blog banner romeo juliet
blog banner romeo juliet

Blogging The Odyssey: Part 6 (The Five People You Meet in the Underworld)

Last time on Blogging The Odyssey, Odysseus blinded a vengeful Cyclops and bragged about it because, I don’t know, I guess he just couldn’t contain himself. Now then.

Book 10: The Bewitching Queen of Aeaea

Having successfully gouged out someone’s eye with a giant toothpick, Odysseus moved right along with his day and sailed to the island of Aeolus. Aeolus is a man with six sons and six daughters and, apparently overcome by this miracle of math, he one day decided to have them all just marry each other. Who does that? Thankfully, he gave Odysseus a bag full of wind to help him on his journey homeward, and we were able to put Aeolus and his questionable family values behind us.

We would’ve made it, too. We ALMOST made it. Ithaca was literally within sight when the crew grew suspicious and decided to open up Odysseus’s sack o’ wind in case it contained treasure. I don’t know why they assumed this. Of all the burlap sacks in the world, do you know how many of them contain treasure? Hardly any.

Predictably, the wind was released (science), and the ships were blown all the way back to Aeolus. This is actual photographic evidence of me reading this hell book:

NBC

Aeolus refused to give them more wind. Damn right. You can’t just give someone more wind after they’ve wasted the wind you gave them. How will they learn? Our motley crew, now bereft of ancient Greek plot devices, trudged onward to the land of the Laestrygonians, and we were given what has to be the laziest way anyone has ever introduced the concept of cannibalism:

Snatching one of my men, he tore him up for dinner.

Odysseus & Co. were able to escape, but not before losing a handful of expendable redshirts. We’re down to just one ship full of men out of what was once an entire squadron. Way to go, Odysseus.

Now, here is the bad news: the remaining crewmen were turned into pigs by the sea-witch Circe. The good news: Odysseus was given the opportunity to right this heinous wrong. All he had to do was get naked with Circe, and then live with her as her lover for an entire year. Well, actually, he didn’t have to do that second part. This did not, however, stop him from doing it. Roughly speaking, here’s how the conversation went:

CIRCE: Have sex with me.
ODYSSEUS: Never! I bet this is a trick.
CIRCE: It’s not.
ODYSSEUS: Good point.

[ONE YEAR LATER.]

RANDOM CREWMAN: Odysseus, shouldn’t we be getting back to Ithaca? You have a family.
ODYSSEUS: I have a what now?

Book 11: The Kingdom of the Dead

If you were to die, who are the five people you’d most want to meet in the afterlife? Would your answer change if you knew they were going to slither toward you, ghost-like, and ask you to do things? It would for me. I’d just opt out entirely. I get that you’re dead, my guy, but I can only accomplish one or two tasks per day. I’m certainly not going to pick up the slack on your to-do list just because you don’t have the good sense to still be alive.

Circe told Odysseus he’d have to sail to the realm of the dead and speak to a prophet, Tiresias, if he ever wanted to make it home. Upon arriving in the dark swamp netherworld that is Hades, Odysseus found himself chatting with a parade of dead people, including:

  • Elpenor, one of Odysseus’s crewmen who had recently fallen off a roof and died. He was introduced and killed off so abruptly that we barely had time to come to terms with his personhood. Presently, he asked Odysseus to go back and give him a decent burial, because apparently they just left his corpse on a beach somewhere.
  • Odysseus’s mother, who died of grief while Odysseus was away (whoops)
  • Tyro, Ariadne, Leda, Iphimedeia, and a whole slew of other ladies who wanted Odysseus to get messages to their families, and whose collective demise communicates to us all that it was very dangerous being a mortal woman in ancient Greece
  • Agamemnon, who’d been killed by his wife and was still b*tching about it from beyond the grave
  • Achilles, the greatest of the Greeks
  • Ajax, the other greatest of the Greeks
  • Patroclus was also there
  • Orion (great hunter)
  • Sisyphus (doomed to roll a rock up a hill forever)
  • And finally Tiresias, the guy we actually came here for.

Tiresias told Odysseus he was fated to return home and slaughter all the suitors courting his wife. Then, and only then, would he be able to journey to a distant land and make nice with Poseidon. He also said something about not touching the cows of the sun god, or else his entire crew would die horribly, but I’m guessing Odysseus had zoned out by this point.

Discussion questions:

  1. Why didn’t Odysseus just tell his men what was in the bag? Was the wind a secret? Was it SECRET WIND?
  2. Raise of hands: who thinks Penelope can do better?
  3. Would you rather die young as a hero or live a long life and remain relatively unknown? Achilles chose the former, and here he told telling Odysseus that a glorious death isn’t all it was cut out to be. He said, “I’d rather slave on earth for another man…than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

Looking for the rest of our Blogging the Classics series? Check it out here! For all of Blogging The Odyssey, click here!