Who were the lotus-eaters in the Odyssey?

The episode

It is the shortest adventure in the Odyssey, about twenty lines (9.82–104). After the raid on Ismarus, a north wind catches the fleet off Cape Malea, the southern tip of Greece, and drives it for nine days. On the tenth they land among people who, in Butler’s words, “live on a food that comes from a kind of flower.” Odysseus sends two men and a herald inland to find out who they are.

The locals mean them no harm. They simply share their food.

who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return

Odysseus drags the three back in tears, ties them under the rowing benches, and orders everyone aboard at once, before anyone else can taste it (9.98–104).

A danger without a monster

Nobody is eaten here, and nobody is killed. That is what makes the episode unsettling. The threat is forgetting, and Homer says it twice in a few lines: whoever eats the lotus forgets the homecoming, the nostos that drives the whole poem. The same danger returns in other shapes. Circe’s drug is meant to make men forget their homeland (why Circe turned the men into pigs), and Calypso spends seven years trying to charm Odysseus into forgetting Ithaca (1.55–59). A monster can be fought. The quiet wish to stop going home is harder.

Where was it, and what was the lotus?

Homer gives no map; past Cape Malea his geography becomes poetry. Later Greeks wanted a place anyway. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, puts lotus-eaters on the coast of Libya, people who live on a fruit as sweet as dates and even make wine from it (Histories 4.177). Tradition settled on Djerba, an island off southern Tunisia.

This lotus is not the water lily of the Nile or of Asia. The usual candidate is a wild jujube of North Africa, Ziziphus lotus, a thorny shrub with small sweet fruit; others have guessed at dates, or at some drug. Homer says only that the fruit was honey-sweet (9.94).

Lotus-eaters today

In English a lotus-eater is someone who drifts through life in dreamy, idle comfort, forgetting duty. Alfred Tennyson fixed the image with his poem “The Lotos-Eaters,” first printed in the early 1830s and rewritten for his Poems of 1842, where the sailors reach a drowsy shore:

In the afternoon they came unto a land, / In which it seemed always afternoon.

By the end of the poem they sing that they will roam no more. James Joyce borrowed the name too, for an episode of his novel (Odysseus and Ulysses). Homer’s three scouts were luckier than Tennyson’s sailors: their captain tied them down and took them home.