A Sea of Troubles: Looking into the wine-dark waves of the Odyssey
by Ed Fluegel
Posiedon, lord of the sea, is the most powerful and persistent antagonist
of the island-king Odysseus, whose trials are framed by a nautical
journey. The sea poses a fierce challenge and causes the death of many of
Odysseus's men, but it is also a space that has none of the carnal
excesses and traps that are found on land. That the sea is Odysseus's true
home was assumed by Tennyson, who sends the aging Odysseus out upon it
once more at the end of his life. Although the sea is certainly not the
true home of Homer's Odysseus, it plays a more important role than that of
some trivial transporting medium that simply moves the hero from one
challenge to another. Despite the wrath of Posiedon, the sea is a place of
relative safety, until the final storm leaves Odysseus to cling to the
mast alone. Most of the danger comes to the ship-bound Odysseus when land
intrudes, in the form of Polyphemous's hurled boulder, or the crashing
rocks of Charybdis, or the attempts of the sirens to lure the ship to
land. While the landscape of the Odyssey and the particular
locales in it have been discuseed, little attention has been paid to the
omnipresent sea. This essay considers the complex role it plays in the
Odyssey.