From the Beginning to Plato

20 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
however badly off she is herself), by urgent rhetorical questions, by the
increasingly direct and passionate way in which he reacts to what Odysseus has
said, and by the way in which he spells out himself what Odysseus
diplomatically left unsaid. The tension between logic and passion, and indeed the
impossibility of ethical argument which does not involve both, is brilliantly
highlighted by this interchange, and further explored in the exchanges which
follow between Achilles and his old tutor, Phoenix.
Gods frequently intervene directly in the course of events throughout the Iliad,
and issues of the powers and morality of the gods are repeatedly in play. Human
characters express the view that the gods support morality, but the debates and
decisions on Olympus reveal no such moral imperative; so Menelaus (Iliad XIII.
620–22) assumes that Zeus will destroy Troy because of Paris’s abuse of
hospitality, but Zeus shows no awareness of this responsibility in the Council of
the Gods in Iliad IV. Indeed what debates on Olympus reveal is that divine
interests are in conflict and that there is a constant bargaining between gods as to
whose interest is to prevail. Disputes among the gods are conducted much as are
human disputes, although in the Iliad trickery is predominantly a divine attribute.
But gods differ from mortals in two important respects: first, among gods there is
an all powerful figure who can insist that his will be done; Agamemnon may be
better than other men (Iliad I.281) but Zeus is best (Iliad I.581) and when Zeus
warns that the consequences of resisting him are terrible (Iliad I.563) we know
that that means something rather different from when Agamemnon says the same
thing (Iliad I.325); second, gods are immortal and the divine perspective is
longer than the human perspective, so that major events in human life can be
seen to be resolved over the longer course of time. Through conflicting divine
interests and powerful divine oversight the Iliad explores and explains the
existence of evil and moral dilemmas. 22
The struggle at the heart of the Odyssey also raises issues of authority and
theology, but it raises further issues too upon which I wish to focus here. 23 Plato
has Socrates quote the father of his friend Eudicus as saying that ‘the Iliad is a
finer poem than the Odyssey by as much as Achilles is a better man than
Odysseus’ (Hippias Minor 363b), and it is Odysseus’ cautious, secretive and
deceitful behaviour that introduces a whole new set of issues into the Odyssey.
The poem traces Odysseus’ return from his long enforced residence with the
nymph Calypso to his eventual triumph, against all the odds, over the suitors on
Ithaca to reclaim his wife and his political control—although we are told of
further wanderings to come. The story of how Odysseus came to be stranded
with Calypso, which Odysseus tells to the Phaeacians with whom he is next
washed up, the stories of the homecomings of other Greek heroes told in the
course of the epic, and the episode of the slaughter of the suitors are all strongly
moral: in every case before disaster strikes warnings are given about the
consequences of behaviour which breaks the rules. Although magic plays a
larger part in this poem than in the Iliad, it is the logic of morality rather than any
supernatural force or arbitrary intervention of the gods that governs events. Even