Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

162HomerNot if his mother and his father were both to die,Not if right in front of him his brother or his dear sonWere slaughtered with bronze, and he saw it with his own eyes.(IV, 224–7)Through the formality of Helen and Menelaus there is felt acertain coldness. And to Odysseus the Phaeacians display a childisheagerness, for all their own elegance. Menelaus has the servants batheTelemachus, a task Nestor assigned to his own daughter. Anxiousabout their cleanliness, Menelaus orders the bath as soon as theyarrive; Nestor has had it done as a send-off. Such coldness, in thispoem of heartfelt pain and joy, may evidence cruelty. Menelausmentions casually that if Odysseus should care to settle nearby, hewould gladly sack and depopulate a city for his old friend.Each character, of place and society, becomes objectified inthe comparing eye of the visitor; Telemachus, like his father, cancompass the varieties by encountering them. Home is the norm, andIthaca—unlike Aeaea or Ogygia or Phaeacia or Pylos or Argos—hasno special features other than the chaos into which it has fallen.Odysseus discovers himself on his way home. The wideness ofthe way, the wideness of the character destined for so much turning,becomes apparent by comparison with the briefer ways of others, andby the more circumscribed societies, each of which objectifies a wholemoral attitude and destiny: a character (ethos) of the sort Aristotleasserted this poem to be woven from (peplegmenon).Ithaca lacks the heightened felicity of Lacedaemon and Phaeacia,their ordered painlessness and easy delight. Subject to pain andchaos, it is the more rooted in the human variety known and soughtby its absent overlord, and it stands waiting in memory, changing inreality, for his rearrival. When he does arrive, his reinstitution mustbe so deliberate as to take nearly half the poem. While Odysseuswanders, Ithaca stands in unseen relation to him, though from thebeginning it is portrayed in its changed reality. Perpetually the poemholds his biased and unswaying nostalgia in a comparison, oftenunexpressed, between home and the place of sojourn. Explicitly hedeclares that Calypso surpasses Penelope in appearance and form,but such ideal excellence pales before the real rootedness of hismortality. Telemachus, in refusing Menelaus’ gift of horses, admits