Odysseus, Maker of Horses

Robin Mitchell-Boyask (Temple University)

This paper examines the Odyssey's fleeting, but complexly ambivalent, remembrances of the Wooden Horse, as the narrative seems reluctant to name Odysseus as its maker, while clearly marking the Horse thematically and then actually as belonging to Odysseus. The deep connections between heroes and their horses in the Iliad, combined with the equation of horses and Troy in the city’s mythical history, both are inverted and violated in the fabrication of a giant horse out of wood by a hero who otherwise lacks equine connections. Thus, on several different levels the ruse of the Wooden Horse is a travesty of the codes of heroic behavior, and even the Iliad is haunted by equines to foreshadow Troy's destruction. The Odyssey gradually reverses those violations in the narrated experiences of Odysseus, culminating in the boat he builds, which Homer links to the brief depictions of the Horse in books 4 and 8.

The Iliad consciously keeps Odysseus away from horses because they foreshadow Troy's fall, but his separation from heroic horses is only explained in the Odyssey's thematization of the landscape of Ithaca, as the biography of Odysseus, a hero from a horseless land, is generated by his designation as the sacker of Troy through the fabricated Horse. Only someone with an "unnatural" relationship with horses could turn them as an icon against their people. While Odysseus claims twice (8.493-94, 11.523) that Epeius made the Horse with Athena and Odysseus merely led it into Troy, Menelaus omits Epeius and stresses Odysseus' courage inside the Horse (4.266-89), and Nestor emphasizes how Odysseus' cunning destroyed Troy where other stratagems had failed (3.118-22). The gradual shifts in the Horse story thus parallel the narrative's evolving deployment of the death of Agamemnon. These divergent accounts, the constant iteration throughout the Odyssey of disguise as an Odyssean tactic, the considerable carpentry skills Odysseus displays in the Odyssey's main narrative, and the incentive Odysseus has to cast himself as a warrior in the Horse and not as its maker, mark the deep unease in both the epic and in Odysseus himself with what we normally think of as his greatest achievement. Odysseus does not ride horses, but he does ride on ships and ships are, Homer tells us, horses of the sea (4.707-10, 13.81-6).

Odysseus twice finds himself at moments of utter aporia until a goddess helps him build a large wooden structure, one a horse and the other a ship. Athena is credited with giving Odysseus the idea of the Wooden Horse which he designs and Epeius then executes, but his isolation on Calypso’s island requires he be his own carpenter, and he possesses such skills in abundance (5.228-61). Key verbal echoes link these constructions. Odysseus’ Wooden Boat is the Wooden Horse transformed, just as he has been. As the last stage in this movement he rides, in a simile, one of its components like a horse (5.371), something he has built himself, but not like that other horse in Troy. Ships are horses of the sea and he is their master. Yet back on Ithaca, when he asks for Athena's aid (13.383-91) and recalls the sack of Troy, the Wooden Horse disappears from his memory. At Odysseus' return to Ithaca horses virtually vanish and are mentioned only as existing elsewhere. Ithaca has no horses literally, but, even figuratively, they are so strongly associated with the heroic world of the Iliad they would be thematically incongruous in Ithaca.

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