Odysseus and a Phoenician tale

The third text to be considered is the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions (Greek Anagnцseis)23, for it, too, is novel of sea travel, of family members lost and found, and of Phoenicia -- the genre has a convenient if ponderous generic brand name in German, Wiedererkennungsmдrchen. Authorship was falsely attributed to Clement I, Bishop of Rome (late 1st century CE; his Latin name means “calm, tranquil, gentle”); the work seems rather to be a document associated with the Ebionites or Nazoraeans. These were early Christians who accepted Jesus as a prophet or messiah but to varying degrees rejected the doctrines of the Pauline Christians whose version of the new faith was to become its self-proclaimed orthodoxy. For instance, avo doni “Live (long), sir!” (cf. Hebrew hai “live” and adoni “my lord, mister”); mu punim sucartim, “Do you remember Punic?” (cf. Hebrew zakharta, “you remembered”); and, poignantly, makom, literally “place”, for “city”-- the Jewish use of this word for Amsterdam became the slang name of the city in Dutch and is still used, even though some ninety percent of the Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis. As Hanno makes his entrance he prays (line 930) Yth alonim ualonuth sicorathi symakom syth, “Ye gods and goddesses that I call upon, of this place!” (Cf. Heb. elyon “high [god]” and qara'ti“I called”).

On the face of it that would seem unlikely, given the deeply rooted Greek disdain for “barbarian” tongues. The early Romans were in a somewhat different position: many were at least bilingual to start with in Etruscan and the various Italic languages, and any man aspiring to even a smattering of culture had to learn Greek, which in any case was spoken all over southern Italy. And one had to know some Punic to travel do business in the western Mediterranean.

Paul courted the gentiles and abandoned both the people of Israel and the laws of the Torah. One might go so far as to assert that Christian anti-Semitism was born with Paul's Epistles. The Ebionites and Nazoraeans did not break away, though, from the mother faith: they kept the Sabbath, the dietary laws of kashrut, circumcision, and other commandments. They also maintained steadfast attachment to the Land of Israel and reverence for Jerusalem as the place of the house of God on earth, the holy Temple. So it is reasonable to suppose that a story whose structure and themes are readily identifiable as belonging to the traditions of the Phoenicians, a people closely kin to the Jews, would have struck an instant resonance with them. Here is the story: Clement, the son of Faustus (a common Latin name meaning “fortunate”), has two brothers who are twins, Faustinus and Faustinianus (cf. the Menaechmi!). T. Hagg [22, p. 163], notes that the motif of the twins is entirely unexploited, which would suggest that the author “simply took over parts of a ready-made story” on which to erect the “superstructure” of his apologia for the Christian faith. I have argued that a propagandist of Manichaeism, probably around the same time (3rd-4th century CE), acted in much the same way-- he appropriated the epic motifs of the heroic quest and Drachenkampf-- battle with a dragon-- and then cunningly altered aspects of them in order attract, disorient, then teach a Syro-Armenian audience (see [23]). If one recalls the episode of initiation into the cult of Isis in the Metamorphoses of Apuleius of Madaura (2nd century CE) and considers Merkelbach's persuasive argument that Iamblichus worked Mithraic allegory into his own Oriental Hellenistic romance, the Babyloniaka, then the religious subtext seems more the rule than the exception in these popular works.

He lives in Rome with his parents and them, but one day the twins and their mother travel to Athens and mysteriously vanish. Clement later goes on a religious pilgrimage to see the Apostle Peter in the Land of Israel. They travel together to the isle of Arados (i.e., Arvad, off the Phoenician coast), where Peter meets a beggar woman. She tells him she left her home once with her twin sons to escape the lustful advances of her brother-in-law without bringing shame upon the family. She and her boys were parted in a shipwreck. Peter reunites Clement with his mother, and they proceed northwards along the coast, visiting the temple of Melqart at Tyre and eventually arriving at Antioch, where they meet Nicetas and Aquila -- who are in fact Faustinus and Faustinianus. The two had been captured after the shipwreck that parted them from their mother, and were adopted and named by a kindly Jewish Christian, Justin, in Caesarea on the coast of Israel. Peter mentions several times in the text the mendacious doctrines of the bad man -- Paul -- so the story is used as a frame to propagate Jewish Christian teaching, and Peter and Justin, the righteous men of the piece, are made to be the instrument of the recognitions and reunions of the sundered family, mother, twins, and all. The name Clement to the ear of a Semitic speaker might well be understood as a Latin synonym of Menachem; but in any case we already have a play on names -- twin boys and a dad all named “Lucky”, which indeed the lads turn out to be, as their names and identity are restored.

Conclusions, and a different future for Odysseus

To review the evidence: we have the Odyssey of Homer, ca. 750 BCE; two similar Greek plays, one of which is securely Phoenician in its characters and setting, the other likely to be so, ca. 350 BCE (later translated and reworked by Plautus); and a Jewish Christian novella clearly modeled on the same basic story of the two plays and set in the Land of Israel, Phoenicia, and up the Syrian coast, ca. 2nd century CE. The two plays and the novella would appear to flow from the same stream of Phoenician storytelling, in overall theme and in small details such as naming, but they are attested at a minimum of four centuries after Homer. Moreover, one might expect to encounter the common story line among peoples who sailed the Mediterranean, without the necessity of filiation; and the themes and elements of the story can be found as folk-lore motifs in many places and times. So one cannot offer a watertight case. This is a skiff whose caulking Odysseus would not approve. Fortunately, even as Melqart rides his sea horse over the waves, the hero of Ithaca, so like the Tyrian Heracles in his trials of strength, could mount the floating planks of a shattered vessel. But one's suggestion of a much older Phoenician tale behind the plays, the novel -- and the epic -- given the circumstances of culture and geography, is something more than a thought experiment if less than a concrete archaeological excavation. It is a suggestion that is not at all an unreasonable one. And if we give it a hearing, then perhaps our understanding of the complexity of Greek identity itself may be enhanced. Man is both a single being and a binary, forked creature; our thoughts perpetual thesis and antithesis. Thus, too, the foundational, sacral epic of Hellenic civilization itself. Half is aristocratic, martial, landed, rooted in the rules of honor and shame, and imperishable glory, Achaean, Indo-European, chanted by bards. And the other half is writ in the script of Cadmus (Semitic qdm, “eastern, ancient”), and is clever, mobile, and febrile, cosmopolitan and adaptable, curious and adventuring, Phoenician, Semitic. One adumbrates here not only the cross-cultural borrowings admirably explored by Michael Astour in his Hellenosemitica, but the very sense of what it is to be Greek. The truly admirable is always also inexplicable; yet perhaps it was this merging of two streams of eastern Mediterranean civilization that was in part responsible for that synthesis: the golden age of Athens, the city whose goddess was patroness of Odysseus and Telemachus, the city where the written recension of Homer was accomplished.

In his famous poem Ithake the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy writes, “When you set out on the journey to Ithaca, / Pray that the road be long,” full of adventures, new sights, discoveries, and luxurious, exotic things to enjoy. A less well-known verse published in the Mikra Kabaphika entitled Deutera Odysseia, “A Second Odyssey”, with epigraphs from the 26th canto of the Inferno of Dante and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's “Ulysses”, suggests (lines 27-29) ...kai ten eirenen kai anapausin tou oikou ebarynthe:/K' ephygen “„ and the peace and relaxation of home weighed upon him/ And he fled.” Dante has Ulysses and his men sail through the Pillars of Hercules (i.e., of Tyrian Melqart) and turn south to discover what lies in the regions of the Antipodes. Ulysses urges them on with a short, stirring oration that must be seen as the noble battle cry of the Renaissance at its moment of birth: Considerate la vostra semenza:/ fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza “Think of the seed from which you were born! / You were not made to live as animals, / but to pursue virtue and knowledge.” But as the crew heave in sight of the mount of Purgatory, three great waves engulf them, punishing them for their hubristic audacity. Three waves, trikymia, is Greek for a storm at sea; and here the number must correspond to the Trinity as well. Tennyson's poem presents Ulysses in the same way, urging on his men with eloquence of equal might and passion: “It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. / Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'/ We are not now that strength which in old days/ Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;/ One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/ To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Is there a man, young or old, with such a heart of stone as to be unmoved by these lines?

Yet all the prediction in the Odyssey actually says is that our hero is to travel again, to a place where men do not know oars, and that death will come to him from the sea in a normal way. There is no suggestion that he will become bored and want to leave Ithaca, and there is no sequel either that might recount the fate of Telemachus. Western humanistic tradition has projected the fate of Odysseus in a direction never explicitly defined, in a mighty and audacious feat of imagination25. If the basic narrative frame, the armature, of the Odyssey is the Phoenician tale that I have proposed, then the later life and end of our hero can accordingly be imagined in another way than Dante and his successors envisioned it. His later life, following our model, would have been a time of domestic happiness and tranquillity, not a daring voyage of heroic discovery (or, viewed more cynically, a deadbeat dad's road trip with his pals to relive his youth). It is a future with Penelope and the growing Telemachus to comfort (nhm\) him and be comforted by his gentle presence as he grew old, not one of arms and warriors.

Joseph Brodsky tried to imagine it. Either the worst has happened, and the journey has blurred the consciousness and identity of Odysseus, or it is years later, and he is old and about to go away. Мой Телемак, / Троянская война окончена. Кто победил -- не помню. / Должно быть, греки: столько мертвецов / вне дома бросить могут только греки..., / И все-таки ведущая домой / дорога оказалась слишком длинной, / как будто Посейдон, пока мы там / теряли время, растянул пространство. / Мне неизвестно, где я нахожусь, / что предо мной. Какой-то грязный остров, / кусты, постройки, хрюканье свиней, / заросший сад, какая-то царица, / трава да камни... Милый Телемак, / все острова похожи друг на друга, / когда так долго странствуешь, и мозг / уже сбивается, считая волны, / глаз, засоренный горизонтом, плачет, / и водяное мясо застит слух. / Не помню я, чем кончилась война, / и сколько лет тебе сейчас, не помню. // Расти большой, мой Телемак, расти. / Лишь боги знают, свидимся ли снова. / Ты и сейчас уже не тот младенец, / перед которым я сдержал быков. / Когда б не Паламед, мы жили вместе. / Но, может быть, и прав он: без меня / ты от страстей Эдиповых избавлен, и сны твои, мой Телемак, безгрешны. “My Telemachus: / The Trojan war is over. Who won -- don't remember. / It must have been the Greeks: only Greeks / could toss so many corpses out the door... / But the road leading home even so/ seems to have been too long, / As though Poseidon, while there / we wasted time, stretched space. / I don't know now where I am / Or what's in front of me. Some dirty isle, / bushes, houses, snorting pigs, / a garden overgrown, some queen, / and grass and stones. My dear Telemachus, / all islands are similar to each other, / when you've been wandering this long, and the brain / loses track counting waves; / the eye tears, clogged by the horizon, / and the flesh of the brine dulls the ear. / I don't recall how the war ended, / don't remember how old you are now. // Grow big, my Telemachus, grow. / Only the gods know if we'll meet again. / You aren't the baby anymore / Before whom I held the oxen back. / If not for Palamedes, we'd have lived together. / But perhaps he's right: without me / You're relieved of Oedipal passions, and your dreams, my Telemachus, are harmless.” I sat a few feet from Brodsky as he recited this newly completed poem at a reading in the international studies building of Columbia University on a Spring afternoon in 1972, shortly after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. A freshman all of eighteen then, one did not yet know to ask him whether he meant that all islands are alike, like all Tolstoy's happy families; and had one known more then, one might have asked him, also, whether he intended his evocation of stretched space and wasted time in “Odysseus to Telemachus” to resonate in wan irony with the final verses of Mandelstam's poem of 1917 in Tristia, “The stream of honey golden from the bottle flowed”: Помнишь, в греческом доме: любимая всеми жена, -- / Не Елена -- другая, -- как долго она вышивала? / Золотое руно, где же ты, золотое руно? / Всю дорогу шумели морские тяжелые волны, / И, покинув корабль, натрудивший в морях полотно, / Одиссей возвратился, пространством и временем полный. “Do you recall, in that Hellenic house, the wife beloved of all, / Not Helen, the other, how long she was weaving? / Golden fleece, where are you then, golden fleece? / All the way thundered the heavy sea breakers, / And abandoning his ship, working a canvas of the waves, / Odysseus returned, replete with time and space.” Brodsky was impatient with pedants in later years but he was still young then, and gentle with a boy: I approached him and asked whether he had read The Icon and the Axe; later, I gather, he and James Billington were friends. There is another Russian insight, cryptically brief but wonderfully pregnant with suggestion of the uncanny, into the character of Telemachus: in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Bend Sinister the hero, Professor Adam Krug, suggests that one read the “pruned” essence of the name TELMAH (i.e., Telemachus) backwards: the result is Hamlet.

So at some point towards the end, the aged Odysseus, king of a little island, set out on a distant journey on business: those Sidonians of ours were sailing through the Pillars of Melqart all the time, not to storm Purgatory but to trade in Cadiz and pick up cargo at the tin mines of southern Britain. And perhaps on just such a commercial voyage in the dangerous Atlantic he met his end. But for long years he had enjoyed a happy life at home reunited with his beloved wife and son. It was the life of peace that he worked so hard and prayed so long for, over ten long years of hard fighting under the walls of Troy and ten more of harder sailing -- peace that he deserved, and, with the aid of his friend, the grey-eyed goddess Athena, finally got. It's about family.

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