Two steps of decency

A couple of months ago, I sent A Conversation With … Emily Wilson PhD, Contemporary Interpreter of the Iliad, on Listening, Hearing, and Communicating to a couple of friends-for-fifty-years who were uniquely appropriate for the article: she read Classics and he read medicine in college and they got married.  A few weeks later they were in Ireland for a Class Reunion and we got to meet in Tramore. They gave me a copy of Emily Wilson's 2018 translation of The Odyssey . . . and some rather fancy Canadian tea.

I had a very expensive education with access to a pretty good library: top-heavy with Thackeray, light on thrillers. As a teenager, I read E.V. Rieu's 1946 translation of The Odyssey, which was the 1st volume published as a [eventually black-covered] Penguin Classic.Teenagers are frankly Scarlett about the niceties of translation: so long as the story rips along. I know the story in some detail but have no Greek. At about the same time I also read HDF Kitto's The Greeks in its Pelican edition. The Greeks was a key text for Robert Pirsig [Blobit 2017] in the writing of ZAMM Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Kitto: "Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send, and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all rounder; he has surpassing aretê.” That should resonate with Heinlein's Specialization is for insects analysis of what a piece of work is a man [Withnail]; and also with O'Grady & Pyke's I could read the sky. We are all, even the dullest of us, complex creatures: so it is invidious to label /summarize anyone as dull or narcissist or scientist. 

Wilson devotes the first 91/583 pages to setting out her stall with as much baggage as she is aware of. It is also helpful to have a classicist's explanatory insight on how Archaic Greek life and certainties differ from those of our own time. "Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass-murderer, and a war hero". Some of those descriptors [migrant homeless disabled] have a particular charge for our modern selves in contrast to the inhabitants of EV Rieu's immediate post-WWII world of 80 years ago.

As we see above Kitto is keen to lay out the nuance of aretê ἀρετή = virtue / excellence. Wilson spends as much effort on xenia ξενία = hospitality: the rights and obligations of hosts and guests. Perhaps in these troubled, othering, times we all need to reflect more on xenia than aretê ?? When somebody, anybody, rocked up to the door Greeks were obliged to give the stranger bath, bites, bevvies and bed.  An integral part of the process is pompḗ Πομπη = safe escort to the next destination. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus' son Telemachus goes off to glean some intel from his father's fellow warriors who have, like, actually returned home. Nestor provides the chap with a chariot and his own son Pisistratus as guide for the onward journey to Menelaus and Helen's palace in Mycenae. Hypnopompic same root.

They say that, when B&B's became A Thing in Ireland in the 1950s there was some [presumably bitch behind the back] outrage that people would charge money for accommodating wayfaring strangers [♪Riannon Giddens♪] who needed a bed for the night. In that world Two steps of decency required a host to see their departing guest to the door - to the gate - to the bus-stop . . .