Homer, ancient Greece and Tahiti

Tahiti has always had a rather strange relationship with ancient Greece. The paintings and engravings produced after Tahiti was first visited by Europeans in the 1760s were neoclassical in style. So, Polynesians were depicted as if ancient Greeks, wearing togas and carrying palm fronds.

These pictures established Tahiti as an arcadia or Garden of Eden, an image which endured throughout the 19^th century and indirectly led, in the early 1920s, to a Tahiti craze. The number of tourists travelling there dramatically increased. There were numerous books, magazine articles and photographs extolling the virtues of this paradise island, and over 150 South Sea Island movies were produced, many featuring Tahiti. And, uniquely out of all the many South Pacific islands, some 20 American and European writers and artists visited or settled on Tahiti.

Arriving less than 20 years after the death of the great French painter Paul Gauguin, I have called these men ‘guys like Gauguin’. Some such as millionaire novelist Zane Grey, American painters Jerome Blum and Francis McComas and Evelyn Waugh’s older brother Alec only stayed for a few months. But others, like co-authors of Mutiny on the Bounty James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff, writers Robert Dean Frisbie and Robert Keable and artists William Alister Macdonald and Octave Morillot stayed for much longer. 

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his men visit the lotus-eaters’ island. Three of his men eat the lotus flowers which make them so happy that they lose any desire to leave the island and return home. In Christopher Nolan’s film (brief spoiler alert) the visit to the lotus-eaters’ island is not included but the eponymous hero does become a lotus-eater, fed by the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) with the same consequences.

Homer spent just 23 lines, out of over 12,000, on the story of the lotus-eaters, their island, the impact on Odysseus’ men and their escape. But Alfred Tennyson popularised the tale, and the phrase, in his 1832 poem The Lotos-Eaters. By the 1920s ‘lotus-eater’ was much used by newspapers. It was not a compliment. For example, a 1922 New York Herald article on Tahiti explained that when a civilised man stayed too long in the South Seas, he goes ‘native’ and ‘when a white man goes native his case is hopeless. He is a lotus-eater indeed. He is done for. He is beyond the pale.’

Why did so many Americans and European writers and artists go to Tahiti in the 1920s? Perhaps there is a parallel with Odysseus, who was heading home after ten years fighting the Trojans. Quite a few of the guys like Gauguin were in France during World War 1. The Iowan James Norman Hall had fought for the British – pretending he was Canadian; for the French – as a pilot; and for the Americans, again as a pilot, before ending up in a prisoner of war camp. Englishman Robert Keable served as a chaplain to the appallingly treated black labourers of the South African Native Labour Corps in France. Philadelphia born artist George Biddle felt both angry and guilty that his work in France kept him away from the front line. And Charles Nordhoff, who grew up in California, went from ambulance driver to pilot. He perhaps best summed up their reaction to the war:

After being in France for these past few years and seeing what civilisation has done to mankind, I want to get as far away from it as possible; so if the South Seas are as I hope they are, that is where I want         to spend the rest of my life.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus spends seven years on a deserted island, trapped by the nymph Calypso.

In Nolan’s version he eats lotus flowers to suppress memories of the Trojan War and its atrocities. Many of the guys like Gauguin were heavy drinkers which probably helped them in a similar way. As far as I have discovered only one resorted to a powerful narcotic. Octave Morillot, the French painter, was an opium addict who imported the drug from France – smuggled in amongst his pots of paint. Although in the mornings he found time to paint or take his dogs out to hunt wild boar, most afternoons and evenings would be spent lounging in bed with his opium pipe.

If the guys like Gauguin were lotus-eaters what, apart from the war, were they trying to forget? James Norman Hall complained about the relentless technological progress, more and more cars and roads. Robert Dean Frisbie disliked ‘the noisy clamour of the civilised world’. Robert Keable bemoaned the state of Europe with famine in Austria and British army brutality in Ireland, but he also wanted to escape a failed marriage. William Alister Macdonald too was running away from his wife, and like Keable with a woman almost half his age.

Perhaps it was simply that they were looking for a better, simpler, life. Post-war America and Europe were deeply socially conservative. In most countries homosexuality was illegal, non-marital sex discouraged, mixed race friendships opposed, gambling banned and in America, alcohol prohibited. Tahiti allowed and some would say encouraged all of these activities. And one in particular. The aforementioned 1922 New York Herald article was subtitled: ‘Why the Sirenlike Women of Polynesia Draw Men from all Quarters of the World’ and helpfully explained:

The example of the sirens who attempted to lure Odysseus to their fascinating rock, as told by Homer, has been followed with more success and more tragic climaxes by modern sirens ever since Homer established the precedent.

Alec Waugh was the only one of the guys like Gauguin who admitted that he had travelled to Tahiti for sex. But many ended up forming close relationships with Polynesians either marrying or living for many years with their partner. Morillot, Hall, Nordhoff, Frisbie, Keable and Macdonald all had children with their Polynesian partners. The newspapers’ disapproval of the lotus-eaters of Tahiti was fuelled by the growing racism in America and Europe against mixed-race relationships. This change is evident in movies about the South Sea. Before 1918 a number of such relations in these movies ended happily, but none did afterwards, and by 1930 the Hay’s Code had forbidden relationships between black and white characters.

In Homer’s Odyssey the Sirens’ song lures sailors to their island only for their ships to be crushed on the rocks killing them all. The suggestion in the 1920s was that Polynesian sirens were offering unescapable physical pleasure.  The truth was that many of the men fell in love and the reason they stayed was because they knew that they would face social condemnation if they returned home with their partner and child.

Nolan’s film has reintroduced the idea of the lotus-eater. The popularity of the term in the 1920s is exemplified by fact that John Barrymore’s 1921 Hollywood movie was called The Lotus Eater. Although set in the modern day, the ridiculous story culminates in the hero stealing a hot air balloon and sailing across the South Pacific before landing on a remote island, presumably near Tahiti, where he finds a peaceful race of people all descended from ancient Greeks, still wearing togas and sandals!

Guys like Gauguin, writers and artists in 1920s Tahiti, will be published by Troubador on 28^th August 2026.