art by Christian Ward
τῶν δ᾽ ὅς τις λωτοῖο φάγοι μελιηδέα καρπόν,If Ody-C #1 was a prodigious and marvelous, if impersonal, introduction to an epic world and its cunning and cruel protagonist, this is devastating in its intimacy and Odyssia almost villainous in that devastation.
οὐκέτ᾽ ἀπαγγεῖλαι πάλιν ἤθελεν οὐδὲ νέεσθαι,
ἀλλ᾽ αὐτοῦ βούλοντο μετ᾽ ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισι
λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι μενέμεν νόστου τε λαθέσθαι. (ΙΧ.94-97)
Zeus is a tyrant. She is her father's murderer and usurper, and her very own tyrannical usurpation has made her paranoid of her own offspring and viciously unrelenting in that paranoia. She is a child-killer, the eradicator of man, and the cause for the weeping of many mothers for their sons and of many daughters for their fathers. With considerable irony which is not lost on the god, it is only following this great annihilation that unforeseen consequences plague Zeus: "Of course…here was where my troubles began" (Ody-C #2: 5). She is also law-giver, and though her judgment is harsh, it follows the letter. And so Promethene's creation of the sebex is allowed to stand, though she herself wastes away in the lotus-haze of forgetting, far past the flower's gifts of inspiration. She is obliterated, all traces of her Titan memory, her rebellious identity, her compassionate generosity to humankind. She is chained to Lotophage, the world of the memory-ravaging flower, a beautiful but tragic prone body with empty eyes lashed to the planet in Ward's breathtaking opening (10-11).Fraction's land of the Lotus-Eaters is a testament to the horrors of war, the trauma of combat, and the seductive appeal of oblivion in the face of returning home changed by it. "Shiftcaptain Prima Eurylock summons her girls from the Ody-C, ready to blot from their memory the horrible war and the journey ahead" (12). But it owes as much to Dante's Divine Comedy as Homer's Odyssey, a maze of descending circles of sins and decadence as the opiate flower invites its consumers into dulled somnolence, a nightmare from which it is increasingly difficult to return.
Then Ero, Odyssia's sebex lover, disinhibited by the smoke of the lotus, reignites an old contention: children. Despite their closeness during the war and Ero's longing to make a family with her "wife-lord", she is only Odyssia's lover, the other lover in Odyssia's marriage to Penelope and their family with Telem. She's little more than a pleasant placeholder until the general returns home. And their imminent return has sparked old jealousies. And those jealousies lead Ero too far, to coldly bark Odyssia's insecurities back at her. And so, when Odyssia leaves her enraged, Ero imagines like any long-standing lover that she will return, after all, "Fighting's a thing they have both done before and will both surely do yet again. …Right?" (18). When Odyssia leaves her there, wallowing in the lotus pool with the hollow Lotophage supplicants, it is callously near-unforgivable. Such is our hero.
Lotophage: Odysseus' sojourn among the λωτοφάγοι (IX.82-104)
