Ismarus

“I was driven by the winds away from Troy and cast ashore at Ismarus, stronghold of the Cicones. That city we sacked, killing all the men. But the women along with all the loot we had taken - those we hauled away and shared out fair and square amongst the men. I made sure that no one would leave saying he was robbed of his fair share of the booty. ”

(The Odyssey, Book 9, Lines 44-49)

     The above are (to me at least) probably the most troubling lines in the entire Odyssey. Scholars tell us that they are likely drawn from a then still painful memory of the mysterious “Sea People” who wreaked havoc in the Eastern Mediterranean several centuries prior to Homer. We do not know much about the events of those black years, but archeologists find compelling evidence that in the space of a single generation, nearly every significant coastal settlement from Sicily to Syria was sacked, burned, plundered, and occasionally taken apart stone by stone. It is little wonder that such trauma would still find literary expression four hundred years later. In that pre-literate age, a people’s memories were longer and stronger than today.

     But why did Homer link them to his hero, Odysseus? It seems totally out of character. After all, what did the people of Ismarus ever do to him to deserve such treatment? The poet gives us no clue. At this late date, we will probably have to resign ourselves to accepting this particular indigestible bit of narrative with no resolution to its enigma.

     At least Dick Seton had the excuse of having been ill treated at the hands of the Mardonalians. They had, after all, intended to kill him and his companions, despite his being an honored guest in their country. But still…

     “They heard the continuous chatter of the machine-gun operated by the Kordefix, and turned toward him. He was shooting, not at the warships, but at the city rapidly growing smaller beneath them; moving the barrel of the rifle in a tiny spiral; spraying the entire city with death and destruction! As they looked, the first of the [explosive] shells reached the ground, just as Dunark ceased firing for lack of ammunition. They saw the palace disappear as if by magic, being instantly blotted out in a cloud of dust – a cloud which, with a spiral motion of dizzying rapidity, increased in size until it obscured the entire city.”

     Two chapters later, the wholesale mayhem inflicted on the Mardonalians by Seaton and Company is (like so much in the Skylark novels) quite literally beyond description. Perhaps the accompanying illustration above this paragraph may suffice. There is no getting around it. The appalling violence prevalent throughout Smith’s entire corpus is more than a bit disturbing. By the time we come to the Lensman novels (which are outside the scope of this analysis, but worth mentioning), entire planets, with all their populations, are annihilated in titanic space battles.

     “The two worlds rushed together, doomed Jarvenon squarely between them. … The planets touched. They coalesced, squishingly at first, the encircling warships drifting lightly away before a cosmically violent blast of superheated atmosphere. Jarvenon burst open, all the way around, and spattered; billions upon billions of tons of hot core-magma being hurled afar in gouts and streamers. The two planets, crashing through what had been a world, crunched, crushed together in all the unimaginable momentum of their masses and velocities. They subsided, crashingly. Not merely mountains, but entire halves of worlds disrupted and fell, in such gargantuan paroxysms as the eye of man had never elsewhere beheld.”
                                             (Gray Lensman, pp. 297-298, Fantasy Press edition)

Aerial view of Japanese city in flames after B-29 raid

     Perhaps, like Homer’s drawing upon ancestral memories in depicting his hero plundering a hapless coastal town, murdering and/or enslaving its inhabitants, Smith was simply reflecting the horrors of mid-20th Century warfare. The soon to occur genocide and aerial bombardment of the Second World War were all too accurately forecast in the wholescale slaughter which forms an inextricable part of Smith’s space operas.