PICTURE ANALYSIS The Eyes of Odysseus: Gaze, Desire, and Control in the Odyssey - Comprehensive Notes

Athena and Odysseus's Craftiness

• Upon arriving in Ithaca, Odysseus first meets Athena in disguise.

• Odysseus fabricates a story about his identity, which amuses Athena.

• Athena admires Odysseus for his deceptive and thievish tales, which she sees as inherent to his nature.

• Athena acknowledges Odysseus as the best among mortals in counsel and storytelling, while she is known among the gods for wit and sharpness.

The Significance of Eyes in the Odyssey

• Odysseus, like Athena, is characterized by specific organs (the eyes).

• Athena dims Odysseus's eyes when transforming him into an old beggar.

• Odysseus’s eyes are described as handsome.

• Telemachus inherited prominent eyes from his father.

Vision in Homeric Poetry

• Scholars have examined vision in Homeric poetry from different angles.

• Some explore the visual quality of epic narrative, as noted by ancient critics.

• Egbert Bakker uses discourse analysis and performance studies to explain the enargeia of the Iliad and Odyssey.

• Elizabeth Minchin says that epic song uses visual memory for its presentation.

• Strauss Clay argues the Iliad has a coherently visualized narrative, even in battle scenes.

• Other scholars focus on vision as part of the epic’s action.

• R. A. Prier gives a phenomenology of sight and appearance based on lexical analysis.

• Helen Lovatt wrote a book on the gaze in epic poetry from Homer to Nonnus, but the Odyssey receives less attention.

• This essay will explore how the gaze of the poem’s hero contributes to scenes and plot dynamics.

Theoretical Aspects of the Gaze

• The concept of the gaze has a sprawling landscape of approaches.

• This essay concentrates on two aspects of the gaze: desire and power relations.

• Mulvey’s essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema links gazing and desire.

• Jaś Elsner shows in paintings and ekphraseis how the gaze expresses desire and contributes to subjectivity.

• Michel Foucault analyzes the gaze as part of power relations in Surveiller et Punir.

• The Panopticon illustrates the power of the gaze as a means of control.

• Desire and subjection are the features of the gaze focused on in this work.

• The interpretation aims to single out passages where Odysseus’s gaze contributes to the narrative dynamics of the Odyssey.

• The study points out a disruption of the connection between gaze and desire on Ogygia and Scheria, underscoring Odysseus’s will to return home.

• The gaze highlights Odysseus’s increase in active heroism.

• On Ithaca, Odysseus’s gaze empowers him as he anticipates and accompanies the punishment of the suitors.

• This inverts the situation in some adventures where the gaze shows Odysseus exposed to superior powers.

• A brief look at archaic vase-painting suggests that the Odyssey’s use of the gaze is part of a broader cultural interest in vision.

Gaze, Marvel, and Desire

• Hera seduces Zeus in the Iliad, and the sight of Hera translates into desire.

• The Odyssey presents Odysseus laying eyes on gorgeous women, but the gaze does not trigger desire.

• The cutting of the link between vision and lust comes to the fore on Ogygia and Scheria.

• Odysseus admits Calypso is superior in beauty but no longer pleases him.

• The sight of beauty, even of a goddess, does not fill Odysseus with desire anymore.

• Calypso remarks that Odysseus longs to see his wife.

• The uncoupling of gaze and desire is repeated in Odysseus’s encounter with Nausicaa.

• Odysseus voices his amazement at Nausicaa’s beauty, comparing her to Artemis and a palm tree shoot.

• Nausicaa’s extraordinary beauty is confirmed by the narrator.

• Love and marriage are in the air, but the deep impression that Nausicaa’s appearance makes on Odysseus fails to trigger his desire.

Marvels on Ogygia and Scheria

• Calypso’s residence has rich flora, fauna, and four fountains.

• Even a god would admire the setting, as Argeïphontes does.

• Odysseus, after years on Ogygia, no longer has an eye for the beauty of the setting. He is always weeping, longing to go home.

• Odysseus is captured by the beauty of Scheria, admiring harbors, ships, meeting places, and walls.

• He is struck by Alcinous’s palace and orchards.

• Odysseus witnesses a dance performance and marvels at the twinkling of their feet.

• \text{Odysseus says: Wonder takes me as I look on them} .

• Beautiful women are not the only marvels that fail to tempt Odysseus to stay.

The Idea of Nostos

• What interrupts the nexus between gaze and desire is the idea of nostos.

• Odysseus’s will to return to Ithaca is strong and undercuts his desire for beautiful women.

• He shares the bed with Calypso against his will and does not pursue Nausicaa.

• The failing link between gaze and desire highlights the motive of nostos.

• The formulaic diction for nostos suggests that the chain of gaze and desire is inverted; nostos is made the object of seeing.

• There are three occurrences of the formula νόστιμον ἦμαρ ἰδέσθαι (3.233; 5.220; 8.466) modified to νόστιμον ἦμαρ ἴδηαι in a fourth passage (6.311).

• The phrases φίλους τ’ ἰδέειν καὶ ἱκέσθαι (4.475; 5.41; 114; 9.532) and ἄλοχον τ’ ἰδέειν καὶ πατρίδ’ ἱκέσθαι (8.410) employ a literal visual experience to refer to the homecoming.

• Seeing the wife also paraphrases nostos in 11.161–62 (οὐδέ πω ἦλθες | εἰς Ἰθάκην οὐδ’ εἶδες ἐνὶ μεγάροισι γυναῖκα;).

• In 7.224–25, property and slaves are mentioned as the objects of his seeing that signify a return: “… and let life leave me when I have once more | seen my property, my serving people, and my great high-roofed house” (… ἰδόντα με καὶ λίποι αἰὼν | κτῆσιν ἐμὴν δμῶάς τε καὶ ὑψερεφὲς μέγα δῶμα).

• Odysseus cannot think of any place sweeter on earth to look at than Ithaca (οὔ τοι ἐγώ γε | ἧς γαίης δύναμαι γλυκερώτερον ἄλλο ἰδέσθαι, 9.27–8).

• The visual imagery of nostos implies that Odysseus desires to see his homecoming.

• The relation between gaze and desire is turned upside down.

• Through the deployment of visual terms for achieving nostos, the Odyssey redefines the dynamics of gaze and desire for Odysseus.

• Vision has become the object of desire.

Irony in the Visual Semantics of Nostos

• Odysseus narrates how the land of our fathers appeared, and we could see people tending fires.

• Odysseus falls asleep, and his companions open the bag of Aeolus, driving the ships away from Ithaca.

• Seeing Ithaca does not equate to the desired homecoming.

• When Odysseus arrives on Ithaca, he does not recognize the island because Athena has cast a mist over it.

• Odysseus’s desire to see the fatherland is thwarted at the moment of return.

• The circumstances of Odysseus’s return literally fail the visual imagery for nostos.

• In the case of Odysseus, the desire aroused by the sight of gorgeous women in marvelous places has been blocked by his desire to see the day of homecoming.

• This play on the semantics of the gaze highlights Odysseus’s iron will to return to Ithaca.

• After inverting the link between vision and desire, the visual imagery in expressions for Odysseus’s nostos is itself undercut when Odysseus actually arrives on Ithaca.

Seeing, Control, and Subjection

• Book 19 contains an ekphrasis of a brooch that Odysseus describes to Penelope as proof he met her husband.

• The brooch depicts a hound holding a dappled fawn, gazing at it as it struggled.

• \text{Odyssey 19.299-30: A hound held in his forepaws a dappled fawn, gazing at it as it struggled; and all admired it, how, though they were golden, it gazed at the fawn and strangled it and the fawn struggled with his feet as he tried to escape him.}

• Λάω means gazing at.

• The likely etymological relation to such words as ἀλαός and ἀλαόω confirms this meaning and supports the translation of λάω in Od. 19.229–30 as “gazing at”.

• There are two distinct acts of seeing: the spectators looking at the brooch and the hound fixing its eyes upon the fawn.

• The gaze of the hound accompanies the strangling of the fawn; it is an act of subjection and control.

• This trait of the gaze is underscored through the direct juxtaposition of the agent’s act of seeing with the victim’s struggle: ἀσπαίροντα λάων.

• The ekphrasis of the brooch foreshadows Odysseus’s killing of the suitors.

• The suitors are compared to fawns, and Odysseus is compared to hounds.

• The subjecting gaze exhibited on the brooch also features in Odysseus’s adventures, notably in his revenge on the suitors.

• The gaze as carrier of aggression highlights the dichotomy of active and passive heroism.

• On Ithaca, Odysseus uses his eyes both to survey the scene, thereby exerting control, and to transfix his opponents before he kills them.

Odysseus's Gaze as Control

• Odysseus offers to take care of the torches and commands the female servants, intimating his hidden identity as master of the house.

• Melantho harshly puts the beggar in his place, but Odysseus manages to intimidate her.

• While the female servants leave the megaron, he stays.

• He took his place by the burning cressets, and kept them lighted, looking at them all himself, but the heart within him was pondering other thoughts, which were not to go unaccomplished.
  Odysseus gathers to himself the formulae that are the property of the sun.

• \text{Helios ὃς πάντ’ ἐφορᾶι καὶ πάντ’ ἐπακούει}

• The light prefigures the light Athena will create around Odysseus, heralding his impending victory.

• Odysseus’s silent gaze at the suitors anticipates the control he will gain over them.

• The suitors, unaware of being watched, become the object of his gaze.

• In their sleep, the suitors are helplessly exposed to the eyes of the true master of the house.

• Even though Odysseus still lets them see the light of the sun, his thoughts are already set on the bloody revenge.

The Assaultive Gaze

• Before lashing out against Melantho, Odysseus looks at her scowlingly.

• James P. Holoka argues that the formula ὑπόδρα ἰδών has a marked connotation in Homeric poetry: it indicates an infraction of propriety has occurred.

• The formula is linked to physical violence; the gaze from below carries aggression that will be acted out.

• There are nine occurrences of ὑπόδρα ἰδών in the Odyssey.

• In two instances, Odysseus is the object of a hostile gaze which translates seamlessly into an act of violence.

• Antinoos stares at him scowlingly and then hits him with a footstool, shortly repeated by Eurymachus.

• The remaining instances all have Odysseus as the subject of the gaze, concentrated in Books 18–22, featuring six passages with Odysseus casting an angry look from below.

• All of them are subsequently eliminated by Odysseus and his men.

• The aggression inherent in the fierce gaze from below is thus acted out, even if not immediately in all cases.

• The killing of the first suitor, Antinous, and Eurymachus’s actions elicit glares from below, leading to the death of Eurymachus.

• Odysseus rejects the supplication of Leodes, accompanied by a scowling look, and then kills him.

• ”If you claim to be the diviner among these people, many a time you must have prayed in my palace, asking that the completion of my sweet homecoming be far off from me, that my dear wife would go off with you and bear you children. So you cannot escape from sorry destruction.” So he spoke, and in his heavy hand took up a sword that was lying there on the ground where Agelaos had dropped it when he was killed. With this he cut through the neck at the middle, and the head of Leodes dropped into the dust while he was still speaking."(22.320-30)

• The immediate sequence of looking and killing emphasizes the gaze as an act of subjection.

• Through ὑπόδρα ἰδών the assaultive capacity of the eye becomes formulaic in the Odyssey.

The Bow as an Instrument of the Assaultive Gaze

• The connection between looking and assault is underlined through the first weapon that Odysseus uses in his revenge: the bow.

• Odysseus makes the bow contest a prelude to his revenge and kills the first suitors with the bow they were unable to string.

• The relevance of the bow is captured in Odysseus’s description of Heracles in the underworld.

• \text{Odyssey 11. 605-8: Homer: All around him was a clamor of the dead as of birds scattering scared in every direction; but he came on, like dark night, holding his bow bare with an arrow laid on the bowstring, and looking, as one who is about to shoot, with terrible glances.}

• παπταίνω signifies the movement of the searching eye before it fixes upon an object and aims, expressing lethal shots.

• Explaining to Agamemnon why there is such a flood of new arrivals, Amphimedon recounts the slaughter on Ithaca.

• \text{Odyssey 24.178-79: He stood on the threshold and scattered out the swift shafts before him, glaring terribly, and struck down the king Antinous.}

• The immediate sequence of glaring terribly and striking down” highlights the aggressive notion of the gaze.

• Requiring a sharp eye, the bow is the instrument of the assaultive gaze.

• The aggression of the gaze turns into actual violence when the eye fixes upon the object to be hit by the arrow.

Irony and Echoes in the Use of the Gaze

• \text{An anonymous voice mocks the beggar turning the bow in his hands: This man is one who gazes at bows, a clandestine expert (ἦ τις θηητὴρ καὶ ἐπίκλοπος ἔπλετο τόξων, 21.397).}

• Indeed, Odysseus looks the bow all over.

• His eyes, however, do not stop here, but go on to take aim first.

• Odysseus did not miss any axes from the first handle on, but the bronze-weighted arrow passed through all and out the other end (πελέκεων δ’ οὐκ ἤμβροτε πάντων | πρώτης στειλειῆς, διὰ δ’ ἀμπερὲς ἦλθε θύραζε | ἰὸς χαλκοβαρής, 21.421–3), before he turns to Antinous.

• Aiming at this man, he struck him in the throat with an arrow, “and clean through the soft part of the neck the point was driven (τὸν δ’ Ὀδυσεὺς κατὰ λαιμὸν ἐπισχόμενος βάλεν ἰῷ, | ἀντικρὺ δ’ ἁπαλοῖο δι’ αὐχένος ἤλυθ’ ἀκωκή, 22.15–16).

• It may be echoed ironically later, when another compound form of the κλεπ/κλοπ-stem is used, again in conjunction with a visual term: Odysseus looked about his own house to see if any man had stolen away alive, escaping the black destruction.

• Then clandestinity is ascribed to the suitors, while Odysseus’s gaze at the bow has become the search for those who have survived its work

Contrasting gazes and Actions

• Like in Book 18, Odysseus looks around in what has become his own house again.

• The gaze at the dormant suitors has metamorphosed into a search for whether there are any survivors among the corpses that now fill the house.

• The control that was implicit earlier in the eye directed at the sleeping suitors has been substantiated; Odysseus’s thoughts have been accomplished.

• The gaze expressing control thus frames the assaultive gaze exercised during the revenge.

• The controlling aspect of Odysseus’s gaze in 22.381–82 is thrown into relief by the use of the same verb in the preceding verse, here applied to Medon and Telemachus, whom Odysseus orders to wait outside while he does the work he has to do (ὅττεό με χρή, 22.377).

• They sat down both together beside the altar of mighty | Zeus, looking all about them, still thinking they would be murdered.”

• Their fearful eyes resemble the look in the suitors’ eyes when the slaughter starts.

• After “throwing their glances every way all along the well-built walls” (πάντοσε παπταίνοντες ἐϋδμήτους ποτὶ τοίχους, 22.24) and failing to find weapons upon Odysseus’ self-revelation.

• The same verb underscores the contrast: while Odysseus’s wandering eyes control the scene, the suitors search in a panic for means of defence or flight.

The Gaze in the Apologoi

• Aggression is most prominent in the last third of the Odyssey but appears in the apologoi.

• Vision does not express Odysseus’s control, but rather casts him as the object of violence.

• The curiosity to see the Cyclops prompts Odysseus not to comply with his companions’ wish to leave the cave.

• The cave becomes a trap where they are exposed to the giant Polyphemus.

• Deprived of his eyesight, Polyphemus is unable to lay hands on the men.

• His blindness permits Odysseus and the remaining comrades to escape; it is highlighted when Polyphemus addresses the ram which, against his habit, is the last to leave the cave.

• Odyssey 9.452-54 The tardiness of the ram is indeed linked to the blinding, albeit differently from what the Cyclops suspects.

• Later, when Odysseus taunts Polyphemus from his ship, the Cyclops hurls stones after him, but they fail to hit their target due to his blindness.

• Book 9 presents Odysseus not as the subject of a look of aggression, but as its object.

• Only the blinding of the Cyclops allows Odysseus the escape from his cave.

• The loss of control effected by Polyphemus’s loss of his eye highlights, ex negativo, the empowering aspect of the gaze.

The Scylla Episode

• The semantics of viewing as an act of control is also played out in the Scylla episode.

• Scholars have been struck by Odysseus’s attempt to attack the monster.

• Odysseus puts on his armour and takes two spears, but this is of no help, reinforcing the incommensurability of the Odyssey’s adventures with heroic combat in the Iliad.

• It is noteworthy that Odysseus first fails to catch a glimpse of Scylla.

• Clad in full armour he goes to the prow and climbs the foredeck, and his eyes grew weary from looking everywhere on the misty face of the sea rock,

• Odysseus sees Scylla only when she has already snapped up the six men.

• .“That was the most pitiful scene that these eyes have looked on | in my sufferings as I explored the routes over the water.oἴκτιστον δὴ κεῖνο ἐμοῖσ’ ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσι | πάντων, ὅσσ’ ἐμόγησα πόρους ἁλὸς ἐξερεείνων, 12.258–59
  The horrid threat of Scylla is underscored not only by the ineffectuality of heroic armour and courage, but also by the fact that she is not seen until she has already attacked.

• Paradoxically, the temporary invisibility of the adversary contributes to the qualification of the scene as the most pitiful that these eyes have looked on.

• A simile underscores Scylla’s nabbing of six companions.

• The simile can be read as an elaboration of the much briefer comparison of the Laestrygones throwing stones at Odysseus and his men with men spearing fish (10.124).

There are no pointed echoes and while the first simile features a single fisher- man harpooning, the fish in the second have been caught by several fishermen with the help of a net. The kinds of similarities between the similes and their contexts are also different: in Book 12, the primary point of comparison is the desperate struggle of fish and men (12.254: ἀσπαίροντα – 12.255: ἀσπαίροντες); in Book 22, image and context are aligned by “all” (22.383: πάντας – 22.386: πάντες), and by “being piled up” (22.387: κέχυνται – 22.389: κέχυντο).
Odysseus, who first has to witness his men being harpooned like fish, finally finds himself metaphorically in the role of a fisherman.

• Viewing as an act of aggression and control is exemplified most clearly in the revenge on the suitors, but, as we have just seen, it also surfaces in Odys- seus’ earlier adventures.
  *Notably the passing of the Sirens, foreground is related to other senses. But even in the encounters with Polyphemus and Scylla the notion of (not) seeing significantly enriches the presentation of Odysseus’ trials.

The dynamics between active and passive her-oism in the Odyssey explored by Cook are well shown through various points through the story being shown.

The Gaze beyond literature

Homer uses the link between gazing and desire to reinforce the drive of nostos. The experience of gazing at beautiful women fails to instill desire in Odysseus; instead, in a notable inversion generated by the formulaic diction for nostos, Odysseus desires to “see the day of his homecoming”. Ironically, when he actually returns, the visual imagery of nostos does not pan out. Other than the desiring eye, Homer capitalizes on the gaze as carrier of aggression and control. In some of the adventures of the apologoi, the presentation of the gaze underlines that Odysseus is the object of assaults. Then on Ithaca, he himself marshals a stare that expresses control and conveys aggression. In the stringing of the bow, crucial to his revenge, Odysseus\textquotesingle gaze turns into an actual assault. The engagement with vision thus highlights the shift from passive to active heroism in the course of the Odyssey’s plot.

The eye is an iconographic motif that is widespread. The black-figured eye-cups from Attica and Chalcis immediately spring to mind .
Whatever the function of depictions of eyes on archaic vases is,

Pictorial engagement with vision is further charged

Most incisively, Medusa embodies the assaultive gaze: whoever looks at her stare is transformed into stone. From the beginnings of Greek art, the gorgoneion is a fixture. While exacerbating the force of the gaze, the motif of Medusa\textquotesingle s head gains an ironic twist from the en face presentation. Unlike most other figures on vases, Medusa gazes at the beholder, but instead of the beholder, she herself is fixed, if not in stone, then in clay. Rainer Mack argued that the viewer thus re-enacts the victory of Perseus over Medusa: through the power of representation, the objectifying view of Medusa is turned upon herself. This inversion notwithstanding, the prominence of the gorgoneion in early vase-painting illustrates a vivid concern with gaze and aggression.
What is more, one of the episodes discussed in this essay seems to be the earliest Odyssean motif in our record of vase-painting. As we have seen, the blinding of Polyphemus demonstrates the power of the gaze via negationis. Only by depriving the Cyclops of his eye-sight can Odysseus evade his control.

Deviations from the Homeric account in the number of attackers and the object used for the blinding surely do not warrant the assumption that another story is depicted. At the same time, a detail in some of the paintings seems to corroborate a reference to the Odyssey. A vessel held by the giant indicates his inebriation, an element that is not found in any of the non-Homeric tales of blinded ogres.

In this context, a black-figured Pseudo-Chalcidian amphora dating from the last third of the 6th century BCE is worth mentioning. Here, we do not in fact see the eye of Polyphemus, occluded as it is by the stake that the Greeks ram into it.
The gaze has lately attracted much attention in the field of Classics.
Greco-Roman antiquity was, it appears, highly invested in vision. Most scholarly work has concentrated on the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. Their penetrat- ing reflections and subtle games with text and image richly reward our inter-pretative efforts. My reading of the narrative use of the gaze in the Odyssey and the brief consideration of early vase-painting suggest that the archaic age too was deeply concerned with vision. While Homer deploys the gaze of his charac-ters to endow individual scenes with depth and to reinforce the trajectory of his plot, painters cash in on the reflexive potential of the eye for visual art. The sophisticated treatment of vision in authors like Philostratus, Lucian and Achilles Statius is embedded in a long tradition that has its roots in Homer.