Eat, Eat, Eat

I wonder what vegans think of The Odyssey. . .

Last week I wrote about the human heart and its relation to the mind in Homer’s epic.  This week I’ll explore another dominant element of the body that receives frequent attention in the story: 

The stomach. 

As Odysseus says at one point, “. .  .there’s no way to hide the belly’s hungers--/ what a curse, what mischief it brews in all our lives!/ Just for hunger we rig and ride our long benched ships/ on the barren salt sea, speeding death to enemies.” (17.312 ...)

Considering that there is so much roasting of meat and eating in this book-- among other indulgences-- I found it accurate when Odysseus compared his “belly” to “a shameless dog” (7.250).  He is right to be so disparaging. The demands of his crews’ stomachs in Thrinacia lead them to eat the cattle of Helios the sun-god, destroying themselves, and jeopardizing Odysseus’s chances of returning home. But hunger also keeps the characters in the story tied to life. 

“. . .despite my misery, let me finish dinner./The belly’s a shameless dog, there’s nothing worse./ Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget--/destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness. . ./still it keeps demanding./ ‘Eat, drink!’ It blots out all the memory/ of my pain, commanding, ‘Fill me up” (7.250. . .). Odysseus exclaims these words to Alcinous during one of the epic’s many feasts.

Later in the story we learn how Odysseus’s father Laerte’s has sunk deeper into depression, refusing to eat, lost in despair. Odysseus eventually finds him and revives him: As tempting as death or oblivion seems at certain points of the story to certain characters, life is equally compelling.

The quote from last class’s discussion comes back to me: the dead Achilles’ surprising estimation of the value of life--- even a humble life-- over the prizes of death:

“By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man-- some dirt poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive--/ than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” (11.556. . ). 

I’m reminded by a moment in the middle of Odysseus’s journey when he’s “overjoyed at the sight,” of a simple pile of foliage to hide under and rest.  The narrator compares him to a man “on a lonely farmstead” working against the darkness, “. .  to keep a spark alive.” Savoring a moment of shelter and insignificance, “. . .great Odysseus buried himself in the leaves. . .” (5.540).

Later, in the book, he seems to enjoy being reduced to an anonymous vagabond for a time.  He relishes meals of roasted pork with his loyal swineherd Eumaeus, who lives “cut off from the world, with all my pigs,“(14. 422)-- a man who Achilles, and all the others from the underworld, would gladly trade lives with.

Between the calamities, misfortunes, and brutalities of the story, Homer makes every simple beauty of life, every insignificant detail, seducing.  Sleep is a “gift.” And “Dawn with her rose-red fingers,” has as much a pull on Odysseus and the other laborers of the story as the temptresses who entice him with death or immortality.  The cycles of night and day that Homer describes, and all of its attendant meals and rituals-- keep the characters in motion, held in the orbit of life.

Homer is repetitive. Sometimes I can’t read another word. Other times I get lost in the pile of leaves.  It’s very dream-like.  An extravagant and violent fairy-tale.  I get the feeling as I read the repeated descriptions of meat-carving, sacrifice, and consumption in the narrative, that Homer’s Greece had an unapologetically carnivorous culture. Of the number of monstrous appetites in the story-- the Cyclops, the Laestrygoninans, the deadly Charybdis and Scylla-- the greed and slaughter of the suitors seem to comment most on the dangers of such a culture.