Cunning, Deception & Trickery in Homer

 

Cunning, Deception & Trickery in Homer

            Homer makes use of cunning, deception and trickery extensively in the Iliad and the Odyssey. In fact, one of his major characters, namely Odysseus, is seldom mentioned in either work without an added epithet of cunning, sly, clever, resourceful or wily. The basic reason why Homer uses such a prominent theme and recurring motif is quite simple – it’s entertaining! Many people regard Homer as the father of deception, mystery and intrigue in Western literature and can find elements of his influence in the works of writers like Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Wilke Collins, Mark Twain, Alexandre Dumas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Edgar Allan Poe, James Hilton and many others.

            Homer did not always regard being cunning or sly as a bad thing and in fact, it was something that was done by gods and goddesses as well as by mere mortals. Divine beings often used deception to further their own aims, to test the strength of characters, or to convince mortals to act in certain ways in order to achieve desired outcomes. We see this especially in the later books of the Iliad as the battle heated up and one-on-one confrontations took place more often. As the war was moving towards its final conclusion, the gods became increasingly more active in taking on the semblance or the voices of mortals.

Mortals themselves used lies and trickery to outwit their enemies, to navigate their way through dangerous circumstances and in many cases, just to survive. Sometimes Homer positioned deception as a necessary evil, but many times the perpetrator received the praise of the author. Heroes attempted to achieve Κλέος, or fame and good reputation during their lifetimes, most often by doing brave and noble deeds on the battlefield. Odysseus, the chief trickster of Homer’s works, was seldom portrayed as a great fighter in the Trojan War. But Odysseus is still being sung about by the bard today, and has achieved his Κλέος through his wily ways and not with his plunging sword. This was the very man who tried to shirk the war in the first place by feigning madness, and then pulled off the two best tricks in Homer’s stories – the escapade with the Trojan horse and then his disguise as a beggar in his confrontation with his wife’s suitors. It is no wonder that King Agamemnon referred to him as, “you crafty one who excels in wily deeds.”

            In this paper I propose working our way through the Iliad and the Odyssey to find the most obvious and relevant examples of how Homer used the themes of cunning, deception and trickery to push the narratives forward, to further reveal the depths of his characters and to provide a more entertaining way of telling his stories. Leo Tolstoy said that there were only two types of stories ever told, one where a stranger comes to town, and one where a stranger goes on a journey. There are hundreds of strangers who come to the town of Troy in the Iliad, borne on a thousand ships, and the Odyssey is certainly the story of one of those strangers on a personal journey. Let us discover how Homer uses his recurring motifs of trickery and disguise to enhance the entertainment value in the telling of his two epic works.

            Divine intervention is commonplace in Homer’s stories and we often see messages being delivered by the gods to mortals on earth. It is interesting to note that those messages are often delivered by divine or semi-divine entities who are disguised as humans or who take on the voices of humans. For example, in Book II of the Iliad we encounter a dream sent by Zeus to carry a message to King Agamemnon in his sleep. Zeus could have appeared to Agamemnon himself to give him his orders to arm the Achaeans, but instead sent a dream disguised as Nestor, the son of Peleus and a trusted advisor of the king. The gods often talk directly to mortals in these stories, so it is unclear why Homer would choose to deliver divine messages at times through an intermediary rather than directly from god to man. Perhaps it is because most mortals might have difficulty recognizing a god and accepting that the being that they have encountered is actually divine. It is also possible that disguising a god in mortal garb or having him speak in a human voice might somehow make the encounter less threatening to the message recipient. In the case mentioned, it was not Zeus himself who was delivering the message to Agamemnon, but Nestor who was carrying a message from the god. The deception serves the purpose of making the message more believable. Nestor himself gave credence to the dream.

Thus he spoke and then sat down and there arose Nestor, king of sandy Pylos, who being of wise counsel, spoke to those seated in assembly. “O my friends, captains and leaders of the Achaeans, if any other of our leaders had told us this dream, we would deem it a falsehood and would withdraw. But he who is considered to be the best of the army has seen it, so come and let us arm the sons of the Achaeans.”

            Sometimes a trick does not turn out the way that its perpetrator intends. Agamemnon related his dream to his men and decided to test their mettle. He thought that he would rouse their fighting spirit and further enrage them to fight on with the Trojans. He advised the troops, that despite what Zeus might have told him in his dream, enough was enough and they had spent nine fruitless years fighting the enemy and were no closer to achieving their goal of sacking Troy. He said that it was time to pack up the ships and head for home, certain that they would all rebel at the suggestion and stand up en masse, ready for battle. Instead they agreed that his suggestion made a lot of sense and rushed for the ships. Agamemnon’s deception failed miserably and it was only the intervention of the wily Odysseus that convinced the army to stay and fight.

            In Book III of the Iliad we find another example of a god or goddess disguised as a human, engaging in conversation with a mortal.

Disguised as her husband’s sister who was the wife of the son of Antenor, the goddess Iris went to white-armed Helen. She appeared as Laodice, wife of lord Helicaon the son of Antenor and the loveliest of the daughters of Priam.

The goddess Iris had a very specific purpose in mind for her visit to Helen and as a result of their engagement, we start to see Helen in a different light and Homer uses the encounter between them to deepen the character of the woman who we had previously regarded as a wanton adulteress. Their dialogue sets the stage for the subsequent conversations that Helen has with King Priam and Hector and paints Helen as more of a victim and adds an additional element to the story. 

Having spoken thus, the goddess placed in her mind tender thoughts about him who had been her husband, her city and her parents.

Helen spoke to King Priam and because of her intense sorrow and shame, we begin to feel very differently about her.

“You are both friendly and fearful to me my father-in-law. I wish that a wretched death had been my destiny when I followed your son here, having left my marriage bed, my brothers, my blessed daughter and the lovely companions of my own age. But this did not come to pass and so I melt down in weeping.”

            Helen and Priam stood on the walls of Troy to watch the fight between Menelaus and Alexander, for the winner was to claim Helen for himself. Zeus and Aphrodite intervened to save Alexander from being vanquished and the goddess cast a mist over him and removed him from the battlefield and deposited him back in the bedroom that he and Helen shared. In a cunning deception, Aphrodite took on the semblance of an old woman wool-weaver who was close to Helen, and enticed her to return to her chamber to comfort Alexander. But this was one of those times when the trick did not work and Helen was able to see through the goddess’s disguise.

Thus the goddess spoke and indeed she did arouse feelings within her. At that point Helen perceived the highly beautiful neck of the goddess, her lovely breast and her shining eyes. She was amazed, called her by name and spoke to her.

            Later Pallas Athena visited the battlefield and took on the appearance of Laodocus, the son of Antenor. In this disguise she convinced Pandarus to shoot an arrow at Menelaus and he successfully wounded him. Once more the gods furthered their own ends through deception and trickery. Gods and goddesses and all sorts of divine and semi-divine beings were constantly engaged in the warfare, sometimes outright and sometimes acting in the background and they often used deceptive strategies to achieve their purposes.

Indeed, Ares urged on these Trojans and the bright-eyed Athena supported the other side. Terror and Fear and relentless Strife waged on as well and the man-slaying sister of Ares was likewise a companion, she being small at first but then she raised her head to the heavens and stalked about on the earth. She then heaved dissension into the mix of them and destruction moved through the ranks increasing the groaning of the men.

            Weapons were turned aside, combatants were sheltered in mists and warriors were plucked from the midst of the fighting while the residents of Olympus interfered in the battle. Most of the time the gods were successful in what they were attempting, but sometimes it did not turn out as planned. Witness the fact that Aphrodite was wounded in the hand by Diomedes and had to return to her father for comfort. Diomedes taunted her as she fled.

 “Retire daughter of Zeus from the strife and the battle. Is it not sufficient for you to deceive feeble women? But if you wish to resort to fighting, then I think that you will end up dreading it, even if you only hear about it from afar.”

            In Book X of the Iliad we are treated to one of the best deception stories in the epic. Hector asked for a volunteer to go and spy upon the Achaeans. Dolon answered the call but asked for a great reward. He told Hector,

“My heart and my noble spirit urge me on to go near their swift ships and to spy out what is happening. But come now and lift up your staff and promise me that you will grant me the horses and the richly fashioned chariot that even now belong to the son of Peleus and I will prove to be a great spy for you and will not let you down. I will go right up to their encampment and even to Agamemnon’s ship where I will learn from the chieftains sitting in council whether they plan to flee or to fight on.”

Dolon was captured and interrogated by Odysseus and Diomedes and thought that his life was going to be spared because he revealed everything that he knew about the Trojans and their plans. His captors had given him cause for hope but things did not turn out as he anticipated. Homer rather gruesomely reported,

Thus he spoke and the Dolon was about to reach out and touch his chin with his stout hand in entreaty when Diomedes sprang at him and hit him fully on the neck with his sword and cut right through so that while he was still speaking, his head was rolling around in the dust.

            In Book XIV of the Iliad we find Hera, queen of the gods playing her own devious trick against her husband/brother Zeus. She deceived Aphrodite the goddess of love into giving her the power of love, telling her that her intent was to woo the warring parties away from warfare. Unbeknownst to Aphrodite, her real plan was to use the power against Zeus, and after he had fallen into a post-coital slumber, to send Sleep to deliver a message to Poseidon that it was safe to render assistance to the Danaans. She tricked Aphrodite in this way,

Then being wily-minded, Queen Hera spoke to her. “Give me now affection and longing that can be used to overcome all immortals and mortals. I plan to visit all the ends of the bountiful earth and Oceanus from whom arise the gods and mother Tethys, even those who raised me and cherished me in their homes when they took me from Rhea when wide-eyed Zeus thrust Cronos down to dwell beneath the earth and the barren sea. All these I will visit and release them from their endless quarrels, for it has been so long that they have kept apart from one another and their affections and gall has come upon their souls. If by my words I can persuade their hearts and get them to join back together in love, then forever will they call me dear one and regard me with reverence.”

Hera was successful in seducing Zeus and Sleep delivered his message.

“With a forward mind now Poseidon, render aid to the Danaans and give them glory forthwith for Zeus is asleep for a little while for over him have I cast a soft slumber. Hera has beguiled him to her bed to make love.”

            With Hector dead, the Trojan War was rapidly drawing to its conclusion when ‘the wily and crafty Odysseus, he of the many counsels’, pulled off the greatest deception of all time and a stroke of pure military genius. The events surrounding the use of the Trojan horse are not even reported in the Iliad and are only briefly mentioned in the Odyssey. It is mainly from accounts such as Vergil’s Aeneid and other ancient literary works that we find out what happened. The trick was brilliant in both its conception and its undertaking. Odysseus had the Achaeans construct a huge wooden horse that was capable of concealing thirty warriors in its body. They dragged the wooden horse to the gates of Troy in the middle of the night and left it there. The Danaan fleet then sailed off, as if for home, but only went so far as the island of Tenedos, where they hid from the view of the Trojans. They were assisted by Sinon, who passed himself off as a Greek defector. Sinon convinced the Trojans that the Danaans had given up the fight and had sailed home and had built the horse as an offering to Athena, in atonement for them having previously desecrated her temple in Troy. He told them that the Greeks had built it too big to take into the city, so that the Trojans could not bring it in and gain the favour of the goddess themselves. However, if they were to remove a portion of their city wall, they would be able to drag it inside, and this they did. The Trojan priest Laocoon suspected a trap and tried to warn off his countrymen and his warning, told to us by Vergil in the Aeneid, has become famous.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

I fear Greeks, even those bearing gifts

Under the cover of darkness the Greek warriors, captained by Odysseus, descended from their hiding place, opened the city gates to their comrades and sacked Troy. Odysseus, he who tried to avoid going to war in the first place by using subterfuge, brought an end to the war by using the same technique.

In his second work, the Odyssey, Homer continues the use of cunning, deception and trickery, in fact even more so than he did in the Iliad. This is the story of the return home, the Νόστος, of the wily and crafty Odysseus. The master of trickery used one ruse after another to manage situations and to get himself out of difficulty during his ten year journey. Meanwhile, back at his home in Ithaca, his faithful wife Penelope was herself using deception to put off 108 arrogant suitors who were determined to woo her, disinherit her son Telemachus, and usurp the throne from her husband. Deception is a major theme in the Odyssey and once more we see both gods and mortals involved in tricks, disguises and deceit.

Athena was the goddess of wisdom, cunning and strategic warfare and in that capacity she was a strong supporter of Odysseus, because he displayed these same traits. Throughout the Odyssey she worked tirelessly to protect Odysseus, to help him in his journey and many times to accompany him while wearing several different disguises, to strategize with him and to assist him with various devices, and most importantly, to shield him from the wrath of Poseidon, who was bent on his destruction because he had blinded his son, Polyphemus the Cyclops.

Athena got involved early in the story and right at the start of the Odyssey we find her advocating among the gods for the safe return home of the hero Odysseus. She arranged to have Hermes sent to Ogygia to convince Calypso to release Odysseus while she went to Ithaca to give encouragement to Telemachus. In the first act of deception that we see in the Odyssey, we are told that the goddess took on a disguise.

Then she darted down from the heights of Olympus and took up her place in the land of Ithaca, outside the front doorway of the home of Odysseus on the threshold of the court and in her hand she held the spear of bronze and appeared as a guest-friend and took on the likeness of Mentes, the leader of the Taphians.

Disguised as Mentes, Athena had a long conversation with Telemachus about his father and what the boy had to do to rid his father’s home of the suitors. She convinced him to set out on his own journey to seek news of his father and the actions that he should take depending on what he learned while he was away. This visit of Athena’s to Ithaca literally sets the stage for what we are about to witness in the entire story and it was therefore a highly significant interaction between a divine being and a mortal. It is so important to the narrative that Homer actually had Athena break the cover of her disguise as she left and she was revealed to Telemachus as a goddess.

So spoke the bright-eyed Athena and she left and flew upwards like a bird and into his heart she instilled might and bravery and caused him to think much about his father. In his mind he gazed upon her and was startled and knew at once that she was a god and forthwith he went among the suitors as if he himself were a god.

We know that Telemachus had suspected her identity all along, for after he had explained who the visitor was to Eurymachus, we learned the truth.

“That stranger is a guest-friend of my father’s house from Taphos and he says that he is Mentes, son of wise Anchialus and he is lord of the Taphians, the famous oarsmen.” So spoke Telemachus, but he knew deep in his own heart that she was an immortal goddess.

            During the absence of her husband Odysseus, the faithful Penelope had been carrying on her own deception. She managed with her ruse to put off the suitors for a period of three years by pretending that she could not yield to their advances before she had finished an important task. Her trick was only discovered by one of her handmaidens who then betrayed her and reported her deceit to the suitors.

“My young suitors, since the godlike Odysseus is dead, though I am eager to be married, I must finish weaving this cloth and do not want my spinning to be in vain. This shroud is for the hero Laertes, for the time when the fate of grievous death also takes him down and I do not wish for the women of the Achaeans to be angry with me for allowing such a wealthy man to be buried without a shroud.”

Thus she spoke and their manly hearts were convinced. By day she would weave at her great loom but by night she would unravel it when torches were placed beside her. For three years she kept deceit from being noticed and tricked the Achaeans.

            Telemachus loved his mother dearly and did not wish to distress her with worry about him traveling to Pylos and Sparta to seek news of his father. He therefore hatched a plan to deceive his mother and to keep any knowledge of his journey away from her, until it was too late for her to do anything about it. He engaged the services of the old nursemaid Eurycleia to help him play this trick on his mother.

“Take heart dear nurse for I do not act without a plan from the gods. But I swear that I will reveal none of this to my mother before the eleventh or twelfth day shall come or until she misses me or hears of my going so that her dear skin is not marred by her weeping.”

            One of the stops on his trip was at the palace of Menelaus in Sparta. Helen had returned home from Troy with her husband and was once again a loyal wife and queen. Telemachus asked Menelaus and Helen what they might know about the fate of his father and Helen wanted to tell him how Odysseus had disguised himself as a beggar and had entered Troy as a spy and had encountered her. In order not to upset those who would listen to her story, she devised a plan to drug them so that they would more readily listen to what she had to say. Her ends justified her deceptive means.

Then Helen the daughter of Zeus thought of something else. Immediately she placed into the wine that they were drinking a drug to sooth all pain and suffering and to make them forget all these evils. Whoever would gulp this down after it had been mixed in the drinking bowl would not let a tear fall down his cheeks for an entire day, not even if his mother or his father were to die, not even if someone should slay with the bronze his brother or his son in front of him, even if he saw it with his own eyes. The daughter of Zeus possessed such skillful drugs of healing which Polydamna, the wife of Thon a woman from Egypt had given her.

            Homer relates to us how Hermes was able to convince the nymph Calypso to release Odysseus from his seven year captivity on the island of Ogygia and to help him along his way. Odysseus set sail on the storm-tossed seas and eventually found himself shipwrecked in Scheria, the home of the Phaeacians and the princess Nausicaa. Of course the goddess Athena was there, ready to help her beloved Odysseus, and she started the wheels in motion by ensuring that Nausicaa made her way to the shoreline where the hero had been stranded. The goddess approached the princess in disguise.

Like a wisp of air, the goddess sped to the maiden’s bedside and stood above her head and she spoke to her, taking on the resemblance of the daughter of Dymas, who was famous for his ships, a girl who was the same age as Nausicaa and who was a dear friend of hers. Taking on her appearance, the flashing-eyed Athena spoke to her.

            Odysseus told King Alcinous and his retinue the story of how he and his companions had been trapped in the land of the Cyclopes and had been made captives by Polyphemus in his cave. He told them how he had revealed his identity to the monster in an act of cunning.

“Cyclops, you asked me what my glorious name was and I will tell it to you and you need to give me a guest-friend’s gift as you promised. My name is Nobody and my mother and my father and all my companions call me Nobody.”

He and his friends managed to blind the Cyclops and to escape from the cave by clinging to the undersides of monster’s rams. It was a deception that worked well for the Achaeans and when Polyphemus called to his friends for help, Odysseus taunted him by shouting back that he had been tricked and overcome by ‘Nobody’. The story lives on to this day and helps to build forever the Κλέος of the wily and crafty Odysseus. This was an act of cunning and deception that was carried out to its finest.

Then from out of his cave the mighty Polyphemus answered them. “O my friends, Nobody is killing me by deceit and not by force.”

In the words of Odysseus, “my dear heart laughed within me that my name and cunning trick had worked so well.”

            Odysseus and his mates left the land of the Cyclops and soon landed on the shores of a land inhabited by the sorceress Circe. She enticed the crew into her home and then played a nasty trick on them.

Immediately she came out and opened the shining doors and asked them in and they all followed in their ignorance. Eurylochus stayed behind because he figured it was a trick. She escorted them in and sat them down on chairs and couches and offered them cheese and barley groats and yellow honey and Pramnian wine. She mixed noxious drugs into the food so that they might totally forget about their homeland. After she had given them the potion and they had drunk it, she waved her magic wand over them and confined them in a pig sty. They had taken on the heads, the sound, the bristles and the shape of swine but their minds remained intact as before. So they were all penned there weeping and before them Circe threw acorns, swill and the fruit of the cornel tree, the sorts of things that pigs eat when they are rooting around on the ground.

Had not Odysseus come upon an antidote for her potion, he too would have suffered the same fate. As it was, Circe relented when she found Odysseus untouchable and the two of them became lovers for the span of a year. Oh yes, in her new-found kindness, the sorceress returned the crew to human form as well.

            After enduring the terrors of the Cyclops, the cattle of Helios, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, as well as the captivity of Calypso and the lure of Circe, Odysseus finally made it home to Ithaca. From that point forward, his actions were totally driven by cunning and deception. He had no sooner landed than he started to set his plan of trickery into motion. The first thing he did was to try and fool the goddess Pallas Athena who had taken on the disguise of a young shepherd to greet Odysseus and to reveal to him that he had arrived in Ithaca.

Thus she spoke and the godlike much-enduring Odysseus rejoiced in his own land, the land of his fathers, as he heard the words of Pallas Athena, the daughter of Zeus, he who bears the aegis. And then he spoke and answered her with winged words, but he did not speak the truth and held back the facts, as he pondered in his breast some very crafty ploy.

            The mistress and the master of cunning and deception, Pallas Athena and Odysseus, met face-to-face as the goddess revealed herself to her protégé. She had helped him get this far with her wisdom and planning and now she was prepared to help him finish the task.

“He would certainly have to be very crafty and tricky to be able to go well beyond you in all sorts of knavery, as if he were a god who approached you. Bold man, full of wiles and not even able, it seems, to stay away from deceit and tall tales that you love from the bottom of your heart, not even in your own land can you do so. But come now and let us not speak about all this any longer because we are both very good at it and because you are the best of all men in counsel and in speech and I am famous among all the gods for my craftiness and wisdom. Yet you did not even recognize me, Pallas Athena the daughter of Zeus, she who always stood beside you and guarded you in all your toils.”

            Odysseus asked the goddess for her help in devising a plan. “But come now and help me devise a plan with which I can repay them all and give me endless courage, such as when we destroyed the shining fortress of Troy.” Pallas Athena came up with the perfect solution.

“But come and I will render you unknown to all mortals by drying up the skin on your supple limbs, making an end to the blond hair on your head and by clothing you in a tattered garment that no man would want to be seen wearing. I will dim your two beautiful eyes so that you appear to be almost blind to the suitors and your wife and your son whom you left behind in your great hall. You must go first and approach the swineherd, he who is the guardian of the swine and who thinks well of you and who loves your son and your wife, the prudent Penelope.”

            In the disguise of a hapless beggar and with the assistance of the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, along with a handful of others and his son Telemachus, Odysseus was able to overcome the suitors who were ruining his life and his fortune. His disguise was so good that he was even able to fool his wife Penelope. The only one who saw through his ruse was the loyal nursemaid Eurycleia, who recognized the scar on his leg while she was bathing his feet.

The deception that was planned by the crafty goddess and carried out by the wily hero brought the story to an end, but one lingering question remains. After he had been away from home for twenty years, why did Odysseus find it necessary to play a final trick on is father Laertes? The old man had been so overwhelmed by the loss of his son that he was living as a recluse and not taking care of himself or his property. Why did Odysseus deem it important to deceive his father rather than just rush into his loving arms? I guess he just could not help himself. Once a trickster, always a trickster.

            It is quite true that Homer’s use of cunning, trickery and deception is very entertaining and that appears to be the main reason that he does so. In the case of Odysseus, who is not generally regarded as a strong and skillful warrior, his craftiness and use of his wiles helps him to achieve his goals and to manage situations. Others might choose to use strength and force to accomplish the same ends. In their place, Odysseus uses what he has – his cunning. But deception poses a moral dilemma. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Homer shows us in the Iliad and the Odyssey that trickery can be used for both positive and negative purposes. He does not view deception as a character flaw, but rather just a reflection of the character of a divine or a mortal being. Homer does not appear to make a judgement about the use of deception. He just presents it for what it is – part of the human character and a trait that mortals likely inherited from the gods.