Odysseus' Bed and Cleopatra's Mattress (69)

       Lord of lords,
O infinite virtue, com'st thou smiling from
The world's great snare uncaught?

Antony and Cleopatra 4.8.17-19

The Bed

Few would deny that Odysseus, also known as Ulysses, is quite a character. Yet, the hero and anti-hero of "many turns" or tricks (polutropos) can only outdistance fellow heroes like Spider-man and Wonder Woman in the zero-to-infinity race from Myth to Character by the richness and depth of the many turns which enhance his character, only to the further enhancement of his myth. Nowhere is such a turning of myth's special effects on the axis of character better grasped than in the spoken picture of Odysseus' bed uttered in vexation by the craftsman himself when seized by thoughts of a wife's betrayal on a rolling bedstead:

. . . There is one particular feature [great mark: mega sema] in the bed's construction. I myself, no other man, made it.
There was the bole of an olive tree with long leaves growing
strongly in the courtyard, and it was thick, like a column.
I laid down my chamber around this, and built it, until I
finished it, with close-set stones, and roofed it well over,
and added the compacted doors, fitting closely together.
Then I cut away the foliage of the long-leaved olive,
and trimmed the trunk from the roots up, planing it with a brazen
adze, well and expertly, and trued it straight to a chalkline,
making a bed post of it, and bored all holes with an auger.
I began with this and built my bed, until it was finished,
and decorated it with gold and silver and ivory.
Then I lashed it with thongs of oxhide, dyed bright with purple.
There is its character [sing/token: sema piphauskomai], as I tell you;
but I do not know now,
dear lady, whether my bed is still in place, or if some man
has cut underneath the stump of the olive, and moved it elsewhere.

(Ody.23.184-204)

The cunning and carpentry skills associated with making the bed as an artifact embedded in living wood and resistant to motion find their counterpoint by contrast in two other products of Odysseus' master handicraft associated with swift and stealth motion: the ship he builds to leave Calypso's island and the Trojan Horse.

The bed's crafted great mark (mega sema) is homologous with its own character and place: it is subject to change only if Penelope proves unfaithful to wandering Odysseus with a philandering god. Her matching her husband's trademark cleverness with the lying and luring clue that their immovable love nest of old could now be rolled outside for him to enjoy a night's rest puts Penelope on Odysseus' same high level of cunning at his own expense. The bed's great sign locks up their past conjugal intimacy and Penelope's faithfulness inside one shared secret domain which Odysseus is forced to unlock in self-revelation. Conjugal "like-mindedness" (homophrosune) is achieved by Penelope, the constant wife of the absent husband and entrapped lover of the sorceress Circe and goddess-nymph Calypso. As minds match, husband and wife are reunited in body and soul by the grace of an object in whose makeup Odysseus' inalienable signs of identity rest beyond recall. Thus restored, their imperfectly perfect union seems mortgaged in the bed's great sign of the husband's character as the immoveable object kept in place by the wife's own bedstead fastness as custodian of his lordly rule.

Odysseus' awesome tree-house bed answers the riddle it poses about the uttermost fixed furnishing in marriage: the eternally nuptial bedstead site, which will not budge when carved from a living tree. Wendy Doniger writes that Odysseus' bed, "carved from a living tree and carefully roofed and gated and bound in gold and silver is a magnificent metaphor for marriage, which cages...