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in cult, and in iconography. The Fire-god's central role in this alternative
account parallels his anonymous involvement in the Odyssey's
Polyphemus episode, where fire, which the Cyclops seemingly
used only to light his cave, becomes technological. Odysseus fire-
-hardens an already hard piece of Athena's olive wood in order to
make it into a cunning though brutal surgical instrument to blind
the Cyclops, then later reheats the point to a glow, so as to cauterize
the emptied eye-socket! (Odysseus needs to keep the monster
alive, of course, so that he may remove the huge stone blocking the
remaining Ithacans' egress.) To make us think of Hephaestus, with
whom Odysseus identifies himself, one of the hero's own multi-
-verse similes, very rare elsewhere in the Apologue of Books 9—
12, describes the sizzling sound of the gruesome blinding to one
from that god's special craft, metallurgy, when a bronze-smith tempers
a newly forged iron axe-head or adze by dipping it into cold
water (Od. 9.391—393). Odysseus will indeed by means of that
fiery stake escape hopeless existence in that dreadful cave for a
happier life in his own home, though it will take him many years to
get there.
POSEIDON (Hymn 22)
Before we conclude, I should add something more about the
sea and about Sea-god-in-chief Poseidon, addressed in Hymn No.
22. There we are told other gods allow him the honor “to be tamer
of horses and savior of ships" (æppwn te dmhtér' ¿menai swtérÀ
te nh%n, 5). Though both phrases here may look like standard epithets,
they are in fact each unique for early hexameter, pointing
informatively to powers of the Black-haired Earth-shaker that heroic
narration shows us in his action or motivated inaction, yet without
explicitly assigning to Poseidon these functions within the epics. Indeed,
the god is anything but ship-saver either in the Odyssey or in
the alternative tradition about his sympathies in the Trojan War that
the divine prologue to Euripides' Trojan Women reflects, according
to which Poseidon never favored the Greeks in the war. On the
other hand, Poseidon's friendly involvement with certain horses and
horsemen are manifold (for example, with his grandson Nestor), but
so are unfriendly relations with the conspicuous non-horsemen Odysseus
and his son. 21
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