Other than Odysseus: Survivors of the Odyssey

Odysseus: We now set out on our odyssey.

Crewman: [raising hand] what's an ‘odyssey’?

Odysseus: A long journey named after the only survivor.

Crewman: Oh ok… wait… what?!?

An amusing joke for a classicist, which assumes knowledge of the ‘fact’ that Odysseus was the only survivor of his ill-fated attempt to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. However, in the course of the second great journey to a homeland after the Fall of Troy recounted in the Aeneid, we find that at least two of Odysseus’ crewman had survived the various encounters with gods and monsters to meet up with the emigrating Aeneas and his crew. It must be said that neither of the names given for these two survivors appear in the Iliad or the Odyssey, which makes it likely that they are later interpolations invented by the Romans to make further connections between the works of Homer and their own burgeoning origin myth.

Achaemenides of Ithaca

The first supposed survivor of the ‘Odyssey’ was met by Aeneas and his followers on the island of cyclopes (Virgil, Aeneid 3.591ff; Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.158ff). As they surveyed the shore, a man “in pitiable plight and half-dead with hunger” with a straggling beard, rags held together with thorns and covered in filth emerged from the woods.

They recognised him as a Greek and he recognised them as Trojans, which gave him the briefest moment of pause, only for his desperation to overcome any fear of the enemy. He begs Aeneas and his men to take him from the island, even if it is to execute him as a Greek enemy, such is the terror and hardship he has endured. Aeneas and his followers urged the man to tell them his name, origin and what he was so scared of, but it was only when Aeneas’ father Anchises offered the man his hand, that he had the courage to reveal his story.

“My native land is Ithaca. I am a comrade of the unfortunate [Odysseus]. My name is Achaemenides. My father Adamastus being poor, I went to Troy – cursed be the day!”

He retells the story of their meeting with the cyclops and the horrors of seeing two of this shipmates killed and eaten by Polyphemos, and then that he had been left behind during the escape. Achaemenides does not explain why he was left behind in the cave – did it require an extra pair of hands to get a man attached to the bottom of a sheep in order to escape Polyphemos’ attention at the entrance of the cave, with Achaemenides therefore the odd man out at the end?

Perhaps the plan had always been for one man to be left in the cave, with those who escaped then making enough noise to attract Polyphemos away from the cave entrance, allowing the last man – chose by lot or volunteering – to then escape. This is what came to pass, only for Achaemenides to be left behind as panic overtook the other escapees and/or, even when blinded, Polyphemos proved still a threat to the Greek crews and their ships.

In the pages of Ovid’s Metamorphososes, Achaemenides explains that he could not cry out to the escaping ships as that would reveal his presence to Polyphemos and the other cyclopes. He could only watch as Polyphemos hurled rocks at Odysseus’s ships, leaving him stranded on the island in constant fear for his life should any of the wild animals or the cyclopes find him.

In terms of how long he had been stranded there, Achaemenides states that he had seen the ‘horns of the moon’ – a crescent moon – three times, suggesting that he had been stranded on the island for at least 5 weeks, if not much more – to see the same version of the ‘horns of the moon’ could take a month at a time. Achaemenides may have been having to eke out a miserable and terrifying existence for over three months.

Any wonder then that he was so happy to see Aeneas and his Trojans making landfall. Even less wonder that he immediately warned his rescuers that they needed to leave. And sure enough, the monstrous Polyphemos appeared lumbering down the mountainside to the shore, using a pine tree to guide him to the sea, where he attempted to wash his wounded eye. The cyclops heard the clamouring of the Trojan escape and chased after them in vain, with his screams bringing down the other cyclopes to see Aeneas’ ships leaving with Achaemenides onboard.

We might ask why Virgil or the Romans in general would invent the character of Achaemenides. It provides a direct connection between the Aeneid and the Odyssey from the Greek side of things and allows Virgil to show how magnanimous Aeneas could be in saving a member of Odysseus's crew, and bearing little grudge over the destruction of Troy. And in return for this magnanimity, Achaemenides not only gives his loyalty to his Trojan rescuers and immediately exhorts them to flee the island, he is also able to serve as a useful source of knowledge for Aeneas going around the islands and shores he had already visited.

Macareus of Neritus

The second survivor of the Odyssey other than Odysseus is spoke of in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It has it that this second survivor was found by Aeneas’ expedition after it emerged from the Stygian realms near the Euboean colony at Cumae. Arriving on the shore that he would name after his nurse, Caieta – that is the Bay of Gaeta, Aeneas discovered another “Greek had found a home” there. This was Macareus, originally from the town of Neritus on mainland Acarnania in western Greece.

Macareus immediately recognises Achaemenides, shocked to find him still alive...

“what chance or what god saved you, Achaemenides? Why does ship belonging to the barbarous Trojans carry a Greek on board?”

Once he describes his ordeal with the cyclops and explains how he owes the Trojans his unending gratitude due to their saving him from the island, Achaemenides then enquires about Macareus’ travels after the escape from the cyclopes.

Macareus recounts how Odysseus’ received the winds of Aeolous, which after 9 days brought then fleet within sight of Ithaca, only for the jealous crew to open the bag they were contained in thinking that Odysseus was concealing gold from them. This saw the ships carried all the way back to the harbour of Aeolus.  At their next stop, Macareus was chosen along with two other crewmates to treat with Antiphates, king of the Laestrygonians, only for one of his comrades to be eaten by the cannibal ruler. The other crewman and Macareus escaped back to Odysseus’ ship, but it was only one to survive the encounter with the Laestrygonians, with the other ships destroyed and their crews either drowned or eaten...

This single ship then makes landfall at an island off the coast of Rome called Aeaea, which could supposedly be seen from the Bay of Gaeta as Macareus points to it in his retelling (it is a mythical island). Macareus warns the Trojans to stay away from there as it is the island of Circe...

Macareus tells of how he was again chosen by lot, along with 21 others to make contact with the inhabitants of the island. They were welcomed with a banquet by Circe, who gave them a concoction that turned them all, bar one, into pigs (this transformation and another story of Circe’s powers is why Ovid recounts the survival of Macareus).

“... my body began to bristle with stiff hairs, and I was no longer able to speak, but uttered harsh grunts instead of words. My body bent forward and down, until my face looked straight at the ground, and I felt my mouth hardening into a turned up snout, my neck swelling with muscles. My hands... now left prints like feet upon the ground.”

Macareus and his pig brethren were shut up in a pigsty and were only saved due to one of their original number, Eurylochus, having refused to drink the concoction. He escaped to inform Odysseus, who protects himself from Circe’s magic by taking moly. Surviving his own drinking of the concoction untransformed, Odysseus persuades Circe to turn his men back. The crew then spent a year living on Aeaea, where Macareus hears may stories of the power of Circe, including that of Picus and Glaucus.

When the crew finally departed Aeaea, Circe “told us of the dangerous voyagings, the long, long journey and perils of the cruel sea” they were still to face, which thoroughly frightened Macareus, who jumped ship when it reached the Bay of Gaeta, where he decided to remain. This decision saved his life. Had he stayed onboard, Macareus would have been fated to die at the hands of Scylla or in the shipwreck caused by Zeus in retaliation for the crew’s hunting of Helios’ sacred cattle on the island of Thrinacia; it was this shipwreck that saw Odysseus become the ‘sole survivor’ of the Odyssey.

Both Achaemenides and Macareus are used as storytellers in the Aeneid and Metamorphoses. Ovid, in particular, in having Achaemenides and Macareus meet, demonstrates how history has been passed down orally, becoming a coherent story in the process before being committed to writing. The lack of mention of these men in the Odyssey suggests that they were made up almost expressly for this purpose, taking advantage of there being so many crewmates on Odysseus’ voyage who are not named.

If such a story-telling device was to be used today, it would be considered ‘fanfiction’ and/or extrapolating of a story that did not need to be told from minutiae or unimportant gaps in a larger story.