquire comparative feelings the reader.

She has died not peacefully as her son hoped for her to do, but of chagrin caused by her “longing to know what you were doing and the force of my affection for you” (Butler, 1922); in other words, her indulgence in pining away over her son killed her with grief. Even now in the afterlife, even though she is here due to her love for her son, they are both taunted by the fact that they cannot hug each other, as the dead are no longer really corporeal, and indeed can’t even speak unless they are given sacrificial blood to drink. By being overcome by her desire to have her son to love, she has ruined her chance of embracing him again until Odysseus dies too.

Tiresias’s message to Odysseus, that he must persevere and be stubborn and strong—and smart—if he wants to ever get home, outlines how Odyssus and his crew would be useless if they were to fall to Hades. Odysseus is told that he has to pass Sicily without allowing his men to slaughter the cattle of the sun; if they can be restrained, he will after some suffering get home; but if they cannot control themselves, then they will all be lost, and Odysseus will return alone in another man’s ship to find men courting his wife and devouring his riches. The message here is that indulgence in the impulse to take the cattle will create much suffering down the road. However, even if the men’s indulgence creates suffering for Odysseus, he can, by persevering steadfasty in yet another mission, gain respite for himself and eventually die old, “full of years and peace of mind.” (Butler, 1922.) This would be the better fate for him rather than falling to Hades early and not being able to take back Ithica.

Elpenor’s inability to bury himself shows the incapability of those in Hades to help the living. Elpenor tells Odysseus to bury him so that Elpenor does “not become a cause of the gods’ anger towards” Odysseus. More specifically, Elpenor pleads with Odysseus to do this in a way that is pitiful, as described by Odysseus, because he cannot bury himself now that he is in Hades. Odysseus is left to help himself against the gods’ anger by planning to return to Elpenor’s corpse in the future. Elpenor’s lack of a physical body can be accounted for as the reason for his inability to bury himself. Odysseus’s mother described how the dead lose their flesh because their sinews don’t hold it together anymore. Perhaps you need flesh in the world of the Odyssey to be considered living and on Earth. Although, perhaps the fact that Elpenor is locked away in the alternate realm of Hades has something to do with his inability to help.

Next he runs into Agamemnon, who as the reader might recall from the Iliad, had great difficulty controlling his emotions; his feud with Achilles drove much of the tragedy of the earlier poem and helped to cause the death of many more men than was necessary. Now he is complaining in Hades about how his wife was also emotionally incontinent; after the Iliad he died because she couldn’t help cheating on him, and she and her lover murdered him. Agamemnon’s entire existence revolved around causing unnecessary suffering for his army and his people because he couldn’t control his emotions; now ironically he is dead because his wife could not control hers. (Butler, 1922.)

Finally, the ghost of Achilles appears, with the strongest case against emotionalism. A great but tragic hero of the Trojan War, he did what he did in the Iliad partly out of bravery, but also largely because of his emotional craving for fame and glory. He is miserable as a shade now, and bitterly regrets giving up his life fighting for glory. He wishes that instead he had lived many happy years with his family on Earth, delivering the famous line that “I would rather be a slave on Earth than a king in Hades.” (Butler, 1922.)

After meeting all of these shades, the case that has been made to Odysseus is fairly clear: no matter what his emotions, if he wants to avoid the suffering they face now in the Underworld, he needs to control his impulses and persevere. No matter how absurd his life, his goals, or the quests and detours he is sent on, he must keep his eyes on what he is doing and control not just himself, but his men. Emotions and self-indulgence, in Homer’s world, are the way to regret, pain, and lamentation.