"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."
~ Achilles
Hello fellow-traveller,
Welcome to the Odyssey read-along. Here’s the schedule for you to navigate through this story.
This post, and the ones that will follow, are divided into sections so you can easily follow the text and re-read passages. It does not matter what translation you use — the lines should be the same, although translated differently.
This is the sixth post in the series, if you’re curious about what happened before, please feel free to read the previous weeks’ instalments.
In this journey, I am both an Odysseus and a Telemachus. I might get lost and get stuck on Calypso’s island, yet at the same time, like Telemachus, I need to awaken to act. These are the notes of a fellow-reader, not a scholar.
I’ve just released an interview with Emily Katz Anhalt, a Professor of Classics, discussing how we should read The Odyssey. You can listen to it here:
I hope you will enjoy it.
This week’s journey (Summary) 🌊 :
Book 11 Odysseus sails to the edge of Ocean and digs a trench where the dead come to drink blood — His dead companion Elpenor appears first, unburied, begging for rites — Tiresias drinks and prophesies: Odysseus will return, but alone and in misery; the cattle of the Sun must not be touched — Odysseus speaks with the shade of his mother Anticleia, who died in grief waiting for him, and cannot hold her — He sees the great heroines and heroes of the past — Achilles tells him that a dead slave on earth would outrank a king among the dead — The dead surge forward in thousands; Odysseus flees to the ship in terror
Book 12 Circe charts the course home — Odysseus alone hears the Sirens and survives, bound to the mast while the crew rows with wax-stopped ears — He steers past Scylla and Charybdis: Scylla takes six men; Odysseus watches helplessly — The crew lands on the island of the Sun against his warnings and slaughters the sacred cattle while he sleeps — Zeus destroys the ship with a thunderbolt; all die — Odysseus clings to wreckage through Charybdis and drifts nine days to Calypso’s island, where the tale began
Proofread by Lisa Statler
BOOK ELEVEN
I. Birth Through Mortality
There is a famous proverb which says that one has two lives, and the second one begins when one realises he has only one. It seems to be a part of an essential ancient wisdom that one must die to be able to live fully.
Our mortality reveals what is worth living our lives for.
In the Book XI, Odysseus crosses the Ocean River and at the edge of the world he digs a trench and pours a precise sequence of libations: milk and honey, mellow wine, water, and finally a sprinkling of glistening barley.
Scholars highlight that these chthonic offerings differ radically from standard Olympian sacrifice. An Olympian sacrifice is fundamentally a communal meal designed to feed the living, with only the smoke and thighbones offered to the gods. In contrast, Odysseus’s ritual is a kind of "anti-sacrifice" intended to provide physical sustenance directly to the dead.