The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,13

green sea. As they sailed away the camp’s cold fire pits and abandoned barricades looked as forlorn as Troy’s black husk.

Odysseus’s homeward trip, first joyful, soon became a misery. Fate seemed to have a grudge against him and his Ithacans, sending them in quick succession the cannibal cyclops, the lotus eaters, the sirens, Circe, and inexorable Scylla. A year stripped Odysseus of all his men (gone down to death) and all his ships (torn to flinders or sunk in the sea) and found him clinging to a crude raft as he drifted alone through a bad sea.

Odysseus woke as the water closed over him and thrashed his way to the surface, crying out, though there was no one to hear him. The fog was thick—there was nothing to see but whitecaps and sticks from his raft that sank as he snatched at them. There was no better strategy than striking out hard for land—for all he knew, he would find it. There was not much hope, but it was better than waiting to drown, so he started swimming. He regretted that there were no landmarks and he was, possibly, swimming in circles. His shoulders burned and then his lungs and he was nearly spent when, to his amazement, he drove his hand into something hard that resonated under the blow. He looked up and saw faces peering down at him from a grey ship with a long eye on its prow.

A familiar voice said, “I expected better from you, if only a better escape.” Strong hands pulled him up and dropped him on deck. He lay there thinking that whatever circumstance he had stumbled into, it was bliss to draw breath, feel the ship moving under him and not think of drowning. His eyes were blurry with salt but, rubbing them, he found himself looking at Agamemnon’s golden greaves. “Did you think you could desert so easily, after I went to so much trouble to recruit you?* Can this be Odysseus of labyrinthine mind?”

The sailors, embarrassed on his behalf, avoided looking at Odysseus. He put on dry clothes and realized they had been brought by Alkanor, who had died with a Trojan arrow in his heart the day of Hector’s funeral. The fog was gone, the sun hung in the sky, his heart beat. There was nothing to say.

Agamemnon had the unresisting Odysseus locked belowdecks. After sleeping, he searched the hold and, finding nothing, broke into Agamemnon’s cabin (its lock was contemptible). Among weapons, wine cups and trophies of war he found a book called the Iliad. It was the tale of his war and the gist was right but the details were often wrong. In the introduction he read:

It is not widely understood that the epics attributed to Homer were in fact written by the gods before the Trojan war—these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history. In fact, there have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic, each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.

The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes, through authorial and managerial oversights, become available to their protagonists. Surprisingly, this has had no impact on the action or the outcome. Agamemnon is too obstinate to change his mind and anyway never believes what he reads. Achilles flips through the Iliad and shrugs. Priam makes sacrifices to the nonplussed gods and anyway thinks that he is above prophecy (recall Cassandra). Perhaps there were once characters who read the book with dawning apprehension and fled that very hour, finding refuge in the hills, never again to meddle in the affairs of cities and gods, but if ever there were they are long gone now.

In time they came to Troy and there was Achilles, bright as gold and full of life, leaping from his ship’s prow, the first to set foot on Asian soil. The Ithacans arrived and gathered around Odysseus, asking him where he had gone and why he had left his own ship and taken a berth with Agamemnon. He had liked most and mourned all. They asked him what moved him so—it had been just two weeks since they last had seen him. Odysseus said he had seen by signs and portents that it would be a long war.

Everything fell out as before. In the