Today, our guest, classicist Hilary Mackie from Rice
University, asks us to quiet our fear of engulfment with
stories. The University of Houston presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
Our fears about traveling have
recently been heightened in unfamiliar ways, but those
fears in themselves are nothing new. Ships and the sea
terrified the ancient Greeks. But death at sea was not
what they feared. The sea was a risk more threatening
than death: that you could die not leaving any trace, or
even anyone to tell the tale of how you died. Death by
drowning meant you got no glory. You simply disappeared;
friends and loved ones lacked even the comfort of
In her book on death in Greek art, Emily Vermeule
describes the Greeks' fear that the sea would eat them:
hide them from view by swallowing them down, devouring
them. The metaphor is everywhere in Homer's
Odyssey -- the poem that tells how Odysseus
faced the dangers of the sea on his way home from Troy.
The ocean is a "great gullet"; it swallows him down, then
"belches" him up on the shore. At calmer times, the tide
"spits up" pebbles on the beach. The sea teems with
voracious monsters. Scylla, who "yelps" like a dog, has
six frightful mouths, with three rows of teeth in each.
Charybdis, the whirlpool, "sucks" black water down three
times per day, and three times daily "spews" it up again.
When the poem begins, it is twenty years since Odysseus
left home. His son, Telemakhos, was a new-born infant
then. By now, the Greeks have all sailed back from Troy
-- except for Odysseus. Where is Odysseus? No one knows,
or even if he is alive or dead. Now a young man,
Telemakhos bitterly complains that his father is lost at
The gods have made him invisible. If he were dead, I
would not grieve for him so much -- if he had been killed
at Troy, or died in the arms of friends after the war.
Then, the Greeks would have made a tomb for him, and he
would have won great glory for me, his son, as well as
for himself. Instead, the storm fiends have snatched him
away and left no word of him. He has perished unseen and
To lose a parent is disorienting. If we are young, like
Telemakhos, it can feel as if the floor has fallen out
from under our feet. Our sense of who we are is changed
in a confusing way. With time, this passes: we move on,
and live life in a new way. How much worse to be
Telemakhos. He longs to move on, but he can't.
The Greeks felt
threatened by the sea's power to leave a person
unaccounted for. We have our modern versions of this
fear; for many, recent events have made them a reality.
In the end, Odysseus survived the sea, and his skill at
telling stories helped to save him. Shipwrecked on the
isle of the Phaeacians, he earned his passage home by
entertaining them with tales of his adventures. Perhaps,
in times like these, hearing stories can also be helpful.
Stories cannot take away our fears, but they can comfort
and console us -- most of all when they show us that our
fears are not new, unique, or isolated; stories can show
us that we are in fact living out human patterns much
older than we are.
I'm Hilary Mackie, interested in stories as timeless
testament to the ways in which inventive minds work.
Vermeule, E., Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and
Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1979. See Chapter VI (pp. 179-209).
Excellent translations of the Odyssey are
Robert Fagles (Viking, 1996; now also available in
paperback [Penguin]), Robert Fitzgerald (Noonday, 1998),
and Richmond Lattimore (Perennial 1999 [reprint of 1967
edition]). Each has different strengths. I like Lattimore
because it seems so close in sound and spirit to Homer's
Greek. However, many readers especially like Fagles'
translation, which makes the poem highly readable and
accessible to the modern ear. Fitzgerald's translation
captures especially well the sense of magic and
enchantment that pervades much of the poem. Ralph
Hexter's Guide to the Odyssey (Vintage Books,
1993) is a commentary on Fitzgerald's translation.
George Chapman's translation, which may be read
online, was first published in 1614-1616 and has
become a classic in its own right. It inspired John
Keats' poem, On First
Looking into Chapman's Homer.
Hilary Mackie is Associate Professor of Classics at Rice
University and author of Talking Trojan: Speech and
Community in the Iliad (Rowman and Littlefield Press
1996), and "Song and Storytelling: An Odyssean Perspective" (Transactions of the American
Philological Association, Vol. 127 (1997): 77-96).
Her interests include Greek poetry, myth and folklore,
oral tradition and performance, heroic literature (in
particular, Homeric poetry and the Icelandic sagas), the
Victorian novel, the classical tradition, and children's
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright
© 1988-2001 by John H. Lienhard.