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lotesseHokay, Loti thinks she has a semi-finalized version of the Term Paper of Doom, which is good because the bloody thing is due Monday. But thoughts are always welcome, so she's going to toss it out into the vast oceans of cyberspace.
One of the greatest powers of the poet is the ability to create an image of life within their work. The reader of an epic poem mentally lives through a life other than their own. The hero of an epic exposes their consciousness to the reader, who during the time of their reading shares in it, and shares too the experience of heroes' lives and choices. Because of this potential for secondary experience, epic poems tend to be concerned with the question of virtue. The ability conferred by epics to identify with a protagonist allows us to experience countless decisions and their aftermath without effecting our physical lives. Aristotle would say that the only way to find virtue is through trying different solutions to dilemmas, guessing and checking and coming ever nearer to the right choice. Epic poetry allows us to learn about the nature of virtue from others' guesses in a way that more expository prose does not. Our experience and the knowledge we gain from it is dependent on the identity and nature of a particular hero. In Homer's two great epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, the respective heroes are Achilles and Odysseus, and it is through them that the reader's experience is filtered. The question of their relative virtuousness or lack thereof, then, becomes crucial to understanding the knowledge gained by those that read their stories.
Achilles, greatest warrior of the Greeks, seems to be less noble in spirit than he is in body. The Iliad begins with an account of the rage of Achilles at being deprived of his war booty by Agamemnon. Agamemnon is forced by the gods to surrender Chryseis, a girl that he had taken captive, and is enraged by this, feeling that his honor is undermined. Why should he, high king of the Achaeans, have less than the others? He settles on Achilles' own prize, Briseis, as compensation for this loss. Achilles is enraged by this, and justly so. He withdraws from the battle, taking his Myrmidons with him, and sits on the beach beside his ships waiting for Agamemnon to make amends.
This behavior seems, on the one hand, completely justified. Achilles has been mistreated by his general, and he has a legitimate grievance. But it doesn't end there. For one thing, Achilles doesn't leave. He sits and sulks by his ships, waiting for an apology. His purpose becomes clearer when we examine is reaction to the embassy made to him by King Odysseus and aged Phoenix, who is his friend and counselor. They offer him ten times that which has been taken from him if he will re-join the battle, and he refuses. Why? Because he does not feel that his honor has been restored. He's waiting for Agamemnon to humble himself in person and beg for forgiveness. The fact that Achilles turns down the terms of the embassy indicates that his rage is not at the mere loss of possessions. His rage is a part of an on-going power-struggle between Achilles and Agamemnon. Among the Achaeans, Achilles is the greatest warrior, Agamemnon the high king and general. Which one holds the most power, possess the most honor? Agamemnon chooses to personally slight Achilles when he seizes Briseis. He specifically dishonors the man second in standing to himself. This must be deliberate. Achilles in reparation wants Agamemnon's dishonor. He wants Agamemnon to be forced to admit that Achilles is the more important of the two of them, to get down on his knees and beg for Achilles' return.
Throughout all this Achilles is driven entirely by his concern for his own personal honor. That was his purpose in coming to Troy; he has no material or moral stake in the outcome, merely glory to be won or lost. He's not there to save Helen, not to suppress her, not to bolster Agamemnon or to bring him down. Achilles went to the wars at Troy to win deathless glory and honor that would outlast his own short life. He went to win the immortality of the great warrior. By that reasoning, he's right in waiting for the most dramatic moment to return, and right in refusing to fight when dishonored. To do so would be against his own self-interest.
But is self-interest virtuous? Achilles is the greatest warrior the Achaeans have. Whether or not Achilles fights is the pivot on which the entire war rests. Does that mean, then, that he is responsible for all the Greek soldiers who died while he was sitting and sulking on the beach? Many of them, it is safe to guess, would not have died if he had fought. But it is also not his war. His soldiers do not fight in the battles, not until he sends them out with Patroclus. He is not responsible for the death of other men's troops. However, it is also true that he agreed to fight beside the Atreides. In sitting beside his ships he is refusing to honor that bond, and men are dying because of it. If responsibility is a part of virtue, this behavior is far from virtuous.
Achilles' direct actions can be interpreted as either virtuous or without virtue. All of his choices could be taken one way or the other-as eminently principled or indefensibly childish. However, the reasons behind his actions indicate that virtue has very little to do with his thoughts and does not drive his deeds. Achilles has no real emotional control, and when his temper flames up the fire of it does not die down quickly. It blinds him to all else, including forgiveness and compassion. This makes him an incredible warrior, passionate and swift and strong, but means that one must constantly be on guard to avoid turning that rage against oneself. In his anger he holds completely to an unbending principle. If he is wronged, the person at fault must suffer, and will be his enemy until he feels that his pride and anger have been properly propitiated. Achilles doesn't seem to even consider any other factors, any other responsibilities. He shows no sign of weighing the situation or looking at the circumstances. There's something almost childish about his inability to put aside his anger and his pride.
Of course, this apparent childishness could also be taken as a sign of moral virtue. A childish person is often so because of a refusal to see the world in shades of grey. Is this not an apt description of the stubborn endurance of Achilles' enmity even in the face of reparation and contrition from many? Perhaps we could consider his unwillingness to rejoin the Achaeans virtuous. He is, after all, refusing to settle and refusing to be bribed. Are these not noble things? He has chosen his battle, made his decision, and stuck with it. Perhaps Achilles will not be a friend to those who have slighted him, feeling that to do so would weaken the meaning of the true friendships that he has. Some could consider this virtuous, but friendship is necessarily inextricably tied to forgiveness. Without it there could be no friendship, because it is impossible to never slight someone. It is clear that Achilles' behavior is actually based on a failure to consider the moral complexity of human interactions. Black and white thinking is by nature overly simplistic, and it is not moral to live by tenants that bear no resemblance to real life. The universe does not consist of extremes and easy decisions. Certainly interactions with other people don't. Closing one's eyes to this fact is an act of denial of responsibility, and moral choices based in denial are not virtuous, just blind and wishful. Even beyond this, the viewpoint of Achilles' unbending wrath as an act of moral protest would be much more credible if Achilles seemed to pay the slightest amount of attention to the virtuousness of his choices and actions. He does not do so. He's entirely driven by passion, ruled by pride. His honor is the only thing he desires, his one thought.
Achilles does not compromise himself. He will not yield to Agamemnon's attempts to buy him back with riches and spoils of war, but holds out for the honor that he feels he has been deprived of. Achilles tries to force Agamemnon into sacrificing his pride in order to win the war, and wants nothing to do with the arguments of profit and virtue put forth by Odysseus and Phoenix, respectively. When he at last rejoins the Achaean camp it is because his wrath is redirected from Agamemnon to Hector, not because he has forgiven anyone or grown past his anger. Still he is driven solely by self-interest and by concern for honor. Patroclus he counts as a part of himself out of the love that he bears for him, and Patroclus is struck down while disguised in Achilles' own armor. After Patroclus' death Achilles return to battle not out of desire for justice so much as revenge. His desire is to hurt those that have wronged him. Achilles will not compromise either his actions or his all-precious honor, no matter what the cost.
Odysseus, on the other hand, is brilliant but essentially dishonest. His part in the embassy to Achilles is vital, because he is the most persuasive of the Achaeans. His trickery with the wooden horse is, in the end, what wins the war. And his journey home to Ithaca is littered with tricks of the eye and of the tongue-his triumphs over Polyphemus and Circe, his multiple invented back-stories and disguises-which overcome problems obliquely and slyly. He trusts no one, and is not easy to trust. For Odysseus, the truth bends according to his needs, and is very flexible. Odysseus seems to be lacking a moral compass. His epithets name him as polymorphous, many-shaped. Two-faced. Odysseus is the liar, the twister, the shape-shifter, the trickster. He is nothing if not practical. To his mind, it seems, the end justifies the means. He uses rhetoric and images and often outright lies to get what he wants, and that smacks of sophistry, intellectually and morally dishonest.
Odysseus' desire in the second epic isn't honor, but simply to make it home. Sneaking and tale-telling seem to be the only things that can get him there. Because of the grudge that Poseidon bears against him he has to hide himself. Poseidon is angry because Odysseus blinded Polyphemus the Cyclops, who was systematically eating Odysseus's crew. In the adventure of the Cyclops Odysseus's tricks are merciful, and allow him to escape with the rest of his men without resorting to killing Polyphemus. Achilles in the same situation would have killed the creature out of rage, even had it not been necessary for safe escape. And again, only Odysseus's cleverness can save his men from Circe's porcine transformations. The entire thing becomes cyclical, with Odysseus needing more tricks to get him out of the corners that his previous tricks have pushed him into. Without his willingness to bend the truth they would have been lost many times over. His tales are, in this and in the aforementioned cases, not serving to cozen but merely to conceal, to allow him to do what he needs to without having to kill people or to allow his men to be slain. His adoption of disguise is prudent and thoughtful. He is successful in reclaiming his ancestral home because of his willingness to look before he leaps and his focus on other things besides his virtue and his honor.
But often Odysseus's lies don't get him any further with people than the truth would, serving only to conceal his whereabouts from the angry god. Would the Phaeacians have denied him aid if he had owned up to being a war hero? They don't react negatively when he is at last revealed to them, or withdraw any of their help or hospitality. Odysseus's lies are not always easy to see in a favorable light. Often the end that he's counting on to justify his means does not seem all that important. He is hiding from Poseidon, and that requires a certain amount of disguise, but he trusts no one and will not reveal himself to even the most certain allies. Odysseus uses his tricks pre-emptively, not waiting to see if he needs them, and not thinking of anyone that might be harmed by them. He leads Nausicaa on to believe him more interested in her than he truly is, taking advantage of her lonely innocence, and allows her family to believe that he intends to make good on these imaginary feelings. Can it be considered virtuous to go about wantonly misleading young girls? Would his concealment from Poseidon really be jeopardized if he told the truth about his marital status, at least?
This distrust, which in his position is a bit extreme but certainly understandable, is not merely limited to the duration of his journey, and beyond those confines it begins to seem downright pathological. Even when he has found his way home, defeated the suitors who were impinging on what was his, and been reunited with his wife, still he goes to his old father and starts spinning another tale, creating another mask. He wished to know if Laertes his father would still recognize him after all the years of his battling and wandering. When he sees his father bent with work and poverty he is for a moment in doubt. He considers-should he go throw his arms about his father and reveal himself as his son, home again and alive? But he thinks it best to test him. Why? This course of action is completely illogical. If his father were to fail to recognize him that would still cast no doubt on his loyalty and love for his son. There is nothing which could be gained from this trial. Odysseus has nothing to fear, save that and old man will for a moment not know him by sight alone. There is no reason for any further deception, save that Odysseus tests everyone. He doesn't reveal himself to Penelope until he has watched her for a long time, sounded her out. Why not speed their joyous reunion? Surely she is clever enough to not give him away to the suitors. After all, she can trick him. He is distrustful and suspicious, and chooses to play games when it is not entirely necessary for him to do so. He puts his distrust before his loved ones' suffering. Penelope has spent countless nights weeping his loss, Telemachus has journeyed far to discover his fate, and Laertes has fallen into age and poverty in his absence. Odysseus could choose to alleviate their grief, and does not. How much sorrow does his suspicion cause? It lies in his hands to immediately allay his wife and son's uncertainty and loss, and he waits for a long time before he acts to accomplish those things. Is this not just as selfish as Achilles' fits of the sulks? Telemachus is eventually let in on the secret, and perhaps we could take Penelope's trick with her misleading remarks on the bedstead to be indicative of her willingness to play such games of tricks and tests. But for the sufferings of his father Odysseus still seems culpable. He lies when there is absolutely no reason for him to do so, when he has nothing left to lose or to hide. How are we to read this, save to say that his tale-telling has become almost compulsive? As if conditioned by long years of lying he defaults to it without thought or reason, not trusting even those who are closest to him until he is satisfied as to the proof of their continued love. He is cruelly suspicious of those around him, and allows that suspicion to rule his actions instead of being motivated by love for them.
Neither of these heroes are perfect images of virtue, but both fail to attain it in completely different ways. They are not purely virtuous, having respectively too much and too little of its qualities, but neither are they completely without correctness. They both possess positive traits, but have not found equilibrium between too much and not enough. They remain too extreme. They are diametrically opposed to one another in the way that they handle the problems that they face during the course of the war and its aftermath. War is not an easy situation through which to find a virtuous path. Both stray, but they wander in opposite directions. They are like mirror images of one another. Odysseus is clever and Achilles is strong. Achilles chooses to live hard, die young, and leave a pretty (or honorable) corpse, while Odysseus years for a long but less martially glorious life with his wife and son in distant, rural Ithaca. Odysseus's morals are too grey, and he is too cavalier with what is good and not-good, too focused on the outcome and not on the things that are done to get there. Achilles is rigidly moral to the point of being horribly impractical, refuses to admit that greyness even exists, and often completely ignores the end to focus solely on the means. Neither of these two approaches is strictly virtuous.
For all their differences, however, Achilles and Odysseus are Homer's heroes, and are thus paired in context of his narratives. So what is it that Homer is saying with the two of them? Why are they, and not others, his chosen heroes? Where is it that he stands in regard to their respective virtue? To bring in a definition, Aristotle posits in The Nicomachean Ethics that virtue is a state of balance between two extremes. Virtue is found by finding the point of equilibrium. All sins come in pairs, the extremely overabundant and the extremely deficient, and it's up to every individual person to find the mean between them. Are Achilles and Odysseus not such a pair of extremes, the excessive and the deficient?
As readers of the two poems, we see first Achilles and then Odysseus with great clarity. We learn what choices they made and can see the reasons behind their actions. We, through reading about their lives, can gain a shadow of their experiences. And the only way to find a virtuous equilibrium is to experience and understand first excess and then deficiency. By choosing heroes who have such drastically extreme and opposed relations to virtue, Homer is allowing us to understand the quandaries that every person has to face and solve-what is the right choice? What is it that I have to do? Where does the path to virtue begin, and where will it lead me? When we are angered by Achilles' childishness or inflexibility, we are very aware of what virtue is not. And when we stand aghast at Odysseus' choice to lie instead of tell the truth when either would have served, we are aware of the other pole of what virtue is not. But through understanding what virtue is not, we also come to a better understanding of what virtue is. That's the only way to come to a definition of something as complex and individual as virtue-through circling in on what it actually is through eliminating all those things that it is not. After reading both epics, we have a greater part of the necessary experience to find the mean between the two extremes represented by the heroes. We have, in a sense, lived both their lives, been both their selves. We can learn from their mistakes and from their virtues, and more easily find the point of balance in-between.
Thus these two heroes serve, when taken together, to explicate some of the problems surrounding virtue. Our reactions to their differing behaviors leads us to question what the right course of action would be. If neither that way nor this is the right one, what more do we know about what the right path must be like? The heroic pairing of Achilles and Odysseus naturally brings us to these questions. Both Odysseus and Achilles are in complex situations, and there are times when no choice seems right. Homer shows us two possible choices and lets us go from there. He offers us no definite answers, being aware that the only way to understand virtue is through experience and experiment. Rather, he leads us towards knowledge of what the correct questions are, which is far more valuable, and gives us second-hand experience of two men's very polarized decisions and their consequences. Our reactions to Odysseus and Achilles, whether positive or negative, force us to consider what the right action given their circumstances actually is. If Achilles is not virtuous in his deeds, what would the correct course be? If neither Odysseus nor Achilles are perfectly virtuous, what would perfect virtue actually be like? Between them is a space where the truth is important but other things matter as well, where achieving one's purpose is terribly important but does not justify immorality, where other people's fates matter but where it isn't always virtuous to do everything possible to help them. The balance is shaky and variable, but can be found. The path between them essentially boils down to flexibility, responsibility, conscience, and awareness.
Achilles, dead in Hades, says to Odysseus that he wishes he could do the whole thing over, and that if he knew then what he knows now he would have chosen a less glorious life far away from the wars of Troy. He no longer values the honor that drove all of his deeds in life. But Odysseus makes it back to his home and family, and his wandering bring him to his stated goal, which he still finds good when he gets there. There is no realization of falsely ascribed value in store for him. His ending is not perfectly happy, as he doesn't get to stay in Ithaca, though, but is set to wandering again by Athena his goddess. But both heroes achieve their stated goals-Odysseus gets home, if not for long, and Achilles' name will be forever remembered in great glory. Still, Achilles is regretful. He knows that he took the wrong path. Odysseus does at least get a reprieve. And certainly, Odysseus's future seems a lot brighter than Achilles'. For one thing, he's still alive. This gives us an insight into the correct path. It's wrong to cling too tightly to thoughtless principle regardless of extenuating circumstances, wrong to focus only on one's own good without heed for that of others. It's wrong to be false, to put more stock in masks than in others' care. But it is better in the end to love home, family, and duty than honor and glory and the clash of battle.
One of the greatest powers of the poet is the ability to create an image of life within their work. The reader of an epic poem mentally lives through a life other than their own. The hero of an epic exposes their consciousness to the reader, who during the time of their reading shares in it, and shares too the experience of heroes' lives and choices. Because of this potential for secondary experience, epic poems tend to be concerned with the question of virtue. The ability conferred by epics to identify with a protagonist allows us to experience countless decisions and their aftermath without effecting our physical lives. Aristotle would say that the only way to find virtue is through trying different solutions to dilemmas, guessing and checking and coming ever nearer to the right choice. Epic poetry allows us to learn about the nature of virtue from others' guesses in a way that more expository prose does not. Our experience and the knowledge we gain from it is dependent on the identity and nature of a particular hero. In Homer's two great epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, the respective heroes are Achilles and Odysseus, and it is through them that the reader's experience is filtered. The question of their relative virtuousness or lack thereof, then, becomes crucial to understanding the knowledge gained by those that read their stories.
Achilles, greatest warrior of the Greeks, seems to be less noble in spirit than he is in body. The Iliad begins with an account of the rage of Achilles at being deprived of his war booty by Agamemnon. Agamemnon is forced by the gods to surrender Chryseis, a girl that he had taken captive, and is enraged by this, feeling that his honor is undermined. Why should he, high king of the Achaeans, have less than the others? He settles on Achilles' own prize, Briseis, as compensation for this loss. Achilles is enraged by this, and justly so. He withdraws from the battle, taking his Myrmidons with him, and sits on the beach beside his ships waiting for Agamemnon to make amends.
This behavior seems, on the one hand, completely justified. Achilles has been mistreated by his general, and he has a legitimate grievance. But it doesn't end there. For one thing, Achilles doesn't leave. He sits and sulks by his ships, waiting for an apology. His purpose becomes clearer when we examine is reaction to the embassy made to him by King Odysseus and aged Phoenix, who is his friend and counselor. They offer him ten times that which has been taken from him if he will re-join the battle, and he refuses. Why? Because he does not feel that his honor has been restored. He's waiting for Agamemnon to humble himself in person and beg for forgiveness. The fact that Achilles turns down the terms of the embassy indicates that his rage is not at the mere loss of possessions. His rage is a part of an on-going power-struggle between Achilles and Agamemnon. Among the Achaeans, Achilles is the greatest warrior, Agamemnon the high king and general. Which one holds the most power, possess the most honor? Agamemnon chooses to personally slight Achilles when he seizes Briseis. He specifically dishonors the man second in standing to himself. This must be deliberate. Achilles in reparation wants Agamemnon's dishonor. He wants Agamemnon to be forced to admit that Achilles is the more important of the two of them, to get down on his knees and beg for Achilles' return.
Throughout all this Achilles is driven entirely by his concern for his own personal honor. That was his purpose in coming to Troy; he has no material or moral stake in the outcome, merely glory to be won or lost. He's not there to save Helen, not to suppress her, not to bolster Agamemnon or to bring him down. Achilles went to the wars at Troy to win deathless glory and honor that would outlast his own short life. He went to win the immortality of the great warrior. By that reasoning, he's right in waiting for the most dramatic moment to return, and right in refusing to fight when dishonored. To do so would be against his own self-interest.
But is self-interest virtuous? Achilles is the greatest warrior the Achaeans have. Whether or not Achilles fights is the pivot on which the entire war rests. Does that mean, then, that he is responsible for all the Greek soldiers who died while he was sitting and sulking on the beach? Many of them, it is safe to guess, would not have died if he had fought. But it is also not his war. His soldiers do not fight in the battles, not until he sends them out with Patroclus. He is not responsible for the death of other men's troops. However, it is also true that he agreed to fight beside the Atreides. In sitting beside his ships he is refusing to honor that bond, and men are dying because of it. If responsibility is a part of virtue, this behavior is far from virtuous.
Achilles' direct actions can be interpreted as either virtuous or without virtue. All of his choices could be taken one way or the other-as eminently principled or indefensibly childish. However, the reasons behind his actions indicate that virtue has very little to do with his thoughts and does not drive his deeds. Achilles has no real emotional control, and when his temper flames up the fire of it does not die down quickly. It blinds him to all else, including forgiveness and compassion. This makes him an incredible warrior, passionate and swift and strong, but means that one must constantly be on guard to avoid turning that rage against oneself. In his anger he holds completely to an unbending principle. If he is wronged, the person at fault must suffer, and will be his enemy until he feels that his pride and anger have been properly propitiated. Achilles doesn't seem to even consider any other factors, any other responsibilities. He shows no sign of weighing the situation or looking at the circumstances. There's something almost childish about his inability to put aside his anger and his pride.
Of course, this apparent childishness could also be taken as a sign of moral virtue. A childish person is often so because of a refusal to see the world in shades of grey. Is this not an apt description of the stubborn endurance of Achilles' enmity even in the face of reparation and contrition from many? Perhaps we could consider his unwillingness to rejoin the Achaeans virtuous. He is, after all, refusing to settle and refusing to be bribed. Are these not noble things? He has chosen his battle, made his decision, and stuck with it. Perhaps Achilles will not be a friend to those who have slighted him, feeling that to do so would weaken the meaning of the true friendships that he has. Some could consider this virtuous, but friendship is necessarily inextricably tied to forgiveness. Without it there could be no friendship, because it is impossible to never slight someone. It is clear that Achilles' behavior is actually based on a failure to consider the moral complexity of human interactions. Black and white thinking is by nature overly simplistic, and it is not moral to live by tenants that bear no resemblance to real life. The universe does not consist of extremes and easy decisions. Certainly interactions with other people don't. Closing one's eyes to this fact is an act of denial of responsibility, and moral choices based in denial are not virtuous, just blind and wishful. Even beyond this, the viewpoint of Achilles' unbending wrath as an act of moral protest would be much more credible if Achilles seemed to pay the slightest amount of attention to the virtuousness of his choices and actions. He does not do so. He's entirely driven by passion, ruled by pride. His honor is the only thing he desires, his one thought.
Achilles does not compromise himself. He will not yield to Agamemnon's attempts to buy him back with riches and spoils of war, but holds out for the honor that he feels he has been deprived of. Achilles tries to force Agamemnon into sacrificing his pride in order to win the war, and wants nothing to do with the arguments of profit and virtue put forth by Odysseus and Phoenix, respectively. When he at last rejoins the Achaean camp it is because his wrath is redirected from Agamemnon to Hector, not because he has forgiven anyone or grown past his anger. Still he is driven solely by self-interest and by concern for honor. Patroclus he counts as a part of himself out of the love that he bears for him, and Patroclus is struck down while disguised in Achilles' own armor. After Patroclus' death Achilles return to battle not out of desire for justice so much as revenge. His desire is to hurt those that have wronged him. Achilles will not compromise either his actions or his all-precious honor, no matter what the cost.
Odysseus, on the other hand, is brilliant but essentially dishonest. His part in the embassy to Achilles is vital, because he is the most persuasive of the Achaeans. His trickery with the wooden horse is, in the end, what wins the war. And his journey home to Ithaca is littered with tricks of the eye and of the tongue-his triumphs over Polyphemus and Circe, his multiple invented back-stories and disguises-which overcome problems obliquely and slyly. He trusts no one, and is not easy to trust. For Odysseus, the truth bends according to his needs, and is very flexible. Odysseus seems to be lacking a moral compass. His epithets name him as polymorphous, many-shaped. Two-faced. Odysseus is the liar, the twister, the shape-shifter, the trickster. He is nothing if not practical. To his mind, it seems, the end justifies the means. He uses rhetoric and images and often outright lies to get what he wants, and that smacks of sophistry, intellectually and morally dishonest.
Odysseus' desire in the second epic isn't honor, but simply to make it home. Sneaking and tale-telling seem to be the only things that can get him there. Because of the grudge that Poseidon bears against him he has to hide himself. Poseidon is angry because Odysseus blinded Polyphemus the Cyclops, who was systematically eating Odysseus's crew. In the adventure of the Cyclops Odysseus's tricks are merciful, and allow him to escape with the rest of his men without resorting to killing Polyphemus. Achilles in the same situation would have killed the creature out of rage, even had it not been necessary for safe escape. And again, only Odysseus's cleverness can save his men from Circe's porcine transformations. The entire thing becomes cyclical, with Odysseus needing more tricks to get him out of the corners that his previous tricks have pushed him into. Without his willingness to bend the truth they would have been lost many times over. His tales are, in this and in the aforementioned cases, not serving to cozen but merely to conceal, to allow him to do what he needs to without having to kill people or to allow his men to be slain. His adoption of disguise is prudent and thoughtful. He is successful in reclaiming his ancestral home because of his willingness to look before he leaps and his focus on other things besides his virtue and his honor.
But often Odysseus's lies don't get him any further with people than the truth would, serving only to conceal his whereabouts from the angry god. Would the Phaeacians have denied him aid if he had owned up to being a war hero? They don't react negatively when he is at last revealed to them, or withdraw any of their help or hospitality. Odysseus's lies are not always easy to see in a favorable light. Often the end that he's counting on to justify his means does not seem all that important. He is hiding from Poseidon, and that requires a certain amount of disguise, but he trusts no one and will not reveal himself to even the most certain allies. Odysseus uses his tricks pre-emptively, not waiting to see if he needs them, and not thinking of anyone that might be harmed by them. He leads Nausicaa on to believe him more interested in her than he truly is, taking advantage of her lonely innocence, and allows her family to believe that he intends to make good on these imaginary feelings. Can it be considered virtuous to go about wantonly misleading young girls? Would his concealment from Poseidon really be jeopardized if he told the truth about his marital status, at least?
This distrust, which in his position is a bit extreme but certainly understandable, is not merely limited to the duration of his journey, and beyond those confines it begins to seem downright pathological. Even when he has found his way home, defeated the suitors who were impinging on what was his, and been reunited with his wife, still he goes to his old father and starts spinning another tale, creating another mask. He wished to know if Laertes his father would still recognize him after all the years of his battling and wandering. When he sees his father bent with work and poverty he is for a moment in doubt. He considers-should he go throw his arms about his father and reveal himself as his son, home again and alive? But he thinks it best to test him. Why? This course of action is completely illogical. If his father were to fail to recognize him that would still cast no doubt on his loyalty and love for his son. There is nothing which could be gained from this trial. Odysseus has nothing to fear, save that and old man will for a moment not know him by sight alone. There is no reason for any further deception, save that Odysseus tests everyone. He doesn't reveal himself to Penelope until he has watched her for a long time, sounded her out. Why not speed their joyous reunion? Surely she is clever enough to not give him away to the suitors. After all, she can trick him. He is distrustful and suspicious, and chooses to play games when it is not entirely necessary for him to do so. He puts his distrust before his loved ones' suffering. Penelope has spent countless nights weeping his loss, Telemachus has journeyed far to discover his fate, and Laertes has fallen into age and poverty in his absence. Odysseus could choose to alleviate their grief, and does not. How much sorrow does his suspicion cause? It lies in his hands to immediately allay his wife and son's uncertainty and loss, and he waits for a long time before he acts to accomplish those things. Is this not just as selfish as Achilles' fits of the sulks? Telemachus is eventually let in on the secret, and perhaps we could take Penelope's trick with her misleading remarks on the bedstead to be indicative of her willingness to play such games of tricks and tests. But for the sufferings of his father Odysseus still seems culpable. He lies when there is absolutely no reason for him to do so, when he has nothing left to lose or to hide. How are we to read this, save to say that his tale-telling has become almost compulsive? As if conditioned by long years of lying he defaults to it without thought or reason, not trusting even those who are closest to him until he is satisfied as to the proof of their continued love. He is cruelly suspicious of those around him, and allows that suspicion to rule his actions instead of being motivated by love for them.
Neither of these heroes are perfect images of virtue, but both fail to attain it in completely different ways. They are not purely virtuous, having respectively too much and too little of its qualities, but neither are they completely without correctness. They both possess positive traits, but have not found equilibrium between too much and not enough. They remain too extreme. They are diametrically opposed to one another in the way that they handle the problems that they face during the course of the war and its aftermath. War is not an easy situation through which to find a virtuous path. Both stray, but they wander in opposite directions. They are like mirror images of one another. Odysseus is clever and Achilles is strong. Achilles chooses to live hard, die young, and leave a pretty (or honorable) corpse, while Odysseus years for a long but less martially glorious life with his wife and son in distant, rural Ithaca. Odysseus's morals are too grey, and he is too cavalier with what is good and not-good, too focused on the outcome and not on the things that are done to get there. Achilles is rigidly moral to the point of being horribly impractical, refuses to admit that greyness even exists, and often completely ignores the end to focus solely on the means. Neither of these two approaches is strictly virtuous.
For all their differences, however, Achilles and Odysseus are Homer's heroes, and are thus paired in context of his narratives. So what is it that Homer is saying with the two of them? Why are they, and not others, his chosen heroes? Where is it that he stands in regard to their respective virtue? To bring in a definition, Aristotle posits in The Nicomachean Ethics that virtue is a state of balance between two extremes. Virtue is found by finding the point of equilibrium. All sins come in pairs, the extremely overabundant and the extremely deficient, and it's up to every individual person to find the mean between them. Are Achilles and Odysseus not such a pair of extremes, the excessive and the deficient?
As readers of the two poems, we see first Achilles and then Odysseus with great clarity. We learn what choices they made and can see the reasons behind their actions. We, through reading about their lives, can gain a shadow of their experiences. And the only way to find a virtuous equilibrium is to experience and understand first excess and then deficiency. By choosing heroes who have such drastically extreme and opposed relations to virtue, Homer is allowing us to understand the quandaries that every person has to face and solve-what is the right choice? What is it that I have to do? Where does the path to virtue begin, and where will it lead me? When we are angered by Achilles' childishness or inflexibility, we are very aware of what virtue is not. And when we stand aghast at Odysseus' choice to lie instead of tell the truth when either would have served, we are aware of the other pole of what virtue is not. But through understanding what virtue is not, we also come to a better understanding of what virtue is. That's the only way to come to a definition of something as complex and individual as virtue-through circling in on what it actually is through eliminating all those things that it is not. After reading both epics, we have a greater part of the necessary experience to find the mean between the two extremes represented by the heroes. We have, in a sense, lived both their lives, been both their selves. We can learn from their mistakes and from their virtues, and more easily find the point of balance in-between.
Thus these two heroes serve, when taken together, to explicate some of the problems surrounding virtue. Our reactions to their differing behaviors leads us to question what the right course of action would be. If neither that way nor this is the right one, what more do we know about what the right path must be like? The heroic pairing of Achilles and Odysseus naturally brings us to these questions. Both Odysseus and Achilles are in complex situations, and there are times when no choice seems right. Homer shows us two possible choices and lets us go from there. He offers us no definite answers, being aware that the only way to understand virtue is through experience and experiment. Rather, he leads us towards knowledge of what the correct questions are, which is far more valuable, and gives us second-hand experience of two men's very polarized decisions and their consequences. Our reactions to Odysseus and Achilles, whether positive or negative, force us to consider what the right action given their circumstances actually is. If Achilles is not virtuous in his deeds, what would the correct course be? If neither Odysseus nor Achilles are perfectly virtuous, what would perfect virtue actually be like? Between them is a space where the truth is important but other things matter as well, where achieving one's purpose is terribly important but does not justify immorality, where other people's fates matter but where it isn't always virtuous to do everything possible to help them. The balance is shaky and variable, but can be found. The path between them essentially boils down to flexibility, responsibility, conscience, and awareness.
Achilles, dead in Hades, says to Odysseus that he wishes he could do the whole thing over, and that if he knew then what he knows now he would have chosen a less glorious life far away from the wars of Troy. He no longer values the honor that drove all of his deeds in life. But Odysseus makes it back to his home and family, and his wandering bring him to his stated goal, which he still finds good when he gets there. There is no realization of falsely ascribed value in store for him. His ending is not perfectly happy, as he doesn't get to stay in Ithaca, though, but is set to wandering again by Athena his goddess. But both heroes achieve their stated goals-Odysseus gets home, if not for long, and Achilles' name will be forever remembered in great glory. Still, Achilles is regretful. He knows that he took the wrong path. Odysseus does at least get a reprieve. And certainly, Odysseus's future seems a lot brighter than Achilles'. For one thing, he's still alive. This gives us an insight into the correct path. It's wrong to cling too tightly to thoughtless principle regardless of extenuating circumstances, wrong to focus only on one's own good without heed for that of others. It's wrong to be false, to put more stock in masks than in others' care. But it is better in the end to love home, family, and duty than honor and glory and the clash of battle.