Snider, A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - I

From, Homer's Odyssey: A commentary
[Please note that the Table of Contents here published, is created by Elpenor and is not to be found in the print version]

2. Ino Leucothea, Ino the white Goddess, beholds him with pity in his extremity—she was once mortal herself but now is divine. Her function seems to be to help the shipwrecked mariner; her name reminds the reader of the white calm of the sea, elsewhere celebrated by Homer (Book X, 94; Nitzsch's observation). Thus she appears to represent the peaceful placid mood of the marine element, which rises in the midst of the storm and imparts hope and courage, nay predicts safety. She gives her veil to Ulysses, in which commentators trace a suggestion of the fillet or sacred cloth which was given out from a temple in Samothrace, and had the power of saving the endangered mariner, if he had tied it round his body. As it is here employed, it strangely suggests a life-preserver. At any rate Ino is the calming power opposed to angry Neptune, and she works upon both the waters and the man.

"Ill-fated man," she cries, "why hast thou so angered Neptune?" Then she changes her note: "Still he shall not destroy thee, however much he desires." She bids him give up his raft to the anger of Neptune, throw away his clinging wet garments of Calypso, and swim to the land of the Phaeacians. Then she hands him the veil which he is to "bind beneath his breast," and, when he has reached land, he is to throw it back into the sea. A ritual of some kind, symbolic acts we feel these to be, though their exact meaning may be doubtful. Ino, "the daughter of Cadmus," is supposed to have been a Phoenician Goddess originally, and to have been transferred to the Greek sailor, just as his navigation came to him, partly at least, from the Phoenicians. If he girded himself with the consecrated veil of Leucothea, the Goddess of the calm, Neptune himself in wrath could not sink him.

Such was the faith required of Ulysses, but now comes the internal counterstroke: his skepticism. "Ah me! what if some God is planning another fraud against me, bidding me quit my raft!" The doubter refuses to obey and clings to his raft. But the waves make short work of it now, and Ulysses by sheer necessity has to do as the Goddess bade him; "with hands outspread he plunged into the sea," the veil being underneath him. When he quits his raft, and is seen in the water, Neptune dismisses him from view with a parting execration, and Pallas begins to help him, not openly, but indirectly.

In such manner the great doubter is getting toward shore, but even here his doubts cease not. Steep jutting cliffs may not permit him to land, the billows may dash him to death on the sharp shoaly rocks, or carry him out again to sea, or some huge monster of the deep may snap him up in its jaws; thus he is dashed about internally, on the billows of doubt. But this grinding within is stopped by the grinding he gets without; a mighty surge overwhelms him, he clutches a rock and saves himself, but leaves flakes of flesh from his hands behind on the rock. "He swam along the coast and eyed it well," he even reaches the mouth of a soft-flowing river, where was a smooth beach and a shelter from the wind. Here is the spot so long desired, here then he passes to an act of faith, he prays to the river which becomes at once to the Greek imagination a God.

3. This brings us to the third water deity, and we observe a kind of scale from the universal one, Neptune, down to a local one, that of the river. The middle one, Ino, is the humane kindly phase of the great deep, showing her kinship with man; Neptune was the ruder god of the physical sea, and, to the Homeric Greek, the most powerful and natural. No wonder that he was angry at that little raft and its builder; it meant his ultimate subjection.

D. Snider
A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part I

Learned Freeware

D. Snider A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part I

Learned Freeware

D. Snider
A Commentary on the Odyssey of Homer - Part I