The Odyssey is, along with The Iliad, one of the two oldest works of literature in the Western tradition. It is an epic poem: “epic” both in the sense that it is long, and in the sense that it presents itself as telling an important story, in the traditional, formulaic language used by archaic poets for singing the tales of gods, wars, journeys, and the collective memories and experience of the Greek-speaking world.
Modern connotations of the word “epic” are in some ways misleading when we turn to the Homeric poems, the texts that began the Western epic tradition. The Greek word epos means simply “word” or “story” or “song.” It is related to a verb meaning “to say” or “to tell,” which is used (in a form with a prefix) in the first line of the poem. The narrator commands the Muse, “Tell me”: enn-epe. An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that is told.
The Odyssey is grand or (in modern terms) “epic” in scope: it is over twelve thousand lines long. The poem is elevated in style, composed entirely in a regular poetic rhythm, a six-beat line (dactylic hexameter), and its vocabulary was not that used by ordinary Greeks in everyday speech, in any time or place. The language contains a strange mixture of words from different periods of time, and from Greek dialects associated with different regions. A handful of words in Homer were incomprehensible to Greeks of the classical period. The syntax is relatively simple, but the words and phrases, in these combinations, are unlike the way that anybody ever actually spoke. The style is, from a modern perspective, strange: it is full of repetitions, redundancies, and formulaic expressions. These mark the
poem’s debt to a long tradition of storytelling and suggest that we are in a world that is at least partly continuous with a distant, half-forgotten past.
But in some ways, the story told in this long piece of verse is small and ordinary. It is a story, as the first word of the original Greek tells us, about “a man” (andra). He is not “the” man, but one of many men—albeit a man of extraordinary cognitive, psychological, and military power, one who can win any competition, outwit any opponent, and manage, against all odds, to survive. The poem tells us how he makes his circuitous way back home across stormy seas after many years at war. We may expect the hero of an “epic” narrative to confront evil forces, perform a superhuman task, and rescue vast numbers of people from an extraordinary kind of threat. Failing that, we might hope at least for a great quest unexpectedly achieved, despite perils all around; an action that saves the world, or at least changes it in some momentous way—like Jason claiming the Golden Fleece, Launcelot glimpsing the Holy Grail, or Aeneas beginning the foundation of Rome. In The Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back to the way it was before he went away. For this hero, mere survival is the most amazing feat of all.
Only a portion of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey describes the magical wanderings of Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca. These adventures are presented as a backstory partly told by the hero himself (in Books 5 through 12). The poem cuts between far-distant and diverse locations, from Olympus to earth, from Calypso’s island to the palace at Ithaca, from the underworld to the cottage of the swineherd. Sometimes the setting feels entirely realistic, even mundane—a world where a mother packs a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where there is a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and play checkers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together. At other moments, we are in the realm of pure fantasy, inhabited by cannibals, witches, and goddesses with six barking heads, where it is possible to cross the streams of Ocean (the mythical river that encircles the known world), and come to the land of asphodel, where the spirits of dead heroes live forever. Different characters tell their own inset stories—some true, some false, of past lives, adventures, dreams, memories, and troubles. The poem weaves and unweaves a multilayered narrative that is both simple and artful in its patterning and composition.
The story begins in an unexpected place, in medias res (“in the middle of things”—the proper starting point for an epic, according to Horace). It is not the start of the Trojan War, which began with the Judgment of Paris and the Abduction of Helen and was fought for ten years. Nor does the poem start at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey home, which has been in progress for almost as many years as the war. Instead, it begins when nothing much seems to be happening at all; Odysseus, his son, and his wife are all stuck in a state of frustration and paralysis that has been continuing for years and is becoming unbearable.
Odysseus, at the start of the poem, is trapped by the goddess Calypso, who wants to have him stay there as her husband for eternity. He could choose to evade death and old age and stay always with her; but movingly, he prefers “to see even just the smoke that rises / from his own homeland, and he wants to die.” Odysseus longs to recover his own identity, not as a victim of shipwreck or a coddled plaything of a powerful goddess, but as a master of his home and household, as a father and as a husband. He sits sobbing by the shore of the island every day, desperately staring at the “fruitless sea” for a boat that might take him back home.
Meanwhile, in Ithaca, Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is surrounded by young men who have forced their way into her home and are making merry with daily feasts, wasting the provisions of the household, waiting for her to agree to give up on Odysseus and marry one of them. Penelope has a deep loyalty both to her lost husband, for whom she weeps every night and whom she misses “all the time,” and also to the “beautiful rich house” in which she lives, which she risks losing forever if she remarries. She has devised clever ways to put off the suitors, but it is clear that she cannot do so forever; eventually, she will have to choose one of them as her husband and perhaps leave the household of Odysseus for a new home. When that happens, either the suitors will divide the wealth of Odysseus between them
—as they sometimes threaten—or the dominant suitor may gain the throne of Ithaca for himself. The ambiguity about what the suitors are seeking matches an even more central ambiguity, about what Penelope herself wants. Indefinitely, tearfully, Penelope waits, keeping everyone guessing about her innermost feelings and intentions. As the chief suitor complains, “She offers hope to all, sends notes to each, / but all the while her mind moves somewhere else.” This premise allows for artful resonances with earlier moments in the myth of Troy. Much-courted Penelope resembles
Helen, the woman to whom all the Greek heroes came as suitors (Menelaus, her husband, eventually won her hand by lot), and whom Paris, Prince of Troy, later stole away. Like Paris, Penelope’s suitors threaten to steal away a married woman as if she were a bride. Penelope’s house also echoes the besieged town of Troy, when the Greeks were fighting to take Helen back home—but there is here no strong Hector to defend the inhabitants.
Telemachus, Odysseus’ almost-adult son, is in a particularly precarious situation. Left as a “little newborn baby” when Odysseus sailed for Troy, he must be twenty or twenty-one years old at the time of the poem’s action, but he seems in many ways younger. To fight off the suitors and take control of the household himself, he would need great physical and emotional strength, a strong group of supporters, and the capacity to plan a difficult military and political operation—none of which he possesses. Telemachus must complete several difficult quests in the course of the poem: to survive the mortal danger posed by the suitors; to mature and grow up to manhood; to find his lost father, and help him regain control of the house. The journey with which the story begins is not that of Odysseus himself but of Telemachus, who sets out to find news of his absent father. The son’s odyssey away from home parallels the father’s quest in the opposite direction. The poem intertwines the story of these three central characters— the father, the mother, the son—and shows us how something different is at stake for each of them, in the gradual and difficult struggle to rebuild their lost nuclear family.
The Odyssey puts us into a world that is a peculiar mixture of the strange and the familiar. The tension between strangeness and familiarity is in fact the poem’s central subject. Its setting, in the islands of the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, would have been vaguely familiar to any Greek-speaking reader; but this version of the region includes sea-monsters and giants who eat humans, as well as gods who walk the earth and talk with select favorites among the mortals. We encounter a surprisingly varied range of different characters and types of incident: giants and beggars, arrogant young men and vulnerable old slaves, a princess who does laundry and a dead warrior who misses the sunshine, gods, goddesses, and ghosts, brave deeds, love affairs, spells, dreams, songs, and stories. Odysseus himself seems to contain multitudes: he is a migrant, a pirate, a carpenter, a king, an athlete, a beggar, a husband, a lover, a father, a son, a fighter, a liar, a leader, and a thief. He is a man who cries, takes naps, and feels homesick,
but he is also a man who has a special relationship with the goddess who transforms his appearance at will and ensures that his schemes succeed. The poem promotes but also questions its own fantasies and ideals, such as the idea that time and change can be undone, and the notion that there is such a thing as home, where people and relationships can stay forever the same.
Who Was Homer?
The authorship of the Homeric poems is a complex and difficult topic, because these written texts emerge from a long oral tradition. Marks of this distinctive legacy are visible in The Odyssey on the level of style. Dawn appears some twenty times in The Odyssey, and the poem repeats the same line, word for word, each time: emos d’erigeneia phane rhododaktulos eos: “But when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared . . .” There is a vast array of such formulaic expressions in Homeric verse, which suggest that things have an eternal, infinitely repeatable presence. Different things will happen every day, but Dawn always appears, always with rosy fingers, always early. Characters and objects all have their own descriptive terms in Homer; these are known as epithets, rather than adjectives, because they express an essential quality or characteristic, rather than a trait that the object or person possesses only in a particular moment. Ships are “black,” “hollow,” “swift,” or “curved,” never “brown,” “slow,” or “wobbly.” Chairs are “well-carved” or “polished,” never “uncomfortable” or “expensive.” Penelope is “prudent Penelope,” never “swift-footed Penelope” even if she is moving quickly. Telemachus is “thoughtful,” even when he seems particularly immature. Moreover, many types of scene follow a certain predictable pattern. There is a fixed sequence of events described, with variations, whenever someone gets dressed or puts on armor, whenever a meal is prepared, or whenever a person is killed. Through its formulaic mode, The Odyssey assures us that, once we know the patterns, the world will follow a predictable rhythm. This feature of the Homeric poems is a mark of their debt to a Greek oral tradition of poetic song that extends back hundreds of years before the poems in their current forms came into existence.
In The Odyssey itself we meet two singers who play the lyre while they give their performances of traditional tales at the banquets of the rich. The
first is Demodocus at the court of King Alcinous of Phaeacia, who tells stories about Odysseus himself and the Trojan Horse, as well as about the affair between the god Ares and the goddess Aphrodite. The second is Phemius, who performs under compulsion for the suitors of Penelope. These characters give us some important insights into the composition of the poem, and the person (or people) who composed it. In an obviously self- interested spirit, The Odyssey suggests that poets have a particularly honorable place in society. But the singer is also presented as a servant, perhaps a slave, who earns food and a place to rest by giving performances that are enjoyed by wealthy banqueters. Demodocus does not read out his poetry from a script; his inability to do so is underlined by the fact that he is blind (not incidentally, no one in the entire Odyssey reads or writes anything). Moreover, Demodocus does not invent an original story of his own composition. Instead, Demodocus is inspired by the Muse to sing the “deeds of heroes”—which are, at least in outline, already well-known to his audience. The skill and inspiration of these illiterate singers is shown not in the invention of entirely new stories, but in their ability to retell ancient stories, and to transport their audience to the scenes they describe.
But Homer himself—if there was such a person—was not exactly a Demodocus. A blind, illiterate bard could not, by himself, have written the monumental Iliad and Odyssey. Homer is usually described in Greek sources not as a singer (aoidos) or rhapsode (“song-stitcher”), but as a poet, poetes—a word that means “maker.” Indeed, a normal way to refer to Homer in Greek is as “the Poet”—the name Homer can be omitted, since there is only one primary poet in the canon.
The Odyssey as we know it is based, like almost all the Graeco-Roman literature we have, on medieval manuscripts. But there is an important difference with this text. The medieval manuscripts of an author like Virgil or Horace are based on earlier manuscripts, based in turn on earlier manuscripts, and so on, each scribe copying the work of a predecessor, and moving back from the medieval codex (a leaved book written on animal skin parchment) to the Byzantine and then ancient papyrus (a scroll written on a kind of thick paper made from papyrus leaves).
The Odyssey and The Iliad are different, not only because they are older than other ancient texts, but because of the specific difficulties of understanding how these poems were created—not, or not simply, from the mind of an individual creator, but also from a long oral tradition, which has
been transformed into two monumental written texts. How exactly did this process happen? Did a single, particularly talented folk-poet learn to write? Or did an illiterate singer collaborate with scribes? Was there one creator, or many? At what time in the process of composition did writing enter the picture?
This takes us to what is known as the Homeric Question, which is really a whole cluster of questions about the composition of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Question is given a capital Q, because scholars still disagree on some crucial issues even after a couple of centuries of discussion. How exactly did the Homeric poems as we have them emerge from the oral tradition that preceded them? Who was Homer? Was there a single author of The Odyssey, or several? Did the same person produce The Iliad and The Odyssey? When exactly did the poems get written down, and how? Can we trace earlier and later parts of the poems, or tie particular passages to different geographical locations? And to what extent do the poems reflect real historical events, cultures, and peoples—a real Trojan War, or the real Mycenean civilization of late Bronze Age Greece (which existed from the sixteenth to the twelfth centuries BCE)? Most generally, how exactly did multiple people over hundreds of years across the Greek-speaking world work together to create this magnificent, challenging, and coherent work of poetic storytelling? Design “by committee” has a very bad name, and yet The Odyssey seems like an unexpected success. How was it done?
During the Renaissance, when the Homeric poems were rediscovered in Europe, Homer was assumed to have been a writer, in the same way that Virgil or Dante were writers—albeit a writer from an ancient time. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dissenting voices began to emerge. In 1664, the Abbé d’Aubignac attacked Homer, arguing that The Iliad and Odyssey were incoherent, immoral, and tasteless poems, cobbled together out of an oral folk tradition. A generation later, the British scholar Richard Bentley studied Homer’s language, and proved that it was much earlier than classical (fifth- and fourth-century) Greek, because it still showed traces of a letter of the alphabet that dropped out of the language: the digamma. Bentley argued that “Homer” was a prehistoric oral poet of about 10,000 BCE, whose disparate and rambling songs were not gathered into the epics we have until the late sixth century. Scholars began to apply new methods of historical and linguistic analysis, and to ask new questions about how and when these texts were produced. In his Prolegomena to
Homer of 1795, a pioneering work in this “new philology,” Friedrich August Wolf argued that the Homeric poems were transmitted orally, and that they had undergone a long period of change and adaptation, through multiple oral reperformances and multiple reformulations by literate editors to suit changing contemporary tastes. He suggested that the poems, which he saw as the product of “the whole Greek people,” were forged into their state of apparent unity only at the stage of transcription. Wolf’s new vision initiated a fresh discussion of how the original Homer, or the original building blocks of the poem, might be uncovered out of the text as we have it.
During the nineteenth century, Homeric scholarship was divided between the Analytic and Unitarian schools. The Unitarians opposed Wolf’s ideas, largely on literary grounds, and argued that the poems as we have them are not an aggregate of earlier, shorter compositions, but were composed by a lone author with a single overarching structure in mind. The Analysts, by contrast, argued that the epics were produced by many different hands. There were multiple theories about how exactly the compilation took place, and what the original kernel might have been. Some argued that there was an original core narrative, an ur-Odyssey, which had been encrusted with many later and clumsier accretions; their scholarly task was to strip away the layers of later sub-Homeric narrative and restore the original purity of the poems. Others believed that the poems as we have them are a compilation of originally separate folk stories welded together. The Analysts shared the view that the earlier, more original layers of the poems were superior to the later additions and edits, although they disagreed about where exactly the original Homer could be located in the poems as we have them. Even in more recent times, Homerists have been slow to shake off the notion that earlier means better, as well as to rid themselves of the hope that one might chisel a more perfect poem out of the rough marble of the text we have.
Up until the start of the twentieth century, scholars took the oral roots of Homeric poetry more or less for granted, not fully understanding the degree to which they can help us explain important features of Homeric style and narrative technique. The emergence of Homeric poetry from folk traditions explained its “primitive” style, but the generic and stylistic structures of oral poetry and folk traditions were not examined in a systematic way. The state of Homeric scholarship changed radically and permanently in the early
1930s, when a young American classicist named Milman Parry traveled to the then-Yugoslavia with recording equipment and began to study the living oral tradition of illiterate and semiliterate Serbo-Croat bards, who told poetic folk tales about the mythical and semihistorical events of the Serbian past. Parry died at the age of thirty-three from an accidental gunshot, and research was further interrupted by the Second World War. But Parry’s student Albert Lord continued his work on Homer, and published his findings in 1960, under the title The Singer of Tales. Lord and Parry proved definitively that the Homeric poems show the mark of oral composition.
The “Parry-Lord hypothesis” was that oral poetry, from every culture where it exists, has certain distinctive features, and that we can see these features in the Homeric poems—specifically, in the use of formulae, which enable the oral poet to compose at the speed of speech. A writer can pause for as long as she or he wants, to ponder the most fitting adjective for a particular scene; she can also go back and change it afterwards, on further reflection—as in the famous anecdote about Oscar Wilde, who labored all morning to add a comma, and worked all afternoon taking it out. Oral performers do not use commas, and do not have the luxury of time to ponder their choice of words. They need to be able to maintain fluency, and formulaic features make this possible.
Subsequent studies, building on the work of Parry and Lord, have shown that there are marked differences in the ways that oral and literate cultures think about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literate cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as cliché; we think of it as boring or lazy writing. In primarily oral cultures, repetition tends to be much more highly valued. Repeated phrases, stories, or tropes can be preserved to some extent over many generations without the use of writing, allowing people in an oral culture to remember their own past. In Greek mythology, Memory (Mnemosyne) is said to be the mother of the Muses, because poetry, music, and storytelling are all imagined as modes by which people remember the times before they were born.
It is now generally agreed that, in broad terms, Parry and Lord were right. Many features of the Homeric poems are indeed formulaic (such as those standard “epithets” and those formulaic “type-scenes” of arming or eating), and must have originated from an oral tradition. But there is still a very wide range of opinion about how, exactly, the words of many generations of illiterate and semiliterate bards turned into the written texts
of Homer that we have. Several essential factors need to be accounted for by any viable theory. Most obviously, the Homeric poems are written texts, not oral performances. Writing must have played a central part in the process of composition, so it is very misleading to describe The Odyssey simply as an “oral” poem, as is far too often done. It is a written text based on an oral tradition, which is not at all the same as being an actual oral composition. Moreover, these texts are far too long for any singer to perform them on a single occasion, and far too long for any individual to hold in memory without the use of writing. Songs that had an influence on the Homeric poems were sung for hundreds of years in preliterate Greece; but none of them was The Odyssey.
These are written texts that display the legacy of a long oral tradition. In important ways the poems are a patchwork. The language is a mishmash of several different dialects, which marks the fact that the Greek singers and storytellers lived and developed their legends in multiple different locations across the Greek-speaking world. Moreover, there are small inconsistencies in the narrative itself, which usually pass unnoticed by the casual reader (such as a slight confusion about how many cloaks Eumaeus possesses, and an apparent switch in who sets up the axes for the contest in which the suitors and Odysseus compete for Penelope’s hand). The inconsistencies could mark the text’s emergence from multiple different earlier versions of the story of Odysseus, or they might suggest multiple stages of composition and revision, by one poet or by many. Yet despite their mixed language, and despite the few inconsistencies, both The Iliad and The Odyssey display striking structural coherence. There is a grand architecture to the storytelling, which might seem to imply the careful planning of a single architect, or architects.
It is possible, as Albert Lord argued, that an oral poet worked closely with a literate scribe or scribes over the course of many days, weeks, or months. On this model, the composition of The Odyssey may have been not so different from that of Paradise Lost, composed by a blind poet who dictated his work over a long period to a number of amanuenses. Lord and Parry thought that the composer of the poem could not have been literate, because in the Yugoslavian context, singers who acquired literacy tended to lose their ability to compose oral poetry. But it has now been shown that oral traditions, or “orature,” can interact with literacy in a number of different ways, and they are not necessarily driven out as soon as literacy
arrives; in Somalia, for example, oral poets have been able to continue their oral compositions even after acquiring literacy. Oral literature is more diverse than Parry, with a single point of cultural comparison, could discern.
Some scholars argue that The Odyssey was composed by a single person who was well acquainted with the oral tradition but had become literate. This is certainly possible, but there is really no evidence one way or the other. Alternatively, perhaps the poem was composed when one particularly talented illiterate or semiliterate poet (or several) teamed up with a scribe or a group of scribes. Perhaps the scribe or scribes were entirely passive in the process of writing down what the poet composed; or perhaps there was an ongoing collaboration between two or more members of a group. Again, it is difficult to adjudicate between these various possibilities, in the absence of any solid evidence, or a time machine.
The same person could, in theory, have composed The Iliad and The Odyssey, though many scholars believe that different individuals wrote the two poems, because they are notably different in terms of language as well as narrative content. It certainly seems likely that the person or people who composed The Odyssey were aware of The Iliad, since The Odyssey supplements but does not repeat any incidents from The Iliad—which is unlikely to have happened by chance.
Scholars who claim that The Odyssey was composed by a single person acknowledge that this poet drew on a long and complex set of earlier poetic and folkloric traditions, and that the initial composition underwent considerable alteration in subsequent years, decades, and centuries. Homer
—whoever he, she, or they may have been—composed this definitive version of the homecoming of Odysseus with a deep awareness of multiple different versions of the story, as well as a deep knowledge of multiple other parallel folk traditions and myths. For instance, there were probably versions of the story in which Penelope was aware of Odysseus’ plans to slaughter the suitors at a much earlier stage, and thus proposed the Contest of the Bow in full knowledge that it would help further her husband’s plot. The Odyssey is also influenced by other related archaic legends, originating both around the Mediterranean and the Near East; for instance, the ancient myth of Jason and the Argonauts seems to hover behind the story of Odysseus and his wanderings.
Maybe an individual genius, a “Homer,” had a particularly important role in the creation of The Odyssey. But we should question the notion that a unified structure and coherent creative product must necessarily be seen as the result of an individual’s work. Scholars have tended to assume so, because many long-form narrative genres that we are familiar with, like novels, are produced that way. However, we are also familiar with long narratives that do not have single authors. Many movies, for example, are the product of a team. Most contemporary long-form television drama series are put together by multiple people, even if there is a single creator who came up with the show’s initial premise. It may be helpful to think in these terms when considering the authorship of The Odyssey. Perhaps we are more prepared than readers of the past to approach The Odyssey as a poem that exists as a mostly unified whole, but which was created by multiple different people, over a long period of time.
When Was The Odyssey Composed?
The date of the poem, no less than its authorship, is a matter of serious disagreement. In the middle of the eighth century BCE, the inhabitants of Greece began to adopt a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet to write down their language. The Homeric poems may have been one of the earliest products of this new literacy. If so, they would have been composed some time in the late eighth century. But some scholars have suggested a significantly later date, in the early, middle, or late seventh century BCE; others, less plausibly, have suggested even later dates of composition. The near consensus is that, at some point between the late eighth and late seventh century, a hundred-year-long window, The Odyssey was composed.
It is frustratingly difficult to be any more precise. Arguments about dating the Homeric poems usually involve an appeal to material evidence. Objects can often be dated with some precision, especially since the advent of carbon dating and other technological advances in archaeology. People use different artifacts as time goes by, or behave differently in ways that leave a material record: for instance, we know that people in the Mediterranean world switched from using bronze weapons to using, primarily, iron, once new metallurgical techniques developed. Ceramics survive well over thousands of years and are useful for tracking cultural
change, since pottery fashions often change fairly rapidly. But it is extremely difficult to use any such evidence to date The Odyssey. For example, inscribed on a clay drinking cup that was found on the Italian island of Ischia there is the fragment “Nestor’s cup, good to drink from.” Some scholars, citing an extensive description of King Nestor’s magnificent golden cup in The Iliad, have claimed that this inscription must be an allusion to the poem. It is nice to imagine that the words are a kind of joke: this simple, ordinary piece of crockery is identifying itself as a magnificent, heroic item. The cup can be dated to 750–700 BCE, so if this really is an allusion, The Iliad cannot be later than that date. But it is also quite possible that there were other poems and traditions about Nestor; the cup does not actually quote The Iliad, so it is not conclusive evidence that its maker knew the Homeric poem as such, rather than a set of associated Trojan legends—which we know also circulated in non-Homeric versions throughout the archaic period.
The Homeric poems reflect a mixture of artifacts and practices that existed at different historical times (such as divergent funeral practices, by burial or cremation, and different dowry practices). Indeed, the poems seem to have no interest in conveying an accurate, realistic account of the culture in which they were produced. Rather, they combine elements of a fictionalized, heroicized past with details of the more recent or contemporary world. Consider, as one example, the diets of characters in Homer. The Odyssey’s noble classes subsist on bread and, especially, wine and meat—usually large, impressive domesticated animals like pigs, sheep, and cattle (not chickens or geese, although Penelope dreams of geese and geese are kept in the palace). Nobody ever drinks water, and the men eat fish only when the alternative is starvation—as when Odysseus and his men are stranded on the island of Thrinacia. In real life, as the archaeological record shows and as common sense would predict, the people who lived around the Mediterranean ate fish, vegetables, cheese, and fruit. It has been suggested that the diet of these heroes might reflect a vague memory of even more ancient Indo-European civilizations; the nomadic people of the steppes by the Black Sea ate far more meat than the Greeks ever did. But it seems most likely that Homeric elites do not eat meat as a reflection of reality, but because it is a way for the poem to demonstrate their distinguished and extraordinary status. Meat makes them strong, and it shows how strong and important they already are—the stuff of legends.
Questions of dating are further complicated by the fact that the Homeric poems, or sections of them, were performed regularly by rhapsodes for several hundred years. These “song-stitchers”—professional poetry performers—competed in public competitions, and imagined themselves as stitching together a quilt of poetic narrative out of an already existing cloth, one often presented as the poetry of “Homer.” It seems likely that rhapsodes made use of written texts to learn their lines of Homer, although they may also have ad-libbed and riffed off the script. Rhapsodes presumably introduced variations on the texts in performance, until the first Homeric scholars, men associated with the library of ancient Alexandria in the second century BCE, tried to “correct” the texts. By this time there must have been many slight textual variants in the Homeric poems, and the Alexandrians tried to come up with the “best” reading at each moment when their manuscripts did not agree. We have evidence of the type of variant that existed in the texts of Homer in circulation in the classical period, because quotations of Homer by authors such as Plato are sometimes a little different from the text as we have it.
But The Odyssey as read by Sophocles or Plato in fifth- or fourth- century Athens was presumably not significantly different from our own. Minor variations aside, the Homeric poems existed by the late seventh century BCE, and they quickly claimed a canonical place all over the Greek world. By the sixth century, they had acquired a central place in the cultural institutions of ancient Athens. In 566 BCE, Pisistratus, the tyrant of the city (which was not yet a democracy), instituted a civic and religious festival, the Panathenaia, which included a poetic competition, featuring performances of the Homeric poems. The institution is particularly significant because we are told that the Homeric poems had to be performed “correctly,” which implies the canonization of a particular written text of The Iliad and The Odyssey at this date. From that time onward, if not before, The Iliad and Odyssey acquired a central place in the cultural and educational life of ancient Greece and Rome. There was no holy scripture in the classical world, but everyone knew the stories of Achilles and Odysseus as told in the Homeric poems.
Homer’s World
The geographical setting of The Odyssey is almost as hard to pin down as its temporal location. Some of the places visited by Odysseus are obviously fictional or mythical—the Land of the Dead, the island of the Sirens, the home of the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, or the city of the giant, cannibalistic Laestrygonians. But even the places that seem less clearly unrealistic are often difficult to plot onto an accurate map. Ethiopia is the most distant place imaginable, located “between the sunset and the dawn.” Libya is a mythically wealthy place where sheep produce lambs three times a year. Egypt is a little less hazy, but still not described with any precision: it is the fertile land of the Nile, where traders or visitors (like Menelaus) can acquire fabulous amounts of wealth. Even the island of Ithaca itself is described in a muddled way. This may be a sign that the traditions that informed the poem developed primarily in the eastern part of the Greek world, so that the composer(s) had only a vague notion of the actual geography of the western islands like Ithaca. It is also a sign that the poem has little interest in the realistic depiction of geography.
Nevertheless, readers since antiquity have tried to locate the wanderings of Odysseus in the real Mediterranean and Aegean world. By the third century BCE, certain traditional identifications of Homeric geography with real geography had developed. Scylla and Charybdis were identified with the Straits of Messina (where there are often rough currents, though never six-headed sea-monsters). Sicily was identified as the Island of the Cyclops
—a rich, fertile land inhabited by non-Greek people, whose customs and agricultural practices are different from those of Greece.
These identifications reflect an awareness that there is some correspondence between the world of Homer and the real world, although the relationship is partial and inexact; see Map 1, which depicts the fictional wanderings of the hero, in contrast to Maps 2, 3, and 4, which depict the geographical realities on which the fantasy is loosely based. The Odyssey explores the relationship of its central character, a man from the western Greek world, with people, gods, and monsters from many different regions, each of which has its own separate identity, and which correspond in wildly different degrees to real life.
“Greece,” as a unified entity, is an invention of the classical age; in the sixth and especially the fifth centuries BCE, Greek-speaking people began to define themselves as Hellenes, in contrast to the “barbarian” (meaning “non-Greek-speaking”) peoples of other civilizations, such as the Persians
and the Egyptians. But in Homer, as Thucydides points out, there is no single term for all Greek people. Those who sail to attack Troy from places that would later be defined as “Greek” are categorized by names for smaller ethnic tribes, or as the followers of individual leaders: the Danaeans, the Achaeans, the Myrmidons, and so on.
The Odyssey reflects an awareness of the many diverse peoples who inhabited the territories around mainland Greece. During the Bronze Age, in the fourth to second millennia BCE, the Minoans, who may have been proto-Greek speakers, inhabited Crete, while other proto-Greek speakers lived on the Cycladic islands of the Aegean, and others again on the mainland. These people left tantalizing glimpses of their cultures, through material remains, including wall paintings and pottery and ruined palaces and homes. In the sixteenth to twelfth centuries BCE, the so-called Mycenean Greeks established a powerful civilization on the Greek mainland, with grand palaces in locations such as Mycenae itself, but also in many other cities, including Pylos (home, in The Odyssey, of old King Nestor). The Myceneans had a system of writing known as Linear B, a syllabic script that was used by scribes to make administrative records on clay tablets. But when Mycenean civilization fell—perhaps due to invasion by non-Greek people or, more likely, because of civil warfare and possibly climate change—the great palaces were destroyed and, with them, the Linear B writing system was lost.
In the Greek “dark ages,” from the twelfth to the eighth centuries BCE, Greece was illiterate, and it was in this period that the oral poetic tradition that led into The Odyssey developed. The stories and myths that circulated in this period reflected memories and fantasies about the lost cultures of the Minoans and the Myceneans—although they were also drawn from neighboring cultures, such as the civilizations of the ancient Near East (including Egypt, Iran, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor). The oral tradition provided Greek-speaking people with a way to remember and memorialize the cultures that had been lost, including the wealthy and hierarchical civilization of the Myceneans.
The legends of the Trojan War—tales of a great conflict, the fall of a mighty people, and the attempts of scattered survivors to regain or build new homes—are informed by folk memory of this fallen culture. The Iliad tells the story of a conflict between two elite warrior kings, Agamemnon of Mycenae and Achilles of Thessaly—perhaps echoing a real collapse of
Mycenean civilization through civil war. In The Odyssey, the rich palaces of Nestor on Pylos and Menelaus in Sparta may reflect folk memories of Mycenean grandeur. Crete is another important point of reference in The Odyssey. When Odysseus in Ithaca tells false tales about himself, he often says that he comes from Crete—which may echo archaic Minoan or Mycenean myths, and reflect a cultural memory of the days when Crete was at the center of Greek-speaking civilization.
It is hard to say how much the Homeric poems depict the realities of actual historical events, such as “the” Trojan War. In the late nineteenth century, an amateur archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann excavated a site in Turkey, Hissarlik, that he theorized was the original Troy. He made some extraordinary discoveries, including a cache of gold that he labeled “Priam’s treasure”; later, on a different excavation in Mycenae, he claimed to have uncovered the real tomb of Agamemnon. Modern archaeologists tend to be more skeptical, and to lament the way in which Schliemann— like other archaeologists of his time—rashly shoveled his way into the earth, destroying a vast amount of evidence in the process. Hissarlik is still identified as the site of Troy, but it is now generally believed that there were at least nine towns built in the area over the course of some three millennia, from early Bronze Age settlements to a Roman imperial city. Some of these cities were destroyed by natural means, such as earthquakes, and others were destroyed by fire and war; but we cannot identify any one of these multiple destructions with the single sacking of Troy described in Homer.
It was from the Phoenicians that, in the middle of the eighth century, Greece adapted their alphabetic system of writing. The Phoenicians, a trading, seafaring people who originated from the western part of the Fertile Crescent (in the area which now includes Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan), are portrayed in the poem as rich traders who are liable to trick, rob, and enslave the unwary. Odysseus tells his swineherd, Eumaeus, an elaborate false story that he came from Crete, stayed in Egypt for seven years getting rich, and then was tricked by a “cunning man” from Phoenicia into sailing with him; the Phoenician hoped to trade him as a slave, for a profit. Eumaeus replies with his own, presumably more truthful story, which again involves being tricked and trafficked into slavery—which explains how he has ended up in Odysseus’ own household.
These sinister, deceitful, profit-mongering Phoenicians are ostensibly contrasted with Odysseus himself. Similarly, the seafaring people of Taphos
are described as “pirates,” who live by looting, robbing, and enslaving their neighbors—in contrast to the maritime wanderings of Odysseus, whose only goal is to reach his home. But the line is uncomfortably difficult to draw. Odysseus is depicted as a master of deceit, a compulsive liar; he is also, like a Phoenician or Taphian trader or pirate, hoping to return home with as large a pile of loot as he can. He enriches himself from the sacked city of Troy, and from various other places along the way, where the inhabitants either willingly equip him with presents (as in the case of Calypso, Circe, Aeolus, and the Phaeacians) or are robbed by Odysseus and his men. When telling the story of his various adventures to the Phaeacians, Odysseus begins with an episode in which he and his men stop by the city of the Cicones. He explains,
I sacked
the town and killed the men. We took their wives
and shared their riches equally among us. (9.41–43)
No justification is given for this act of plunder; it is presented simply as the kind of thing that Odysseus does, or perhaps the kind of thing that any Greek man would do, given the chance. A little later, Polyphemus the Cyclops asks Odysseus suspiciously if he is a “pirate,” like people who “risk their lives at sea to bring disaster / to other people.” Odysseus’ answer is notably equivocal. He declares that he and his men are part of the great expedition to Troy, and claims
We are proud to be the men of Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, whose fame is greatest under the sky, for sacking that vast city
and killing many people. (9.263–66)
Being a “hero,” heros—which in archaic Greek suggests a warrior, and does not imply virtue—is different from being a “pirate” in that it is a much more positive term, which a man can proudly apply to himself; nobody in Homer admits to being a pirate. Like pirates, warriors sack towns and kill the inhabitants; the main difference is scale. Odysseus goes on to infiltrate the enemy’s dwelling, maim him, and poach his beloved sheep, the wealth of his household—an act that is clearly analogous to the hero’s previous triumph over the Trojans.
The late eighth century was a period of increasing trade across the Mediterranean world—including trade of objects, stories, skills (like writing), ideas, and people. It was also a period in which Greek speakers had begun to create colonies. Colonization was a way to improve trading opportunities and increase the wealth of the originating city or settlement, as well as to house a growing population. Greek colonies developed in Libya, in southern France, along the Black Sea, and on the southern coast of Italy and Sicily—later known as Magna Graecia, “Big Greece.” The Odyssey shows an acute awareness of the processes of colonization, and Odysseus himself seems sometimes to think as much like a colonizer as a pirate. When scoping out the uninhabited island adjacent to that of the Cyclopes, he gives a description that sounds like an advertisement for prospective colonial inhabitants, as well as a critique, from the colonizer’s point of view, of the natives who have failed to exploit their country’s natural resources:
Cyclopic people have no red-cheeked ships
and no shipwright among them who could build boats, to enable them to row across
to other cities, as most people do, crossing the sea to visit one another.
With boats they could have turned this island into a fertile colony, with proper harvests.
By the gray shore there lie well-watered meadows, where vines would never fail. There is flat land
for plowing, and abundant crops would grow
in the autumn; there is richness underground. (9.125–35)
It is not surprising that the island was identified in antiquity with Sicily, given both the lush natural resources of this location in the poem, and the ways that the Polyphemus episode seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization. In real life, we know frustratingly little about the process by which the Greeks established their control. The Greek invaders quickly imported their own agricultural products—olives for oil, and grapes for wine—and later used slaves, perhaps including native Sicilians, to construct monumental architecture, vast temples to the Greek gods to represent Hellenic dominance in the region. The various tribes who
inhabited Sicily before the Greeks took over do not seem to have managed to fight back against the invaders, and there is no way to reconstruct what they felt about it all.
We can see in The Odyssey a complex response by the Greeks to their own growing dominance as traders, travelers, colonizers, pirates, leaders, and warriors. The Polyphemus episode, for example, can be read as an attempt to justify Greek exploitation of non-Greek peoples. Odysseus enters the Cyclops’ cave without the host’s permission, and then tricks, blinds, robs, and abuses the native inhabitant. As narrator, he makes his actions seem acceptable or even admirable, by emphasizing morally irrelevant considerations—such as the fact that the Cyclops lives by herding animals rather than growing crops (as presumably was also true of the native Sicilians), and by presenting his victim as loud, ugly, and oversized. Of course, Polyphemus also has the nasty habit of eating his human visitors. By this means, the text invites us to imagine that all non-Greek and pastoralist societies should be seen as barbaric and cannibalistic.
The narrative is told only through the mouth of Odysseus himself, and we may well see him as an unreliable narrator. Odysseus implies that the Cyclopic people (also known as the “Cyclopes,” plural of Cyclops) are “lawless,” or lacking in customs; but Polyphemus does his chores in an entirely regular and predictable fashion. Odysseus implies that these people are loners who care nothing for one another; but Polyphemus’ neighbors arrive promptly when they hear him calling for help, and the Cyclops treats his animals with attentive care and affection—his blind petting of his favorite “sweet ram” is particularly touching. Odysseus first tells us that the Cyclopes “put their trust in gods,” who provide them with crops (implying that these people can be blamed for their lazy lack of Greek-style agricultural practices), but then suggests that a failure to welcome strangers should be construed as an insult to “the gods,” or at least to Zeus, the god of strangers—suggesting that the gods are all on the Greek side. In fact, Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, has some powerful divine backing of his own.
The Odyssey looks back to a lost heroic age, the time before the Greek dark ages, when elite Mycenean families, living in great palaces, dominated the surrounded regions, clashed with one another, and maintained power through wealth, military prowess, and a traditional way of life. But the poem also meditates on the social and geographical changes undergone by
Greek society in the late eighth century, as the new literacy enabled new forms of communication with outsiders, and as colonizers, traders, and pirates pushed outward across the Mediterranean, encountering alien cultures and alien peoples.
Friends, Strangers, Guests
Before approaching the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus tells his men that he has to find out some important information: whether the inhabitants are “lawless aggressors,” or people who welcome strangers. Odysseus presents these categories as if they are mutually exclusive: the willingness to welcome strangers is figured as enough, in itself, to guarantee that a person or culture can be counted as law-abiding and “civilized.” The Cyclopes would have good reason to be suspicious of these visitors, who have looted and slaughtered the inhabitants of the previous island that they visited. But the dichotomy hints at the importance in The Odyssey of xenia, a word that means both “hospitality” and “friendship.” The cognate word xenos can mean both “stranger” and “friend”; it is the root from which we get the English word “xenophobia,” the fear of strangers or foreigners, as well as the sadly less common “xenophilia,” the love of strangers or of unknown objects.
Hospitality is important in all human cultures, ancient and modern; in this respect, there is nothing special about archaic Greece. What is distinctive about the customs surrounding hospitality in this culture is that elite men who have entered one another’s homes and have been entertained appropriately are understood to have created a bond of “guest-friendship” (xenia) between their households that will continue into future generations. Guest-friendship is different from philia, the friendship, affection, love, and loyalty that connects a person to his or her family members and neighborhood friends. It is created not by proximity and kinship, but by a set of behaviors that create bonds between people who are geographically distant from each other. Xenia is thus a networking tool that allows for the expansion of Greek power, from the unit of the family to the city-state and then across the Mediterranean world. It is the means by which unrelated elite families can connect to one another as equals, without having to fight for dominance. It is no coincidence that the origin of the Trojan War, the
abduction of Menelaus’ wife by his guest, Paris, is presented in Greek literature as an abuse of xenia, since the laws of hospitality are what stave off a world where men kill those who are different from themselves. When xenia is absent or is abused, violence follows.
Xenia acquired an extra importance in the era when Greek men were expanding their world. Travelers, in an era before money, hotels, or public transportation, had to rely on the munificence of strangers to find food and lodging and aid with their onward journey. The Odyssey suggests that it was the responsibility of male householders to offer hospitality of this kind to any visitor, even uninvited guests, strangers, and homeless beggars. Those who traveled to an unfamiliar land used the norms and expectations of xenia to form bonds with people who might otherwise have treated them as too ragged and dirty to deserve a welcome, or as too dangerous to accept into their home. Conversely, the promotion of Greek xenia as a quasi- universal and quasi-ethical concept can be used as imaginative justification for robbing, killing, enslaving, or colonizing those who are reluctant to welcome a group of possible bandits or pirates into their home. The Odyssey shows us both sides of this complex concept, which hovers in an uneasy space between ethics and etiquette.
The poem’s episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia. In the first four books—known as the Telemachy, the story of Telemachus—Odysseus’ young son grapples with the suitors, who are presented as bad guests: they have taken over Odysseus’ household without his permission and are abusing its resources and inhabitants. By contrast, Telemachus shows that he himself is capable of being a good, polite guest who is more or less able to overcome his crippling shyness with the magical help of Athena. He thanks his hosts appropriately, and does not overstay his welcome. He manages to be a good host also, when he welcomes a stranger in need, Theoclymenus, on board his ship. He even manages to circumvent a tricky dilemma of etiquette—how to avoid having to make a second visit with touchy, long-winded Nestor, without being rude to the old man—although only at the cost of putting his friend, Nestor’s son, in a difficult position.
Telemachus’ visits to the homes of Nestor and Menelaus provide contrasting examples of elite hospitality. The first is old-fashioned, pious, rich in horses and sons, presided over by moralizing old Nestor. The second is piled high with newly acquired treasure, brought by blustering, self-
pitying Menelaus, and the dominant figure is beautiful, magical Helen, who has frightening drugs that can take away all pain and grief. But in both Pylos and Sparta, the visit follows a set pattern. The guest is welcomed, washed by slave women, given an honorable and comfortable place to sit, and offered food and wine. Only after he has eaten and had some wine is he asked to tell his story. The visitor is then given lodging for the night, and when it is time to leave, the host provides gifts and some practical help with the onward journey. As Menelaus pompously declares, “To force a visitor to stay / is just as bad as pushing him to go.” Providing help with the next leg of the trip—pompe in Greek, “sending,” a common word and essential concept in the Odyssey—is thus an important component in hospitality. Nestor, for example, gives Telemachus a horse-drawn chariot to get to Sparta, and sends along his youngest son, Pisistratus, as a companion.
Odysseus is not so lucky in some of his hosts. We first see him suffering the burdens of a hospitality even more insistently lavish than that of Nestor. Calypso gives her human guest more than enough of everything a visitor could ask for, except the final crucial ingredient: pompe—the ability to get away. When, thanks to divine intervention, Calypso finally lets Odysseus build a raft and be on his way—an unorthodox “sending” in which the guest has to construct his own means of transportation—his next hosts are challenging in different ways. The shipwrecked, naked stranger finds himself rescued by a young princess of marriageable age, among a nation of sailors, and has to muster all his powers of flattery and politeness. Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess, warns Odysseus that her people are not welcoming to strangers; yet the court of Arete and Alcinous seems in many ways ideally hospitable. Odysseus is bathed, wined and dined, entertained with poetic song, and given the chance to tell his own story at great length. He watches and then is put to the test in the Phaeacian contests, performing far better than expected—an episode that anticipates the later challenges and contests back home in Ithaca. The Phaeacians then give him the most lavish possible pompe—a magical boat that sails itself—at a high personal cost to themselves; Poseidon punishes them by crushing their boat with a mountain hurled into the sea, thus blocking their island from the outside world forever after and curtailing any future Phaeacian generosity.
The limits and antonyms of xenia are explored in Odysseus’ account to the Phaeacian king of his wanderings to other fantastical, monstrous places he has visited. Each of these hosts seems to offer a perversion or a
frightening exaggeration of the ordinary modes of hospitality. Aeolus, the god of the winds, provides Odysseus with a means of transportation or “sending” that is more powerful than he or his men can handle: the bag of winds, once opened, blasts the ship back in entirely the wrong direction. A normal host may provide his guests with poetic and musical entertainment before he goes to sleep; the Sirens entice their visitors with a song so fascinating that they want to stay forever, and never go home again. Many of these hosts pervert the ordinary way that guests are given food and drink. The Lotus-Eaters share a plant that makes those who eat it forget all thoughts of going home. In order to meet the dead, Odysseus himself has to act like a peculiar kind of host, welcoming them into the world of the living
—by allowing them to drink blood from a ditch. The witchlike goddess Circe provides her guests with a magical drink that turns them into pigs.
Several of those whom Odysseus visits—the giant Polyphemus, the gigantic Laestrygonians, the thirsty whirlpool Charybdis, and the six- headed Scylla—are defined as monstrous because they do not feed their guests: instead, they eat them (or, in the case of Charybdis, gulp them down like drink). The majority of Odysseus’ men are devoured alive. Some are eaten by the Cyclops; many more are skewered in the water by the Laestrygonians and devoured, like fish. Later, Odysseus watches Scylla eating six of his men and hears them “still screaming, / still reaching out to me in their death throes.”
After this climactic moment, the ship—the last left from Odysseus’ fleet
—sails directly on to Thrinacia, the island of the Sun God (Helius), and is becalmed there. Supplies dwindle and the men grow hungry. While Odysseus is absent, taking a nap in a cave, the men kill and eat the Cattle of the Sun, although they know that it is forbidden. This momentous choice is made for understandable reasons: the men are hungry and desperate, and they choose to risk the anger of the gods rather than endure the pain and slow humiliation of death by starvation. The ringleader of the insurrection, Eurylochus, speaks bravely, urging the others not to worry about the Sun God’s response:
“If he is so angry
about these cows that he decides to wreck our ship, and if the other gods agree—
I would prefer to drink the sea and die at once, than perish slowly, shriveled up here on this desert island.” (12.347–52)
The language is inspiring, as if from a rousing battle speech. We may well wonder what exactly is wrong with Eurylochus’ suggestion. The episode hints at an important idea in the poem: that the willingness to die for honor, which is valued so highly on the battlefield, is not always useful in these strange new worlds. Military valor, in the world of The Odyssey, risks looking too much like impatience. The poem shows us the rewards that come to the “much-enduring” or “long-suffering” protagonist through his willingness to wait for the right moment to act, without ever giving up the goal. Moreover, the determination of this crew member to eat even forbidden foods, and to drink even “the sea,” represents a kind of self- assertion that is out of keeping with his place both in society and in the narrative. He is usurping the leadership role of Odysseus.
This act of forbidden consumption is a terrible mistake, which condemns the men to death and deprives them of their chance of getting home. Helius, the Sun God, responds to the eating of his cattle as if the men had taken a bite out of the god himself, and Zeus backs him up by drowning them all. Eating is important in The Odyssey, and eating the wrong things or eating in the wrong way results in violence or death.
Like the Cyclops or the Laestrygonians, the suitors who have taken over Odysseus’ palace in Ithaca are defined as abnormal and monstrous eaters. We are repeatedly told that they are “devouring” and “wasting” the household wealth of Odysseus, by consuming his fattest animals and drinking his wine in their constant feasts, and failing to repay the absent owner or take care of the estate. It is, of course, a violation of hospitality to enter a person’s home uninvited and remain there day after day, using up his food stores, wine, and wealth. The poem emphasizes that it is also unjust: the norms of behavior require a person to pay back what he or she owes, and a guest is supposed to give presents to a generous host, rather than simply enjoy the benefits of hospitality without giving anything in return.
Greed, ingratitude, and rudeness are annoying but, one might think, rather trivial faults. These boorish, selfish, immature young men are certainly unpleasant to be around, but not necessarily the epitome of evil, and it may be difficult to understand how anybody could think they really deserve death. The poem itself invites us to feel a degree of horror at Odysseus’ violence, and sympathy for the murdered boys. On the other hand, the language in which The Odyssey presents the suitors’ eating and drinking magnifies the enormity of their crime. The standard epithets applied to the suitors often emphasize their excessive desire to be “above” or “beyond” others (hyper: above and beyond): they are hyper-phialos or hyper-thymos (“self-indulgent,” “heedless,” “overbearing”). These words can be neutral or even positive (suggesting “noble” or “high-minded”— above the norms in a good way), but they acquire a sinister connotation here, since they are also applied to the man-eating Laestrygonians and Cyclops. We are repeatedly told that the suitors are devouring not only the literal “property” of Odysseus, but also, metonymically, his “house” and hence his “livelihood” or “life”—the words bios and biotos can mean both “way of making a living” and “life” itself. It is as if in eating Odysseus’ animals, the suitors are metaphorically eating the man himself, and his son. Telemachus complains that the suitors are “consuming my whole house, and soon they may / destroy me too.” The rage Odysseus musters against his uninvited guests seems to stem from a desperate need to preserve not only his wealth but even his identity from the mouths of those who are eating him alive.
But people who feel oppressed can become more dangerous than the people they fear. Once he reaches Ithaca, Odysseus is in the position of a guest in his own home, disguised as an old beggar. He is given a modest but warm welcome by the slave pig-keeper, Eumaeus, while the suitors act as unfriendly, hostile hosts, mocking and throwing stools at their ragged guest. However, when Odysseus is restored to his own persona, taking charge again of his household, the roles of guest and host make a sudden switch. The poor old visitor is now the householder himself. Odysseus becomes one of the most terrifying hosts of all, defending his property against unwanted visitors as thoroughly and violently as the Laestrygonians or the Sun God himself.
Gods
Xenia is particularly important to the gods in general, and especially to Zeus, the father and king of all the gods. One of the standard titles of Zeus was Xenios (“God of Strangers”). He is the god who presides over visitors, foreigners, and beggars, and who is invoked to defend the rights of guests or of hosts, when people fail to adhere to the norms of xenia. Zeus is also the god associated most closely with justice—dike in Greek, a notion linked to the idea of balance, and hence to the idea of retribution. Some readers have assumed that the gods in this poem—or at least Zeus—are defenders not only of xenia (which is, as we have seen, only partly an ethical concept), but also of morality in general. Some leap to the further notion that the triumph of Odysseus over the suitors represents an ethical victory, sanctioned by the gods. This certainly goes too far. Odysseus is presented as a morally complex character, as ancient readers recognized. The gods in The Odyssey, like those of The Iliad, are self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law.
The main difference between gods and humans is that gods are far more powerful and, unlike mortals, immune from old age and death. Humans in the poem, especially Telemachus and Odysseus himself, invoke the gods as guardians of what is “right,” but it is less clear that the gods see themselves in quite this way.
At the start of The Odyssey, Zeus is contemplating a problem in the human world. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, had raised troops to help his brother Menelaus reclaim his wife, Helen, who had been taken to Troy by Paris, son of Priam, king of Troy. But in Agamemnon’s absence, Aegisthus, who had an alternative claim to the throne of Mycenae, seduced Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, seized control of his kingdom, and murdered Agamemnon when he came back home from Troy. Later, Agamemnon’s young son Orestes—who had been sent away for his own protection—returned to Mycenae and killed both Aegisthus and his own mother, Clytemnestra, in revenge for the killing of his father.
Zeus presents the story of Aegisthus as an object lesson in human folly. People are already destined to suffer a certain amount, and yet sometimes they increase their quota of suffering by making bad choices—as Aegisthus
did in killing Agamemnon and partnering with Clytemnestra, despite the warnings of the gods. Athena replies by reminding her father that Odysseus is stuck on Calypso’s island, thanks to “bad luck,” the hostility of Poseidon, and the negligence of Zeus himself—although perhaps also, we may speculate, thanks to his own decisions.
This first exchange between divine father and divine daughter has sometimes been read to imply that the gods of The Odyssey ensure that good people, like Odysseus, are rewarded for their virtue, while bad people, like the suitors, are punished. Aristotle, the philosopher of the fourth century BCE, may hint at this interpretation in a very brief allusion to the poem: he says that The Odyssey has a double structure, and ends in opposite ways for the “better” and “worse” characters (Poetics 1453a). But “better” is not the same as “good,” and the word Aristotle uses can mean simply “more noble” or “higher class.” In fact, neither Zeus’ words nor the narrative of the poem suggests that morally good behavior guarantees a happy life. Zeus says nothing about virtue as such in this speech. Although one may speculate that the gods warned Aegisthus because they are on the side of ethical behavior (against adultery, murder, and usurpation), this is not what Zeus himself says. Rather, he insists that Aegisthus was imprudent and foolish in pursuing a course of action that he should have known would result in his doom. When Athena urges Zeus to help Odysseus, she does not claim that her favorite human is morally superior to all others—a case that would be hard to make about this lying, self-interested sacker of cities. Instead Athena reminds Zeus that Odysseus “is more sensible than other humans.” His intelligence sets him apart from other adulterers and murderers. Gods usually favor people who are exceptionally talented in some way, and the poem makes it clear that it is Odysseus’ special form of cleverness that has earned him the attention of Athena.
Moreover, Odysseus has made the prudent habit of regular sacrifice to the gods. The gods in this poem, like the human characters, prefer people who show them respect and provide plenty of lavish gifts. Gods in Homer, like humans, care about eating and drinking, and associate the proper forms of consumption with honor and identity. The consumption of meat and wine demonstrates the heroes’ close relationship to the gods, since these, unlike other foodstuffs, are always offered to the gods: a splash of wine from any drinking occasion is always poured for the gods (as a libation), and animals
that are killed are always “sacrificed,” never merely butchered. The gods are the most important guests who are always present at human feasts.
Gods have their own particular interests. As father and king of the gods, Zeus takes a special interest in masculine political power. Chieftains in Homer, whether or not they descend from Zeus in terms of lineage, are often given the epithet diotrephes, “sprung from Zeus”; in The Odyssey, this epithet is applied exclusively to Odysseus himself, whose role as king of Ithaca is apparently important to Zeus. Zeus is associated with the eagle, the king of the birds, and at more than one key moment in the poem (including the omen in Book 3, and the dream in Book 18), eagles represent Odysseus himself as the king whose power as king, and capacity to exact retribution on his enemies, seem to be favored by Zeus. In Book 1, Telemachus’ attempt to speak out against the suitors is valorized by Zeus, who sends two eagles to swoop into the assembled crowd:
they wheeled and whirred and flapped their mighty wings, swooping at each man’s head with eyes like death. (2.152–53)
The birds anticipate the moment, twenty-two books later, when Telemachus and Odysseus together will slaughter the suitors. The day before the massacre, in a memorably creepy episode, the prophet Theoclymenus is able to foresee the suitors’ deaths, when they lose control of their own faces, and their cooked meat begins to drip with blood; the prophet declares,
“Your faces, heads and bodies are wrapped up in night; your screams are blazing out like fire.
The ornate palace ceilings and the walls
are spattered with your blood. The porch is full of ghosts, as is the courtyard—ghosts descending into the dark of Erebus. The sun
has vanished from the sky, and gloomy mist is all around.” (20.353–60)
Even before their deaths at the human hands of Odysseus and his helpers, the suitors are doomed by a divinely ordained fate.
But there is more than one god in this poem, and more than one point of view from which to look at Odysseus. The god most hostile to the hero is
Zeus’ brother Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes. Indeed, the narrative of the poem can be seen as an extended balancing act between Athena’s desire to restore Odysseus to a place of honor and stability in his household, and Poseidon’s to curse him with eternal wandering. Poseidon is understandably angry that Odysseus tricks and blinds his son, Polyphemus the Cyclops, who in Book 9 calls on his father to curse the homeward journey of the man who maimed him. Poseidon is less prominent as a character in the poem than his rival, Athena; he gets far fewer speeches and far fewer appearances interacting with the human characters. But we can see his work behind every storm and shipwreck, and behind every disaster that befalls Odysseus’ unlucky fellow travelers.
Homer presents us with a world where gods mingle with humans, and may touch their lives in ways that are not always visible to the mortals involved. Great charm and magic comes from the notion that the divine and human worlds are less separate than we might otherwise imagine. Telemachus, for example, is guided by Athena on his journey, and the presence of the goddess imparts a special comfort and joy even to the most mundane moments of the trip.
Wind blew the middle sail; the purple wave was splashing loudly round the moving keel.
The goddess surfed the waves and smoothed the way. The quick black ship held steady, so they fastened the tackle down, and filled their cups with wine.
They poured libations to the deathless gods, especially to the bright-eyed child of Zeus.
All through the night till dawn the ship sailed on. (2.427–34)
Mortal characters, and their accessories, are very frequently referred to by the standard approbatory epithet, “godlike” (or variations thereof), and one of the most common epithets of all, dios—often translated as “noble” or “shining”—literally suggests “associated with Zeus” (the word has the same root as the Latin deus, “god”). The sixth-century BCE philosopher Thales said, “The world is full of gods.” This is certainly true of the world of Odysseus. On his travels, he meets a number of minor deities, including the “nymph” Calypso. “Nymph” is the normal Greek word for a human young bride, but it is also applied to goddesses who are particularly closely
associated with the natural landscape in particular places; there are nymphs of the sea (Nereids), nymphs of the woods (Dryads), and nymphs of caves (like Calypso herself, whose name suggests “hidden,” and like the unnamed nymphs whom Odysseus greets as soon as he arrives back in Ithaca). Every place has its own special deity—some welcoming or helpful, like the White Goddess who rescues Odysseus from shipwreck, and some hostile, like Scylla and Charybdis—goddesses who emerge from the dangerous natural world.
A particularly important god in this poem about journeys and interactions between people from different cultures and different households is Hermes, the messenger god, the god of travelers. Hermes is a son of Zeus who has the ability to fly at supernatural speed, bringing news or passengers from one realm to another, wearing the magical sandals “of everlasting gold with which he flies / on breath of air across the sea and land.” Hermes can dive from sky to earth and down to the underworld, and can flash through water to travel across the sea:
He touched Pieria, then from the sky
he plunged into the sea and swooped between the waves, just like a seagull catching fish,
wetting its whirring wings in tireless brine (5.50–53)
Hermes has a certain elusive quality, appearing and disappearing at will; he is, like Odysseus himself, a trickster. In the (post-Odyssean) “Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” this clever, deceitful thief acquires an epithet often used of Odysseus himself—polytropos, “much-turning.” Hermes plays a key role at three important junctures. He is the one who is sent down unwillingly from Olympus, to the distant island of Calypso, to persuade the goddess to release Odysseus; he saves Odysseus and his men from Circe; and in the final book, he is the one who leads the spirits of the suitors to the underworld.
The most important deity in the poem, however, is Athena, the goddess of technical expertise and strategic thinking. She is a military deity, often represented as dressed in battle armor, and she reminds Odysseus that she is the one who helped him sack the city of Troy, inspiring the construction of the Wooden Horse. Athena also presides over activities associated more with peacetime; Penelope’s weaving, no less than Odysseus’ fighting, is
done under the aegis of Athena. Whereas Poseidon favors the untamed world of the stormy sea, Athena loves fixed settlements and the olive tree— a crop whose oil was used in archaic Greece for cooking and skin care. Poseidon makes the earth shake; Athena makes even the most rugged, barren landscape available for cultivation.
Athena’s most common epithet, glaucopis, suggests bright or shimmering eyes. The poem constantly reminds us that Athena is alert to whatever is happening to Odysseus and Telemachus; nothing escapes her intelligent, careful notice. We can detect her presence in the narrative, her sharp eyes, even at moments when she is not visible to the human characters. For instance, when Odysseus and his men put out the eye of the Cyclops, they do so with a staff made of olive wood. When Odysseus meets Athena in person on Ithaca, she tells him that she has always been watching over him and helping him, even during the terrible storms at sea when Odysseus thought that she was giving him no protection: “I am Athena, child of Zeus. I always / stand near you and take care of you, in all / your hardships,” she declares.
Athena’s ultimate motives are mixed and not always benevolent, as befits a divine being in the Greek imagination. She presents herself as consistently the defender of Odysseus and his male line. However, we are also reminded (in Book 5) that the storms which scattered the Greek fleet after the sack of Troy were caused by Athena herself, working alongside Poseidon, since she was enraged at how the Greeks defiled the Trojan temples—and she wanted to increase the glory of her favorite when, after long delays, he finally returns to slaughter the suitors. When Odysseus is in disguise in Ithaca, Athena goads him to greater and greater rage, and prompts the suitors to mistreat him. Athena loves violence, and knows how to manipulate events so as to maximize her own pleasure in battle. Her skill in weaving clothing for domestic use sits uneasily with her ability to weave deception and military strategy for the tapestry of war.
The major Olympian gods do not usually appear in their own true form to mortals. Athena appears in multiple different guises to Telemachus and Odysseus. She can be a bird of prey, not an eagle (the bird of her father Zeus) or a hawk (bird of Apollo), but a European vulture (an ossifrage) or an owl. The cult of Athena in Greece may have originated from that of a Minoan owl goddess. When disguised as a human, Athena appears as Odysseus’ old guest-friend, Mentor. But she also assumes other guises. In
Phaeacia, she is a little girl, carrying water from the well. When she has her most extensive conversation with Odysseus, in Book 13, she appears first as a well-dressed young man; then, as if to make herself recognizable to him, she transforms herself again, this time into a beautiful woman. Athena transforms Odysseus as well as herself. She can change him into a ragged old man, and then into a tall, handsome, strong man in the prime of life. Athena can mask places, too: she casts a magical mist to make Ithaca unrecognizable, even to Odysseus himself.
Athena’s powers of transformation and disguise are part of her cunning, the quality she shares with Odysseus. In myth, Athena’s mother is Metis, a goddess who is the personification of Odysseus’ central quality: metis, which means “cunning,” “skill,” “scheming,” or “purpose.” It is the kind of cleverness that enables one to prepare for any new challenge and to come out as a winner. Metis was supposedly swallowed up by Zeus, and Athena emerged whole from the head of her father—a myth that hints at how the archaic Greeks imagined this potentially dangerous and unattractive quality as one that could become acceptable, even admirable, in the right contexts. Unlike the English word “wisdom,” which tends to suggest a staid, peaceful, possibly moral kind of intelligence acquired by long years of experience, metis suggests cunning plots and deception employed in the service of self-interest. It is not necessarily seen as a bad thing; metis is a very useful quality for a person who hopes to survive in a dangerous environment.
Odysseus is often described as polymetis, a term that suggests an abundance of metis. When the man and the goddess meet face-to-face in Book 13, they agree that they share a capacity for scheming, for deceit, for transformation, and for telling elaborate lies, as well as an ability to wait a surprisingly long time to achieve their ends. Athena tells him,
“No man can plan and talk like you, and I am known among the gods for insight and craftiness.” (13.298–300)
These shared characteristics explain why the man and the goddess get along so well together. The relationship between Athena and Odysseus has a flirtatious quality that is made all the more interesting by the fact that they come from different worlds—she a goddess, he a mortal—and by the fact
that she is a mostly female character who has the absolute upper hand, as well as the power of life, death, and identity, over this dominant Greek male. The relationships of Odysseus with Calypso, Circe, and especially Athena give us glimpses of an alternative to the “normal” mortal world, in which female characters are always less powerful than their male partners.
Goddesses, Wives, Princesses, and Slave Girls
We know frustratingly little about the lives of women in archaic Greece. The Homeric poems themselves are rich sources of information about Mediterranean society in the eighth century BCE, although both are highly artificial literary texts, and both were presumably created primarily by and for men. We see in The Iliad a world in which women were often treated by elite warrior men as if they were objects, prizes traded in war for men’s honor, along with other possessions, like bronze tripods and piles of treasure. But women also had their own distinctive work (as mothers, wives, weavers, and caretakers), and their own perspective on the male- dominated world of war. They fed, washed, and clothed the men who left them to fight among themselves for honor, and they washed, wrapped, and wept for the dead bodies that returned. They gave birth and cared for their children, and cried when men hurled them from the city walls. Fathers traded their daughters to other men as wives, and they were passed on to yet more men as trafficked slaves.
But perhaps life for women in archaic Greece was not always as bleak as this. The Odyssey allows us to imagine a far more varied array of possible female lives. Its various settings—in multiple different islands, homes, and palaces, in peacetime rather than war—are mostly places where women or goddesses have a defined position and a voice. Some scholars have tried to find buried memories in The Odyssey of an ancient, pre-Greek matriarchal society—for example, in the peculiarly high status of Queen Arete in Phaeacia, who sometimes, confusingly, seems more important than her husband, or in Penelope’s power in Ithaca over even the male members of her household, most prominently Telemachus. But these elements in the poem probably tell us more about male fears and fantasies, both ancient and modern, than about the historical realities of archaic or pre-archaic women’s lives.
Samuel Butler famously suggested in the nineteenth century that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman, because it has so many interesting and sympathetically portrayed female characters: “People always write by preference of what they know best, and they know best what they most are, and have most to do with.” Few modern scholars would agree: we have, sadly, no evidence for women participating in the archaic Greek epic tradition as composers or rhapsodes. Moreover, Butler’s claim relied on the dubious assumptions that only a woman would want to write about female characters in any depth, and that all the elements he regarded as ham-fisted could be explained by positing a young, unmarried girl as the “authoress”—in contrast to The Iliad, which was clearly the work of an adult man, a person capable of writing convincing battle scenes.
It is more plausible to view The Odyssey as the product of archaic male imaginations, questioning and defending the inequalities of male dominance within the status quo. The poem meditates on what women might be capable of, and the degree to which their potential can or should be suppressed. We are shown differences in how men and women behave—for instance, women in Homer do not fight, attack, or kill one another, or travel to foreign countries for trade or war. There are also similarities: both men and women speak, sing, cry, steal, think, plan, deceive, celebrate, organize, give orders, and feel a whole range of emotions—grief, surprise, frustration, rage, embarrassment, shame, loneliness, and joy.
The Odyssey is a poem in which certain females have far more power than real women ever did in the society of archaic Greece. Most obviously, the goddess Athena, born from the head of her father, guides Odysseus through all his wanderings and all his plots, schemes, disguises, and battles back in Ithaca. Only through female divine power can his patriarchal dominance over his household be regained. On a human level, it is essential for the plot that Penelope has the power to choose in her husband’s absence to marry one of her suitors, and that if she does so, the suitors will either divide the wealth of the house, or the new bridegroom will take control of the whole palace. It never seems to have been a normal Greek custom for power over the household to transfer through the woman to a new husband. But the notion is vitally important in The Odyssey: if Penelope remarries, Odysseus will lose not only a person he loves, but also, perhaps more important, all his economic wealth and social status. It is at least hinted as a possibility that the wife in this poem, unlike most wives in real archaic
society, has the power to choose the man who will have control over her household.
In many respects, the text reflects social roles that presumably existed in real life. Girls and women in The Odyssey occupy different social spheres from those of men and boys, and their particular types of expertise are different. Female slaves (like Eurycleia) take care of children inside the house and perform domestic labor, like making the beds and lighting the torches, while some male slaves (like the old swineherd Eumaeus) take care of animals and others (like Dolius and his sons) do farmwork and gardening. The task of feeding and clothing the elite is also divided along gender lines. Women slaves grind the grain, bake the bread, and set and clear the tables, while male slaves prepare and serve the meat and pour the wine. Women slaves (like Eurycleia and Eurynome) are the ones who wash, scrub, and anoint the bodies of male guests, and female slaves help elite women make the household clothes and linens, by spinning and weaving cloth, and help them take care of the clothes by doing laundry. Girls make the daily trip to fetch water for the household. Carpenters, shipbuilders, construction workers, ironmongers, priests, fishermen, hunters, pirates, tradesmen, and poets are male.
Among the elite, too, there are clear distinctions between male and female kinds of activity. Powerful men participate in male-only council meetings, and they are the ones who lead troops to war or (what is presented as much the same thing) on raids to kill and rob from neighboring settlements. Elite men are the primary participants in athletic competitions, although we glimpse girls playing ball in their spare time. Men predominate at feasts and banquets, although exceptional noblewomen (such as Helen, and Arete, queen of Phaeacia) are present. Elite women have a separate suite in the house, a set of “upper” or “inmost” rooms, such that Penelope is able to withdraw from the rowdy bustle of the suitors to her own tearstained bed.
The poem circles around the question of whether an elite woman’s worth depends entirely on s*xual fidelity. Odysseus has affairs with Calypso and Circe in the course of his wanderings, as well as a carefully calibrated flirtation with young Nausicaa. These episodes are not presented as a sign of disloyalty to his wife or a blot on his character—although it is notable that he is rather selective in his final account of these adventures when he tells Penelope about his journey. By contrast, the poem presents it
as a matter of the utmost importance that Penelope must keep her suitors at bay and wait indefinitely for her absent husband. Female fidelity is important for maintaining a husband’s sense of honor and control; it is associated with the preservation of a particular wealthy household and the perpetuation of a particular elite family line. The double standard creates a particular kind of vulnerability for both men and women within the system.
But the story of the affair between the god Ares and the goddess Aphrodite, told by the poet Demodocus in Book 8, reminds us that female fidelity may be important only in specific human social environments. Hephaestus, Aphrodite’s husband, is furious about the affair, traps the lovers in bed, and wants to punish Ares; but the other male gods (with the important exception of Poseidon) treat the whole thing as an amusing joke. The divine lovers, male and female, skip away unharmed, with apparently no damage done to their reputation or status. Odysseus, whose greatest fear is that Penelope will act like Aphrodite, reacts oddly to this narrative: he is delighted. Perhaps there is a kind of relief in imagining a situation so different from his own—a world in which an adulterous affair does not result in loss of status, loss of wealth, and loss of life.
The most insistent declarations that women’s value depends entirely on their loyalty to their husbands comes in the mouth of the murdered Agamemnon, who has good reason to be upset about adulterous wives; his wife’s s*xual infidelity represents the takeover of his household by Aegisthus. Odysseus meets the ghost of Agamemnon in Book 11 and is given a stern warning to keep a close watch on Penelope—lest she act as Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, did, murdering him when he comes home and allowing the suitors to take control of Ithaca. Later, in Book 24, the spirit of Agamemnon meets the spirits of the murdered suitors, learns their story, and responds by exclaiming how lucky Odysseus was to have such a faithful, intelligent wife, whose fame should be made the subject of a divine poem—perhaps a poem like The Odyssey itself, but one that would allow a more prominent role for “intelligent Penelope.”
The story of Aegisthus, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes recurs repeatedly in The Odyssey as the shadowy parallel to the story of the suitors, Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. This parallel homecoming serves as a dark warning of what could have happened to Odysseus if he had arrived home openly, as Agamemnon did, rather than in disguise. The story of Agamemnon’s death invites us to read Odysseus’ slaughter of the
suitors in terms of preemptive self-defense, as if he had to kill them in order to avoid being killed in turn. It is also presented as an important lesson for Telemachus. Without a son mature and determined enough to kill Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s murder would have been left unavenged. Telemachus’ growth to maturity seems in some ways to threaten Odysseus’ position in the household: there would be less need for the father to return and regain control, if the son were already adult enough to manage everything and keep his mother’s suitors at bay. Conversely, the example of Orestes presents a case where the son’s maturity unambiguously benefits his father, albeit only after the father’s death.
In some versions of the Agamemnon story, Clytemnestra actually kills her husband, with Aegisthus merely the accessory to the crime. This is the version used by Aeschylus in his later tragedy, the Agamemnon; but it was likely that this version of the myth was already known at the time of the composition of The Odyssey. Why, then, is Clytemnestra’s role consistently minimized in the references to the story here? A possible reason is that presenting Clytemnestra as eager to sleep with her suitor and murder her husband would cast a disturbing light on Odysseus’ own wife, Penelope. The Agamemnon story is thus not simply contrasted with the Odysseus story, but also made parallel to it: in both cases, the wife is a decent person whose loyalty is tested when her husband is away at war. But the shadowy presence of the Agamemnon story may also underline our awareness that Penelope may not be able to wait forever for her absent husband. Moreover, in other early versions of the myth (as in Aeschylus), Orestes kills not only Aegisthus but also his own mother, Clytemnestra. In The Odyssey, we are told only that Orestes killed Aegisthus; the matricide is carefully erased from the story. But the uneasy relationship between Penelope and Telemachus clearly shows us that the interests of mothers and sons need not coincide. This parallel story acts as a reminder of the importance of Penelope’s loyalty, and also reminds us that a sensible wife whose husband is long gone might have to move on.
The idea that male power depends on female s*xual fidelity is also central to the myth of Clytemnestra’s sister, Helen, whose abduction by Paris led to the Trojan War. In The Odyssey, we meet the beautiful and frighteningly intelligent Helen back home in Sparta, with her wealthy, blustering, and rather less intelligent husband, Menelaus. The affair between Helen and Paris, like the affair of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, can
be seen as another alternative but parallel narrative, showing what might happen if Penelope decided to go off with one of the suitors. But this counternarrative complicates the idea that it would be a disaster if Penelope had an affair, since Helen and Menelaus seem to have suffered no obvious ill effects from her escapade—beyond the fact that so many people decided to engage in the war and died as a result. The marriage seems, if anything, cemented by a shared sense of regret and a shared interest in the wonderful consumer goods they have acquired through their foreign conquests. At the moment when Penelope and Odysseus are reunited, Penelope speaks of Helen, and draws a complex, confusing comparison between her own situation—vulnerable to any deceitful stranger who may show up—and that of Helen, who left her husband for Paris. Penelope seems to suggest that Helen was forced into adultery (because Aphrodite compelled her and Paris tricked her), and also that, insofar as she made a choice, it was informed, as perhaps most choices are, by limited knowledge of the outcome. She could not know that “the Greeks would march to war / and bring her home again.” Should war, defined in The Iliad as “the work of men,” be seen as ultimately the fault of a woman—because Helen inspired Paris to abduct her? The question is left largely unanswered in Homer. In The Iliad, Helen tells Priam she wishes she had “chosen death” rather than leave her husband for Paris—suggesting that she did have some kind of choice, but also that her only alternative was suicide. The affair is not presented as something that she actually desired. In The Odyssey, a much more self-possessed and cheerful Helen declares that the Greeks made war “for the sake of” her face
—a formulation that suggests that the woman’s appearance is the men’s supposed motive, but does not imply that it, let alone its owner, can be blamed for their actions.
Helen describes her face, the face that, in Christopher Marlowe’s famous words, “launched a thousand ships,” not as beautiful but as “doglike”; it is a face that (in this translation) “hounded” the Greeks to war. The idea that women or goddesses, especially desirable ones who sleep with men outside marriage, are like dogs, or have doglike faces, recurs at several moments in the poem: Hephaestus uses the same term of his unfaithful, divinely beautiful wife, Aphrodite; the dead Agamemnon calls his murderous wife a “she-dog”; and the pretty slave girl Melantho is called a “dog” by both Penelope and Odysseus. As a term of insult, “dog” is applied not only to women. Odysseus also calls the suitors “dogs” when he
inveighs against their greedy, shameless consumption of his food supplies, and he suggests that the human belly is also always like a whining dog: it begs for food, even in circumstances where it is not appropriate or possible to eat. The night before the slaughter of the suitors, Odysseus feels his heart “bark” inside him, like a “mother dog” defending her puppies. Odysseus has to restrain his doglike heart, because it is nudging him to act too soon, rather than follow through carefully on his plan. In our culture, “bitch” is used as an insult term only for women, and it implies a kind of malice that is imagined as specifically feminine. In The Odyssey, to be “doglike” does not usually connote this kind of malice or cruelty (which is why “bitch” would be a misleading translation). Instead, it suggests an insistent drive, to be fed or satisfied or noticed, which is impatient and oblivious to social cues and constraints. Dogs are kept not as pets, but as guards of the house and for hunting; they are low on the household hierarchy, but valued for their persistence and quick powers of observation—shown most touchingly by Odysseus’ old dog, Argos, who recognizes his old master even after twenty years’ absence. Women, more than men, are like dogs, because they are put low on the social hierarchy, and because they might be scarily capable of seeing through social conventions, and might refuse to stay in their place. But the idea that it is not the woman or goddess herself, but her face, that is like a dog suggests that it might be male perceptions of women, rather than female desires themselves, that threaten the social fabric.
Characteristics that are ostensibly presented as particularly “feminine” often turn out to be rather more complicated in their metaphorical gendering. For example, female characters tend to achieve their ends by seduction, deceit, or witchcraft, rather than by open aggression. Helen, who has a particular power to control perceptions and see through appearances, puts a special drug in her guests’ cup which can enable them to forget all that they have suffered and even be numb to the greatest possible grief or loss:
Whoever drinks this mixture from the bowl will shed no tears that day, not even if
her mother or her father die, nor even
if soldiers kill her brother or her darling
son with bronze spears before her very eyes. (4.223–27)
Helen’s drug is a frightening exaggeration of the normal cheering power of wine, and it hints at her witchlike powers of fascination: in Helen’s house, all eyes are always on Helen. The goddess Circe and the Sirens also have the power to trap their victims through enchantment. But it remains unclear whether deceit is being presented as a naturally feminine mode of operation, since Odysseus himself is the most prominent liar and trickster in the poem; nor is deceit necessarily seen as a bad thing in the world of The Odyssey.
Prudent, clever Penelope shows her capacity for clever deceit and false storytelling, as well as her technical expertise (as a weaver), which in many ways parallels the sharp wits and practical abilities of her husband. The suitors are attracted to her not only for her wealth and her beauty, but also for her mind; even the brashest of them, Antinous, can wax eloquent in describing Penelope’s abilities.
Athena blessed her with intelligence, great artistry and skill, a finer mind than anyone has ever had before,
even the braided girls of ancient Greece. (2.116–19)
She weaves a great piece of cloth that is supposedly the shroud in which Laertes will be buried and convinces the suitors that she cannot marry any of them until the task is completed. This delaying tactic shows her capacity for deceptive storytelling—a quality shared by her husband—as well as her technical skill in weaving, which is analogous to her husband’s competence as a construction worker. But we should also notice differences. The things Odysseus constructs (such as the Wooden Horse, his raft to get away from Calypso, and his bed) are finished, and are supposed to remain finished. Penelope’s weaving is designed to be undone. Moreover, whereas the deceptive plots of Odysseus are geared towards a particular end (to invade a city, to reach his home, or to destroy the suitors), the deceptive plot of Penelope serves in the opposite direction: to hold off an end point, to avoid the end of the story. It is meant to be forever in a state of becoming, not completion.
We get only glimpses of Penelope’s state of mind, which is repeatedly described as ambiguous or opaque. What comes across most clearly is her emotional pain. She is in a state of constant apprehension for her young,
vulnerable son, constant grief for her lost husband, and constant doubt about how long she can put off the suitors. Penelope knows that marriage to one of them will mean an enormous, wrenching loss; for one thing, remarriage may uproot her from the house to which she feels a deep attachment, the house in which she has lived for her whole adult life: “this beautiful rich house, so full of life / my lovely bridal home. I think I will / remember it forever, even in / my dreams.” But she also knows that she may ultimately have little choice; she cannot hold the suitors off forever. In an evocative passage from Book 19, she tells Odysseus—whom she has still not recognized—about her nightly tears:
As when the daughter of Pandareus,
the pale gray nightingale, sings beautifully
when spring has come, and sits among the leaves that crowd the trees, and warbles up and down
a symphony of sound, in mourning for her son by Zethus, darling Itylus,
whom she herself had killed in ignorance. (19.520–26)
The simile suggests that Penelope feels a desperate and ambiguous kind of guilt about the husband and son whom she may be forced to “betray,” through no fault of her own. Later in the same passage, Penelope tells the story of a dream she had in which there were geese in her house, eating her corn, which were destroyed by an eagle. Odysseus, in his guise as a beggar, immediately interprets the dream to his own advantage: the dream shows, he says, that her husband will return and rout the suitors from the hall. It is, he assumes, unambiguously positive. But Odysseus’ interpretation entirely ignores the most striking feature: Penelope says that in the dream, she “wept and wailed” at the death of the geese. This dream response suggests that on some level, Penelope might not want her husband to come home. This would be a perfectly reasonable feeling, since her position in the household is not markedly improved by his return. But when she learns that her suitors really are dead, Penelope is “overjoyed”—although she still refuses to accept that the old beggar might be her husband in disguise. Penelope’s feelings are mixed and confusing.
Some readers have argued that this clever woman may well have recognized her husband much earlier than she lets on, or at least half-
recognized him. Perhaps she has; the text seems to allow for this possibility, although it gives us little evidence for it. But it is important to see what is at stake in the decision to interpret Penelope as either cognizant or ignorant of her husband’s identity. Some critics have been understandably motivated by a desire not to see female characters as victims—and therefore want to see her as more in control than she may appear. Alternatively, one can emphasize the ways that female characters can be disempowered in a male- dominated environment, through no fault of their own; one can then argue that Athena and Odysseus work together to keep Penelope in the dark about her husband’s return. In this view, she is presented as an intelligent woman whose capacity for planning and forethought is comparable to her husband’s—but who lacks the apparatus of divine and human help that enable Odysseus to achieve his ends with confidence. Penelope’s cognitive disadvantage parallels the s*xual double standards by which Odysseus’ infidelities are treated as normal, and Penelope’s twenty-year s*xual loyalty is seen by certain characters within the poem (such as the dead Agamemnon) as the centerpiece of her moral worth.
These radically different interpretations are possible because the text keeps the reader or listener of the poem to a large extent in the dark about Penelope’s state of mind. This might be a mark of discomfort with the gender inequalities implicit in the plot or a mark of the text’s particular kinds of blindness. There are certain particularly ambiguous moments in the depiction of Penelope that underline this narrative tension. For instance, in Book 18, Penelope suddenly decides to show herself before the suitors, although she has previously shunned them. We are told that the reason is to increase their desire for her and promote her own honor. One can assume that it is Athena, not the mortal woman, who is controlling events at this point and who has decided to make Penelope show herself. Or one can argue that Penelope herself has recognized her husband, and has decided to do this to continue her plot to deceive the suitors about her true intentions. Or one may argue that Penelope has not recognized Odysseus, but simply feels the impulse to gain greater attention from the suitors for herself—a possibility that has been neglected by most critics only because it is assumed, with obvious s*xism, that a “good” woman would not behave in such a way. The most important point to notice here is how ambiguous the text itself is about these various possibilities, a fact reinforced by
Penelope’s “mysterious” laugh as she makes the proposal. Penelope’s desires and motivations are defined as unknown.
Becoming a Man
The Odyssey tells the story not only of Odysseus and Penelope, but also of their son, Telemachus, whose slow and incomplete journey to adulthood is charted in the course of the poem. Telemachus is the most vulnerable member of the family: the suitors plot to murder him, and we see him break down in tears after a failed attempt to speak up and assert himself in the men’s assembly. The boy must be at least twenty years old at the time of the poem’s action, and he is physically an adult, full grown and handsome. But he struggles to grow to psychological maturity, to become man enough to help his father defeat the suitors. Telemachus’ standard epithet, pepenumenos, suggests “of sound understanding” or “thoughtful”; the poem traces the boy’s developing cognitive maturity, as he begins to learn what adult masculinity might mean.
In the course of Telemachus’ journey in search of news about his father, he meets two alternative father-figures: the controlling, long-winded Nestor, and the rich, narcissistic, uxorious Menelaus. Each of these men seem to echo character traits in Telemachus’ own father—as does the old Sea God Proteus described by Menelaus, a slippery character who can change his shape at will. Back in Ithaca, the swineherd Eumaeus is an even more devoted alternative father: he greets Telemachus on his return like a long- lost son,
Just as a father, when he sees his own dear son, his only son, his dear
most precious boy, returned from foreign lands after ten years of grieving for his loss,
welcomes him; so the swineherd wrapped his arms around godlike Telemachus and kissed him,
as if he were returning from the dead. (16.17–23)
Eumaeus, Nestor, and Menelaus all show their deep, fatherlike love for Telemachus, and each models for the boy, in significantly different ways,
the skill of hospitality, which is an essential aspect of elite masculine adulthood.
But only his real father, Odysseus himself, can help Telemachus achieve what he most wants: a position of greater power in his own household. When father and son are reunited, they weep together, as if for Telemachus’ lost, fatherless childhood:
They both felt deep desire for lamentation,
and wailed with cries as shrill as birds, like eagles or vultures, when the hunters have deprived them
of fledglings who have not yet learned to fly. (16.216–19)
After these tears, Telemachus seems more sure of himself, and he can begin the process of joining the adult, male world, by plotting with his father how to kill the suitors.
Telemachus is an only child; his lack of brothers is emphasized in the poem and was presumably unusual in the context of archaic Greek society. He seems markedly more confident after he has formed a close friendship with Pisistratus, Nestor’s son, who becomes like a brother to him. The suitors—boys roughly his own age, who act like bullying older brothers— threaten his life and his position in his own home. Unable to stand up to the suitors by himself, Telemachus instead practices masculine self-assertion by putting down his mother.
The relationship between Penelope and Telemachus is painful, full of conflict and secrecy. She sees his vulnerability too clearly and worries for him, which makes him all the more eager to distance himself from her. Penelope cannot do for her son what a father could do, which is introduce him to the world of male power. Under the instructions of Athena, Telemachus pointedly keeps his journey from Ithaca a secret from his mother. Underlining his emotional distance from his mother by insisting that her feelings matter only insofar as they might affect her looks, he tells Eurycleia, who is in on the secret,
“Promise me you will not tell Mother, until she notices me gone.
Say nothing for twelve days, so she will not
start crying; it would spoil her pretty skin.” (2.373–76)
Eurycleia is an alternative mother-figure for Telemachus, and a preferable one, in that—being a slave—she always does exactly what he tells her to do. Athena is a second and even better mother-figure: she enables him to succeed on his trip away from Ithaca, proving his ability to act independently of his human parents, albeit always under her watchful eyes.
Telemachus makes several attempts to put his real mother in (what he regards as) her place. In Book 1, Penelope tries to stop the singer Phemius from telling of the disastrous homecoming of the Greeks from Troy, because it makes her cry too much; Telemachus roughly intervenes, telling his mother,
“Go in and do your work.
Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves to do their chores as well. It is for men
to talk, especially me. I am the master.” (1.356–59)
The passage is echoed in Book 21, when Odysseus, disguised as an old homeless beggar, asks to be given a turn at the ongoing contest to string the great bow. The suitors try to prevent it, but Penelope insists that the stranger ought to be treated with dignity and kindness, and should be allowed to try the bow, if he so desires. At that, young Telemachus intervenes, scolding his mother for speaking as if she had the authority to decide who should and who should not have access to the weapons of his father. He sends her back upstairs to the women’s quarters, declaring,
“Go up and work
with loom and distaff; tell your girls the same. The bow is work for men, especially me.
I am the one with power in this house.” (21.350–53)
These outbursts are startling, since most of the time Telemachus carefully avoids direct confrontations with his mother—as if nervous that he might not be able to hold his own against her. The lines in Book 21 seem to allude to a moment in The Iliad when Hector tells his wife, Andromache, that she should not attempt to prevent him from going back to the battlefront, although he may be killed. It is, he declares, his task, as an elite male warrior, to fight on the front lines and risk his life to gain honor—just as it is the task of women to do the household chores and weaving. “War,” says
Hector, “is work for men, especially me.” Telemachus is trying to assert his masculinity and adult status by assuming the role of the heroic fighter who risks his life for his honor and the defense of his city. But the reference does not entirely suit the situation: Telemachus is not planning to fight with the bow himself, only to have control over who else gets access to it. Moreover, the person who is about to assume “power in the house” is not Telemachus but Odysseus, to whom the boy will give the bow. Telemachus is overjoyed at being taken under his father’s wing, but he is also overshadowed by his father’s position as the eternal head of the household. It would be a problem for the poem’s narrative if Telemachus grew up all the way, since there must be only one man running the house in Ithaca forever, and that man needs to be Odysseus.
Telemachus is consistent in his notion that masculine maturity means the suppression and exclusion of women and the suppression of female voices. When Odysseus slaughters the suitors, he leaves a final task to his son, Telemachus: the killing of the “doglike” slave women who have been sleeping with the suitors. Odysseus instructs his son to hack at the girls with swords, to eradicate all life from their bodies and all memory of what they did with the murdered men:
“They will forget the things
the suitors made them do with them in secret.” (22.444–45)
The episode is one of the most horrible and haunting of the whole poem, the culmination of a pattern in which the homecoming of Odysseus prevents other people—elite boys and slave girls alike—from reaching their homes and their comfortable beds:
As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap—
they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime. (22.468–70)
These terrible murders are not quite presented as punishments for a nonexistent crime; these women are slaves, who presumably had little choice about their treatment by the suitors. Rather, Odysseus wants the girls dead because their memories threaten his total ownership of his household. As long as they are still alive, the trace of the suitors is still present in their bodies and their minds, and hence in his home. By slashing them with “long
swords,” Odysseus suggests that his own male line can regain complete control.
But Telemachus takes initiative, to an almost unprecedented degree, and decides that the women should instead be hanged, saying,
“I refuse to grant these girls
a clean death, since they poured down shame on me
and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.” (22.462–64)
This puzzling, disturbing intervention is a defining moment for Telemachus. Why exactly does he want them hanged, rather than hacked to death with swords? One possible answer has to do with cleanliness and pollution. Despite Odysseus’ various attempts to present his killings as revenge for moral outrages committed against him, it is clear that at least some of the murders are primarily motivated by a desire to restore a sense of purity to a house that has been subject to imaginary dirt. The choice of hanging over hacking is beneficial in that it keeps the girls’ dirty blood off the clean floors, and maintains the “tainted” bodies in their self-contained state. Hanging also allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, s*xualized bodies. The boy here demonstrates a newfound maturity in two highly problematic ways: he asserts himself by defying his father’s instructions, and he belittles the women he slaughters. But Telemachus is still resisting the adult male role of the warrior, which involves a quasi-s*xual act of penetration—using a sharp weapon to pierce and kill human bodies at close quarters.
In the final book of the poem, Telemachus has one more chance to prove himself a man, by fighting, yet again, beside his father. With their little band of supporters, Odysseus, Laertes, and Telemachus prepare together to fight against the family members of those whom they have killed. Odysseus calls on Telemachus not to “shame your father’s family,” which is “known across the world for courage / and manliness.” Telemachus responds eagerly, “Just watch me, Father,” and Laertes beams with pride: “A happy day for me! My son and grandson / are arguing about how tough they are!” The fight is curtailed by Athena’s intervention, so Telemachus never gets to prove his full worth as a fighter, although he has demonstrated his eagerness to participate in the military aggression of his male family members. Readers may disagree about the extent to which
Telemachus ever fully grows up in The Odyssey—as well as about whether growing up to manhood, as this boy imagines it, would really be a good thing.
Slaves
Many of the most prominent characters in The Odyssey—such as the father, mother, son, and the suitors—are elite people who live in what is figured as a large, palatial house (although it is clearly modest from the perspective of later forms of kingship). Odysseus is a leader in war, not a mere foot soldier, and in Ithaca, the house of Odysseus is the richest and most powerful of the neighborhood. But the poem also includes a number of characters who are not rich or powerful. In The Iliad, the only named non- elite character, Thersites, is presented as ugly and annoying; when he speaks out of turn, Odysseus beats him up. The Odyssey includes a far richer array of characters who are not lords or ladies, kings or princesses. Slaves and homeless beggars are presented in this text as human beings who deserve respect and even empathy—at least as long as they remain in their limited social place.
The possibility that people of any rank might be enslaved—through trafficking or war—is assumed as a fact about the world; The Odyssey is not an abolitionist text. But we are given glimpses of the hard lives of those who serve and feed the privileged people who are the main focus of the narrative. In Book 20, the prayer of an unnamed, frail slave, grinding the grain, reminds us that the labor of food production is exhausting: it hurts her knees. Odysseus, who has his own agenda, treats the prayer simply as a good omen for his own plans. But the reader or listener can momentarily see the cost of running the elite household in terms of human labor and human suffering—a cost that may be reduced but will not end, even when the banquets of the suitors cease.
Slave owners favor slaves who ally themselves most closely with their master’s interests, rather than taking the risky step of switching to a new set of masters. Only one of the slaves who slept with the suitors is named: Melantho, who is characterized as having a mind of her own and a will to talk back to her mistress. The orifices of female slaves, including their mouths, are a source of particular concern; the rope deprives Melantho of
her attempt to have an autonomous voice. Male slaves are imagined not as mouths but limbs of their masters; a “bad” male slave uses his capacity to work or fight or procreate to serve an alternative master. Melantho’s brother, Melanthius, who serves as a herdsman for the suitors, is trussed up like an animal, and then, in a particularly brutal scene, his nose, ears, genitals, hands, and feet are slashed off. This “limb” of the wrong masters is robbed of his own bodily appendages. Melantho and Melanthius—whose names both suggest “black flower”—are the children of Dolius, the herdsman who is treated as a trusted favorite, loyal to Odysseus. We are not told how he feels about the slaughter of his children, but it is clear that, in Odysseus’ remade household, there will be no possibility of expressing such grief. The name Dolius suggests “crafty” or “deceitful”; the poem shows us why dishonesty is the most essential survival tool for the “good” slave.
The pair of young “bad” slaves are mirrored by a pair of old “good” slaves, who are loyal to Odysseus and his family. Eurycleia, the old slave woman who took care of Telemachus as a baby and now protects the master’s domestic stores, provides a counterpart to the threats posed by Melantho. She is old enough to pose no s*xual threat, and she controls her voice for the sake of her masters—by keeping the secrets of Telemachus’ journey and Odysseus’ identity, and by restraining her impulse to shout in triumph over the slaughter of the suitors. Melantho’s physical intimacy with the wrong set of owners is presented as a threat to the household. Eurycleia, by contrast, maintains the household by taking care of the bodies of Odysseus and his family—by helping Telemachus get dressed, and by washing Odysseus’ feet.
The most prominent slave character in the poem is the swineherd Eumaeus, the “good” counterpart to the “bad” goatherd, Melanthius. Eumaeus welcomes Odysseus, in his guise as beggar, into his simple cottage. Eumaeus’ humble but affectionate offering of xenia contrasts with the rudeness of the suitors, and we are clearly supposed to admire this “noble slave” for identifying his own interests with those of his owner; he is the one who “cared most about preserving / the master’s property.” No other character is addressed directly by the narrator, but Eumaeus is often addressed in the second person (“You, swineherd”), a stylistic detail that creates a particular intimacy between the reader or listener and this odd character. Eumaeus is also described repeatedly in the terms of military
heroism, as the “commander” of his pigs—a trope that serves both to elevate this quasi-heroic character and to mock him. Eumaeus is a “noble slave” for two incompatible reasons. On the one hand, paradoxically, he is noble because he is so slavish: he refuses to disentangle his own interests and perspective from that of his master. But he is also genuinely noble, both in birth and in behavior: he performs the aristocratic customs of xenia even in his poor, dung-piled shack, and he tells the memorable, grim story of how he was born into an elite foreign household, before he was trafficked and sold as a slave. The “good” slave is one who responds to the trauma of enslavement by identifying with his or her owners, and imagining those in power as loving parents rather than overlords. The Odyssey seems to have it both ways in the depiction of slave characters. We are reminded that a good slave can be more loyal and more hospitable than a rude, overprivileged young man, but we are also invited to imagine that slaves are good only insofar as they subdue their own identities to those of their owners.
The poem suggests a similar contrast between the “good” and the “bad” way to occupy another lowly social position: that of the penniless, homeless migrant. When Odysseus is in disguise as a poor beggar, the ways that people respond to him are presented as the test of their moral worth. It is a black mark against the suitors that they fail to behave politely or warmly to the wrinkled, ragged, hungry old stranger who shows up in the palace where they are living it up on somebody else’s meat and wine. But the “real” beggar, Irus—who is not an elite warrior in disguise, but a genuinely poor, dirty homeless person—is depicted in entirely negative terms. Odysseus wrestles with him, wins, and humiliates him, and the text seems to invite us to celebrate his victory. There is thus a certain uneasiness about the proper way to respond to social and economic hierarchies. Elite people are supposed to treat slaves and homeless beggars well; but slaves and homeless beggars are themselves to be despised, unless they are royalty in disguise. Odysseus can become old, poor, weak and homeless; but his “real” identity is (apparently, but perhaps debatably) as the king and warrior who fights to gain massive wealth and assert his own masculine prowess, using deceit and violence to slaughter his enemies—both on the battlefield of Troy and even in his own lovely home.
Odysseus presents himself as someone who has endured exceptional trials and tribulations and has managed, alone, to survive the perils and dangers of his journey back from Troy. After listening to the swineherd
Eumaeus tell the story of how he was captured and trafficked as a child, entering a lifelong position as a lowly slave, Odysseus comments that Eumaeus’ sufferings can hardly match his own: “Your life is good. / But as for me, I am still lost.” Odysseus suggests that his own inability to reach his homeland, even after twenty years’ absence, is the ultimate form of suffering, which trumps all other pain. But it is notable that Odysseus travels in elite fashion, without ever touching the oars himself. That lowly hard labor is performed for him by others, men who are uncompensated for their labor, and who all, eventually, die before reaching their homes.
The Choice of Odysseus
At the start of the poem, we see Odysseus making a momentous and defining choice: to return to Penelope, his mortal wife, rather than stay forever with the goddess Calypso. This goddess is divinely beautiful, and her island is marked by luxuriant, dense complexity; it is a place of secrets and tangled mixtures.
The scent of citrus and of brittle pine suffused the island. Inside, she was singing and weaving with a shuttle made of gold.
Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar, and scented cypress. It was full of wings. Birds nested there but hunted out at sea:
the owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks. A ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes,
was stretched to coil around her cave. Four springs spurted with sparkling water as they laced
with crisscross currents intertwined together.
The meadow softly bloomed with celery and violets. (5.60–73)
The god Hermes, visiting Calypso’s home, is understandably “full of wonder.” But Odysseus, in this magical, mysterious place where he shares the bed of a majestic goddess, is miserable.
His eyes were always tearful; he wept sweet life away, in longing
to go back home, since she no longer pleased him. He had no choice. He spent his nights with her inside her hollow cave, not wanting her
though she still wanted him. By day he sat out on the rocky beach, in tears and grief,
staring in heartbreak at the fruitless sea. (5.151–58)
The text implies that for some (carefully unspecified) amount of time, Odysseus willingly enjoyed the company of the goddess. Calypso rescued him when he crawled, ragged and half drowned, onto the shore of her island, and he spends a good seven years—the majority of time spent returning from the war—sharing her bed. She has given him shelter from the storm and has provided him with a home that seems in certain very obvious ways superior to his original home on Ithaca. As she herself reminds him with touching defensiveness, the goddess is much more attractive than Penelope. Moreover, Calypso’s island is lush and fertile, in contrast to barren Ithaca—and, what ought to be a clinching argument in the case, she has the power to make Odysseus immortal and free from aging forever. She offers him everything, except a way back to his original, human home. Outraged at his rejection of her love, she asks him,
“Do you really want
to go back to that home you love so much? Well then, good-bye! But if you understood how glutted you will be with suffering
before you reach your home, you would stay here with me and be immortal—though you might
still wish to see that wife you always pine for.
And anyway, I know my body is better than hers is. I am taller too.
Mortals can never rival the immortals in beauty.” (5.204–14)
The depiction of Calypso, a powerful but emotionally open female character, frustrated in her desire for the human she has rescued, is one of
the most memorable sequences in the poem. She perhaps does herself a disservice in emphasizing only her superior good looks. She also has a superior mind, and she is particularly well matched with Odysseus, who shares her fondness for secrets. Like Circe and Athena, Calypso appreciates and understands Odysseus’ capacity for deceit and scheming, because she has similar qualities herself—albeit at a divine, more than mortal level. She praises him for mistrusting her, saying, “You scalawag! What you have said
/ shows that you understand how these things work.” Penelope, for obvious reasons, shows far less appreciation for Odysseus the liar, Odysseus the trickster, Odysseus the “scalawag.” Her looks are ordinary compared with those of the goddess; her love for Odysseus is more careful, more suspicious, and her understanding of him is less complete; and in choosing Penelope, Odysseus is also choosing to become old and, eventually, to die. In reply to the goddess, Odysseus acknowledges the truth of everything she says. But then he adds simply, “But even so, I want to go back home, / and every day I hope that day will come.”
Why exactly does Odysseus make this surprising choice? The poem never gives us an explicit answer—an omission that makes the hero’s yearning for home all the more resonant and moving. Calypso, an obviously prejudiced observer, suggests that Odysseus’ choice to go home is masochistic: a deliberate embrace of suffering, and a perverse preference for something worse over something better. The tactful hero does not correct her.
Presumably, Odysseus is inspired by a deep loyalty to his wife, son, father, and the place of his birth, and moved by a deep and constant love for those he left behind. But we must avoid projecting the anachronistic ideas of chivalric romantic love onto Odysseus, who is not a medieval knight performing valiant deeds for the sake of a beautiful lady. To explain the meaning of Odysseus’ choice in Homeric terms, it is useful to look back to The Iliad. In that poem, the central character, Achilles, makes the momentous choice to stay and fight at Troy, to gain honor among his fellow Greek warriors, rather than return home to his young son and dying father, where he might have lived a long life in obscurity. The choice of Odysseus is parallel to the choice of Achilles, in that it is a decision to be mortal in order to gain a particular kind of masculine honor. If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso, he would have been alive forever, and never grown old; but he would have been forever subservient to a being more powerful than
himself. He would have lost forever the possibility of being king of Ithaca, owner of the richest and most dominant household on his island—an estate wealthy in pigs, sheep, goats, fruit, grain, wine, and slaves, with an old father, a young son, and a desirable, much-courted, and valuable wife all devoted to him, and all increasing his value in the eyes of his neighbors.
But strangely, Odysseus’ choice to be in the mortal world does not seem to imply any willingness to submit to the exigencies of change. The hero wants to maintain his dominant position in his household, not for a moment but for all time. His choice to be subject to age and mortality is presented as if it were itself a permanent fact, a choice that he might be able to go on making forever. The Odyssey thus makes a paradoxical set of claims about the possibility of permanence, either in relationships or in the lives of any individual person. Odysseus’ choice to be with Penelope is associated not only with an admission of human mortality, but also with its opposite: an insistence that a man (it has to be a man) might be able to claim or reclaim a permanent position at the head of his particular social ladder. Odysseus seems to be magically able to evade the pressure of time on mortals and rise above all challenges of circumstance.
Athena changes Odysseus into a weak, bent old man, as a disguise. But when needed, she changes him back into the physical appearance that is figured as his “true” self, a man of the utmost vigor, in the prime of youth. In real life, a man who had left home in his twenties, spent ten years fighting a war, and then another ten lost at sea, would be more likely to look wrinkled, bent, and old—especially in an archaic society without modern medicine, when life expectancy was far shorter than in most contemporary Western cultures. But The Odyssey insists that Odysseus is fundamentally unchanged by his adventures. Through his determination and smart mind, and with divine help, he can restore his marriage and his household permanently to the state that they were in when he first went away. Leaving Calypso is thus not only a choice to accept mortality and impermanence, but also, incompatibly, a choice to insist on the fantasy of permanent patriarchal dominance over a carefully regulated human household.
Odysseus is an odd figure to represent permanence, since he seems to be constantly changing—in appearance, behavior, and social role. He is able to be, at different times, young or old, strong or weak, a beggar or a home owner, a victim or an aggressor. What makes Odysseus special is that he is, to a far larger extent than most human beings, in control of his various
different changes and manifestations. Gods can disguise themselves and walk unseen through the midst of mortals; Odysseus is able to do the same. He switches roles not only through the magical power of Athena, which transforms his appearance, but also through the magical power of his own words, through which he creates multiple different identities for himself.
Most of the epithets applied to Odysseus begin with the prefix poly-, meaning “much” or “many”: he is a figure who possesses many attributes, and possesses them intensely. Far more than other mortals, Odysseus is able to change himself to adapt to changing circumstances. A wonderful simile in Book 5, after Odysseus is shipwrecked and clings, just barely, to the rocks of the Phaeacian shore, compares his skinned fingers to the suckers of an octopus:
As when an octopus dragged from its den, has many pebbles sticking to its suckers,
so his strong hands were skinned against the rocks. (5.432–34)
In archaic Greek lore, the octopus was known as the “boneless one,” the creature that (supposedly) survives hunger by eating its own tentacles (or “feet,” of which, luckily, it has eight). In the Homeric image, it is a creature defined by its tenacity. It is resistant to change (it has to be dragged from its den), but also changed by its altered environment (the sticking pebbles). Odysseus’ fingers are like the pebbles of the den, ripped by the octopus; but he is also himself octopuslike in his stubbornness, his power of survival, his capacity to adapt to new environments, his multiplicity, and his slippery, boneless, self-devouring ability to change. It is this power of self- transformation that gives him the ability to reinvent himself into the most marvelous persona of all: the self he was twenty years ago, before he went to war. The ideal of total autonomy and permanent essence depends on the process of constant self-reinvention.
An essential aspect of Odysseus’ multiplicity is his rhetorical ability and capacity for deceit. He is able to spin tall tales, to take over from the poet Demodocus and tell the fantastic story of his own adventures as an entertainment for the Phaeacians. In Ithaca, he constructs multiple different autobiographies, usually claiming to have come from Crete—the traditional home of liars. Odysseus’ grandfather Autolycus prides himself on “telling lies and stealing”; Odysseus has inherited these traits. He is the hero who
always has an answer, a solution, a fix, a good line, a quick reply to any challenge. He is the master of finding the right words in any situation.
Odysseus is in disguise in Ithaca and has to be recognized by a series of different characters in turn. The poem is virtuosic in its variations on the otherwise formulaic “recognition scene”—each character recognizes Odysseus by a different means, and each character recognizes a different Odysseus. Athena, who has no trouble recognizing Odysseus, begins the sequence in Book 13 by allowing him to recognize her and, in so doing, to recognize himself, as the man defined by cleverness and an infinite capacity for scheming and deceit. Argos, the old dog, recognizes Odysseus by his smell and remembers him as the vigorous man who took him on hunting trips. Eumaeus knows Odysseus as a benevolent owner, a quasi-family- member, who may perhaps reward his lifelong loyalty with a short period of freedom before he dies. Telemachus knows Odysseus as his role-model father, the man on whom his own honor and status in the world of adult men depends. Eurycleia, the old slave nurse, remembers Odysseus as a boy wonder, who killed a boar single-handedly even in his earliest youth. Old Laertes knows Odysseus as his son and heir; he is the boy who was taught to name all the trees in the orchard, and he is the man on whom the future of the whole estate depends. Antinous and the other suitors recognize, with horror, that the weak old beggar in their midst is actually a muscular, murderous fighter, the man who will slaughter them all.
The most complex and extensive recognition is that of Penelope. The process by which she comes to acknowledge the old stranger as her difficult, secretive, aggressive husband is extraordinarily long-drawn-out, and the exact moment at which she truly recognizes him remains a mystery
—like so much else about Penelope. After the murder of the suitors, she is told by both Eurycleia and Telemachus that the strange old beggar is really Odysseus. To Telemachus’ irritation, however, she refuses to acknowledge him as her husband. “Cautious Penelope” displays her central quality by resisting any quick resolution. Perhaps she suspects or half-knows who he is much earlier than she admits; or perhaps she genuinely remains unsure about who the mysterious stranger is.
But if she does recognize him, or half-recognize him, she also manages to gain an upper hand in the relationship, provoking Odysseus into “proving” his identity. She tells the slave to make up the bed for him outside the bedroom, which devastates and enrages him: “Woman!” he asks,
“Who moved my bed?” The bed, it turns out, is not supposed to be movable; Odysseus claims to have built it himself, using an olive tree that grew inside the palace as a bedpost. The bed that can be moved only by cutting down the trunk and destroying the structure is a metonymic symbol for the interdependence of the marriage and the house; the destruction of either means ruin for the other. Odysseus asks, in disbelief as well as horror, what “man” has moved his bed: the quasi-immovable bed represents a fantasy that it would be almost impossible for Penelope ever to sleep with another man. No other marriage would involve such deep roots.
The tree-bed is the ultimate answer to the question raised at the start of the poem: What does Odysseus choose when he rejects Calypso’s offer? It is something deeply characteristic of Odysseus himself: like his most famous invention, the Wooden Horse, the bed is a wood structure that contains humans and a secret, and allows close friends to inhabit a hidden place of safety, even surrounded by enemies. Odysseus, the master storyteller, is also the master builder—of horses, ships, beds, plans of attack, and means of escape. As soon as Calypso allows her lover to leave her island, he begins work constructing a raft; his detailed, obsessive account of how he built his marriage bed echoes that earlier moment of construction. In leaving Calypso, Odysseus chooses something that he built with his own mind and hands, rather than something given to him. Whereas Calypso longs to hide, clothe, feed, and possess him, Athena enables Odysseus to construct his own schemes out of the materials she provides.
But the bed is a product of nature, as well as of human labor; it is growing, alive, and divinely blessed. Trees are not, in fact, permanent or immovable objects; Odysseus cuts down trees to make his raft. This bed is thus a rather different kind of symbol from the nailed-down bed to which the frustrated narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is confined (a symbol of the restrictions imposed on women in nineteenth-century New England). Odysseus’ bed is difficult to move, but not immovable. Its permanence and its mutability stem from the same cause
—the life of the olive tree. In returning to Ithaca and to this bed, Odysseus has chosen a world in which his own work is part of something larger than himself, and where he is woven into relationships that are both rooted and changing.
When Penelope and Odysseus are finally reunited, Odysseus puts his arms around his wife, and a simile invokes the experience of shipwrecked
swimmers, suddenly catching sight of land, and crawling to shore, “their skin all caked with brine.” We must initially think that this image applies primarily to Odysseus himself—who is the one embracing Penelope when the image begins and who has, in real life, experienced shipwreck. But the narrator then suggests that it is Penelope, not Odysseus, who is like these survivors: “So glad she was to see her own dear husband, / and her white arms would not let go his neck.” A surprising slippage happens through the imagery, from the man’s to the woman’s point of view. With Calypso, Odysseus would have been frozen into the role of the weak, dependent survivor of shipwreck. The mortal Penelope may not know all of Odysseus’ many identities and may not have plumbed his capacity for lies. But she understands his suffering, because she too has lived through twenty years of pain—caused by his own absence, in war and with Calypso.
Hated Odysseus
Odysseus is defined by his mutual loving relationships—with his wife, Penelope; his patron goddess, Athena; his father, Laertes; his dead mother, Anticleia; his son, Telemachus—and by his less-mutual loving relationships with Calypso, Nausicaa, Eurycleia, and Circe. He is also defined, even more explicitly, by his enemies, those who hate him and dislike him. In Book 19, we learn about Odysseus’ grandfather Autolycus, whose own name suggests “Real Wolf,” and “who was the best / of all mankind at telling lies and stealing.” Autolycus gave the baby Odysseus his name, based on the fact that he himself has managed to make so many enemies:
“I am
disliked by many, all across the world, and I dislike them back.” (19.406–8)
The verb odussomai, meaning “to be angry at,” “to dislike,” or “to hate,” sounds similar to Odysseus. Athena connects Odysseus with the same verb in Book 1, asking Zeus why he bears a grudge against her favorite: “Why do you dismiss Odysseus?” she asks. The etymology suggests that Odysseus is himself much disliked, by both gods and other human beings, and also that he takes after his grandfather by acting in hostile fashion to
other people: he tricks, steals from, and hates. Poseidon is, of course, his most powerful enemy, but Odysseus arouses dislike, hatred, and anger in many others during the course of the narrative, and displays his own capacity for rage.
Odysseus is the hero of his own story, and the poem to some extent glorifies its protagonist and valorizes his claims to dominance. But it also articulates some important questions about the moral qualities of this liar, pirate, colonizer, deceiver, and thief, who is so often in disguise, absent, or napping, while other people—those he owns, those he leads—suffer and die, and who directly kills so many people.
Odysseus’ use of aggression and violence is presented as problematic in certain ways. The poem raises questions about whether Odysseus, as a fighter who has spent ten years at war, sacking and pillaging a foreign city, can adapt himself enough to succeed in an entirely different context—or whether he will bring the battlefield home with him. In some cases, we see Odysseus managing to modify the conventions of the Homeric battlefield to fit a new challenge. For instance, when he first meets the young Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, he supplicates her—an action familiar from warriors on the Trojan battlefield, when one man kneels in abjection and touches the knees and beard of another, to beg for his life. But in this new version of the formulaic supplication scene, Odysseus is kneeling before somebody who has no beard and who poses no kind of military threat. The supplicator, in this version, is rather more physically threatening than the person to whom he prays. Odysseus studiously avoids the traditional touching of the knees, which would only alarm the girl, and shows his own ability to adapt techniques practiced at Troy for entirely different situations.
But the poem also seems to question how fully this epic hero can adapt to a new, nonmilitary world. When Odysseus is about to go through the straits between Scylla and Charybdis, Circe warns him not to put on his armor and try to fight against Scylla, which will be futile and will only make the situation worse. But Odysseus insists on doing so—increasing the danger to his men. Similarly, in leaving the island of Polyphemus the Cyclops, Odysseus is unable to resist shouting back,
“Cyclops! If any mortal asks you how your eye was mutilated and made blind, say that Odysseus, the city-sacker, Laertes’ son, who lives in Ithaca, destroyed your sight.” (9.502–6)
Odysseus cannot resist the urge to gain kleos—the honor that comes from being the named subject of heroic legend. He is able to become nameless (“No man”) only for a little while.
One of the epithets most commonly used of Odysseus is polytlas, which means “much-enduring.” It may suggest how much Odysseus has endured and suffered, and it may also suggest how much he is capable of enduring: his stubbornness, his tenacity, his courage, his relentless drive to achieve his own ends. In modern terms, we can see Odysseus as a veteran soldier with his own version of PTSD: he is moody, prone to weeping, often withdrawn, and liable to sudden fits of aggression. We can also, rather differently, see Odysseus as a man who keeps on repeating the same behavior patterns that he has displayed in Troy. He succeeded in taking the foreign city by a mixture of aggression with deceitful infiltration, in the Wooden Horse, which the Trojans themselves took into their town; he succeeds in taking back his own household through much the same means, sneaking inside the house in hidden form (not inside a horse, but inside the body of a beggar), and emerging to slaughter the inhabitants.
Odysseus seems to have complicated feelings about his own past history. The temptation offered by the Sirens is to listen forever, and know everything that the Greeks and Trojans suffered in the war. One might think that Odysseus would want this, above all, as an ego boost: the Sirens address him as the “glory of the Greeks,” and their songs promise an endless retelling of Odysseus’ own finest hours; they call to him to listen,
“since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered in Troy, by gods’ will; and we know whatever happens anywhere on earth.” (12.189–91)
The temptation is as much knowledge as glory. The Sirens offer Odysseus what no single individual engaged in the conflict can have: a full and complete understanding of what happened in the war and what it meant. In
resisting the Sirens, Odysseus acknowledges that he will have to go on acting out the consequences of the war, without ever being able fully to know what it was all about.
Odysseus puts in a special request to Demodocus, the Phaeacian bard, to sing the story of the Wooden Horse—the trick that Odysseus himself devised in order to infiltrate and sack the city. Demodocus complies, and tells how the Greek warriors, including Odysseus, hid inside the manufactured horse; how the Trojans pulled the horse inside, and left it at the summit of their city, as an offering to the gods; and how, during the night, the gang of fighters jumped out of the hollow cavity, scattered across the city, and began slaughtering the people of Troy. One might expect that Odysseus would be happy to hear the story of his own greatest military triumph—a story that, after all, he had just asked to hear. But his response is surprising. Rather than being glad (as he was glad to hear the story of Aphrodite committing adultery), he bursts into tears, and a striking simile seems to conflate his emotional response with that of his own victims.
Odysseus was melting into tears;
his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen fighting for his home
and children. (8.521–25)
The simile compares the desperate weeping of Odysseus, a military conqueror, to the grief of a woman who is a victim of war, a woman whose husband is dying and who knows that she herself, and her children, will soon be led off into slavery by the victors. Perhaps the comparison suggests that Odysseus himself feels some kind of deep guilt over the suffering that he himself has caused, in his instrumental role in sacking not only Troy but many other towns and settlements. Or perhaps the simile works to downplay Odysseus’ responsibility for the suffering he has caused, by inviting us to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities.
In the final book of the Odyssey, after Odysseus has slaughtered the suitors, Eupeithes, the father of one of the dead men, urges the people of Ithaca to rise up together and kill Odysseus in revenge. He offers a searing indictment of Odysseus.
“This scheming man,
my friends, has done us all most monstrous wrongs.
First, he took many good men off to sail
with him, and lost the ships, and killed the men!
Now he has come and murdered all the best of Cephallenia. Come on, before
he sneaks away to Pylos or to Elis,
we have to act! We will be shamed forever unless we take revenge on him for killing our sons and brothers. I would have no wish to live; I would prefer to die and join
the boys already dead. We have to stop them
escaping overseas! Come on, right now!” (24.425–37)
The words come from the mouth of a grieving parent whose young son has been shot by Odysseus the day before. It represents a limited, highly personal point of view. Moreover, Eupeithes presumably does not know how unpleasantly his son behaved, when he had the chance to lord it up in the household of the absent Odysseus.
But Eupeithes, whose name means “Persuasive,” is making a point that readers of the poem may find surprisingly persuasive—as do the people of Ithaca. Antinous is depicted as an arrogant, supercilious young man, who drinks too much, exploits the resources of an absent home owner, treats Penelope and Telemachus with disrespect, and is cruel and unwelcoming to Odysseus in his guise as a poor migrant. Yet the grief of his father reminds us that the murdered Antinous was very young, probably not much older than Telemachus. Young men often behave oafishly, but they may mature in time—unless they get an arrow through the neck first. Eupeithes’ speech reminds us also that the killing of the suitors is not an isolated incident; Odysseus has made an unfortunate habit of leading young men to their deaths. When Odysseus addresses the men who row his ship, he repeatedly calls them “friends,” philoi, a word that suggests a close tie of kinship or love. Odysseus is a smart talker, who knows the best words to use for a particular audience. But the narrator instead calls these men hetairoi, “companions” or “servants,” a term that can suggest a much more hierarchical relationship. Of the troops Odysseus rounded up to take with
him to Troy, some fell in battle, and all the rest die in various horrible ways in the course of their leader’s journey home.
The first lines of the poem invite us to see these deaths in terms of the dead men’s own folly or childish naïveté, because they chose to eat the Cattle of the Sun. They were “poor fools” (nepioi), a term that suggests childish thoughtlessness. This foolishness is sharply contrasted with Odysseus’ own characteristic qualities of scheming intelligence, quick planning, and forward thinking (metis). But this prologue does not hint at the numerous other deaths suffered by the men in Odysseus’ crew— including those who are eaten alive by the sea-monster Scylla when Odysseus chooses to sail past her island; those who are devoured by the Cyclops, thanks to Odysseus’ insistence on visiting his cave; or those who are skewered from their ships and eaten by the man-eating giants, the Laestrygonians, when Odysseus docks the fleet at their island and moors only his own ship in a safe place outside the harbor. These deaths clearly have nothing to do with the men’s cognitive or moral qualities. The prophet Tiresias predicts that, if Odysseus hurts the Cattle of the Sun, he will arrive home only “late and exhausted, in a stranger’s boat, / having destroyed [his] men,” and a similar prophesy is made by the goddess Circe. The participle here translated as “having destroyed” can also mean “having lost.” The ambiguous phrasing matters, because the ultimate responsibility for all these deaths remains an open question.
Endings
The traditional poetic stories of archaic Greece included tales of how the heroes came home from the Trojan War—the Nostoi, as they were known. The Odyssey is obviously a story of nostos, meaning “homecoming” (the word from which we get “nostalgia,” the pain of missing home). But the poem suggests that it may not be entirely easy to see what a homecoming is, and when exactly it happens. Coming home means more than simply reaching a particular spatial or geographical location. The hero reaches his home country of Ithaca when the poem is almost exactly halfway through. The remaining books trace a series of journeys across a tiny geographical area: from the port of Ithaca to the loyal swineherd’s hut; back and forth between the hut and the palace; from the hallway to the marriage bed, and
back again; out from the palace to the orchard, and back again to slaughter his fellow countrymen who are assembled in front of his house. Each of these locations seems to offer a different version of home, and one can wonder when and where Odysseus feels most fully that he has arrived.
Thanks to Athena’s magic, Odysseus initially does not recognize Ithaca; it seems like yet another unfamiliar and probably dangerous place. Once the divine mist disperses, Odysseus knows that he is on Ithaca, but we can also see that his initial suspicions were in many ways correct: Ithaca is indeed a dangerous and unfamiliar place, and there are real questions about how and when Odysseus might be able to transform it again into the home that he left behind.
A key part of his strategy for doing so is to test the loyalty and behavior of various members of his household. He appears in disguise to the key players, each in turn, and tests their responses to his own persona as a homeless migrant. Those who pass the test are to be incorporated into Odysseus’ plan and restored into the household; those who fail are killed. Thanks to the long process by which Odysseus gradually infiltrates his way into the community of Ithaca, he is able to assess who will help him, and whom he must destroy in order to reassert his own power over his home.
But it is unclear when Odysseus finally achieves his ends and reaches his home, if indeed this moment ever comes. Odysseus is reunited with Penelope, but the poem continues. We see the ghosts of the suitors travel down to the underworld and meet the spirits of Achilles and Agamemnon, which might have been a kind of ending; but the poem continues. We see Odysseus reunite with his old father, Laertes; but the poem continues. Fighting breaks out on Ithaca between Odysseus and his supporters, and the friends and family members of the dead suitors. The battle grows intense, and Odysseus is wild with martial rage; only thanks to the intervention of Athena does it stop. And there the poem ends.
Scholars since antiquity have been puzzled by the ending of The Odyssey. Two Homeric scholars of the Library of Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE, Aristarchus of Samothrace and Aristophanes of Byzantium (not the comic playwright), argued that the poem really ended at the moment when Odysseus and Penelope go to bed together; on this model, the real ending is in Book 23, when the narrator tells us,
Finally, at last, with joy the husband and the wife arrived
back in the rites of their old marriage bed. (23.293–95)
We do not know what grounds were given by these ancient scholars for treating the end of Book 23 and the whole of 24 as extraneous. Eustathius, a twelfth-century critic, tried to defend Book 24 on literary and semantic grounds, arguing that the recognition scene between Odysseus and his father is an essential element in the story.
Modern scholars have also argued about the “correct” or “original” place for the poem to end. Linguistic arguments have been made against Book 24, but these are highly debatable; Homer’s language, as we have seen, is always a mixture of words and phrases from many different dialects and periods. The episode involving the ghosts of the dead suitors is unusual
—but the situation is also unusual. The encounter between Laertes and Odysseus seems cruel to some readers, since Odysseus has no need to “test” his father, now that the suitors are already dead; yet it is arguably not out of character for Odysseus, a person “addicted to deceit,” to keep spinning his lies even when they seem to serve no particular purpose.
Perhaps there are two related reasons that many readers have felt unsatisfied with the ending of The Odyssey. First, it feels less than definitive as a place to stop the story. More events will clearly happen after this conflict between the Ithacans and Odysseus, which is stopped only thanks to the convenient intervention of the goddess. Moreover, a curtailed battle does not feel like the proper culmination of a story of homecoming—unless Odysseus feels most at home when he is killing his fellow countrymen.
Both of these “problems” are perhaps precisely the point. The poem refuses to offer us a definitive moment at which home and peace are achieved, once and for all. Odysseus never sets aside his desire to fight and kill his fellow men, or his yearning to wander and be absent. According to the prophecy given by the dead spirit of the prophet Tiresias in Book 11, Odysseus will not remain and settle in Ithaca. He has at least one more journey to complete, to a land that is, from the perspective of the Greek islands, the strangest of all: where nobody knows the sea, where people eat food without salt, and nobody has even seen a boat. He will know he has arrived when he meets “someone who calls the object on my back / a winnowing fan” (a tool used in preindustrial agriculture to separate wheat
from chaff). Only in this utterly alien location, Tiresias suggests, can Odysseus finally put to rest the anger of Poseidon, the Lord of the Sea.
But even if he were ever to return from this obviously mythical location, one might wonder whether Odysseus would be able to settle down in peace and comfort in Ithaca—the land that would still be populated by the families of those Odysseus has killed. In antiquity, there were a number of legends about what happened to the protagonist after the poem ends— alternatives that may reflect ancient recognition of how little the last book wraps things up. One story tells that this criminally aggressive hero was sent into exile for killing the suitors. Other ancient stories express discomfort with Odysseus’ habit of committing adultery. We are told that he had a son by Circe, named Telegonus, who sailed in search of him and eventually killed him with a poisoned spear. Several stories provide alternative futures for Penelope: either she was killed by Odysseus himself for sleeping with Antinous the suitor; or, creepily, she married Odysseus’ son Telegonus; or she was spirited to Arcadia and seduced by the god Hermes, and became the mother of the god Pan. All of these stories seem to suggest dissatisfaction with the state of Odysseus and Penelope’s marriage, which is defined in the poem primarily by absence, pain, economic dependence, and mutual mistrust.
The Odyssey is in some ways like a fairy tale. “Bad” people are killed, and the “good” hero triumphs. But the poem is surprisingly clear-sighted about both the problematic tendencies of its own hero and its own dominant fantasy. Everybody likes the idea of a radical reversal of fortune, a surprising and long-delayed final victory, a settled, forever home. This is a text that allows us to explore our desire for power and for permanence, in the world of imagination, while also showing us the darker side of these deep human dreams, hopes, and fears.
Reception
In antiquity, Homer was traditionally said to have been a blind man from the Greek island of Chios. This popular idea is expressed in a poem from the sixth century BCE called the “Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo,” which tells how Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis, were born. Their mother, Leto, was pregnant with the twins by Zeus, and had to find a place to give
birth: a hard task, since Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, had made all lands on earth reject her. Finally Leto reached Delos, which was supposedly a floating island, unattached to the sea floor. Since this was a space unattached to the earth, the island welcomed the laboring goddess. Delos was rewarded with a special sanctuary to the god Apollo, who felt deep attachment to the island as the place of his birth. The poem ends by instructing the girls who worship Apollo on Delos to remember the poet who composed the present song:
Bless me, Apollo, bless me, Artemis;
and greetings, all you girls! Remember me whenever any poor and homeless stranger comes here and asks you, “Girls, who is to you the sweetest of all singers? Which one gives you most pleasure?” All of you must answer him, “He is a blind man and he makes his home
in rocky Chios; all his songs will be the best forever.”
The historian Thucydides, writing in the late fifth century BCE, confidently quotes the passage as evidence that Homer was a blind man from Chios. Often seen as the father of modern or “scientific” historiography, Thucydides prides himself on his skeptical attitude towards implausible traditional myths. But it is extremely unlikely that the person who composed these lines had any hand in creating the Homeric epics. The hymn was probably composed by a member of a family or professional organization who lived on Chios in the sixth century, calling themselves the Homeridae—the children of Homer. These people gave performances of The Iliad and Odyssey (or portions from them) and also created their own poetic compositions, which they presented as also “Homeric.” This particular hymn may have been composed by an active member of this clan to honor an unusual double festival to Apollo of Delos and Delphi in 522 BCE—far later than the composition of the Homeric poems themselves.
The testimony about the “blind man from Chios,” then, does not tell us anything about the composition of The Iliad and Odyssey themselves— which probably originated a good two hundred years earlier. But the “Homeric Hymn” does bring into sharp relief the fact that already in
archaic, preclassical Greece, the Homeric poems had a place at the absolute top of the poetic canon: they were the “sweetest,” the “best forever.” Moreover, the notion that “Homer” is a poet who celebrates a birth on a floating island may express an awareness that these poems had evolved out of a long oral history, from multiple different local traditions. Homer, like the god of poetry, emerges from an ambiguous or floating origin. Everybody in the Greek-speaking world wanted to claim and remake Homer for themselves—a process that continues to this day.
The Odyssey was, along with The Iliad, the foundation of Greek and Roman elite education. Sections from the poems were also performed by rhapsodes to adults, for entertainment. All upper-class men in the Graeco- Roman world knew the Homeric poems well. Aeschylus is said to have called his tragedies “slices from the banquet of Homer.” Homer (and the rest of the archaic epic tradition) provided the basis for much of classical literature: tragedy, but also history, later forms of epic, pastoral, and the novel.
But Greek and Roman writers often struggled with the legacy of Homer. Plato’s character Socrates in the Republic famously insists that Homer, along with the Athenian tragedians, must be excluded from the ideal city, because his work provides a false image of reality, and stirs up emotions that are better repressed and controlled. Plato and others criticized the depiction of the gods in the poems, for their lack of morality. Odysseus himself is often a problematic character in later Greek and Roman literature, characterized by his abuse of cleverness for self-interested goals. In Sophocles’ Ajax, he is a commonsensical realist, but in the same author’s Philoctetes, as well as in Euripides’ Hecuba, he is a scheming sophist, willing to say or do anything (including murder children) in order to achieve his own military ends. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Odysseus becomes “cruel Odysseus,” the unscrupulous destroyer of Troy, which was the home of the poem’s hero. But Aeneas himself becomes a new kind of Odysseus, in his search for a home that exists only in the future: the city of Rome itself.
The canonical status of Homer, combined with the philosophical and ethical challenges involved in treating these poems as a source of “truth,” led to a tradition of allegorizing the various adventures of Odysseus. We have, for example, an extensive Neoplatonic interpretation by Porphyry (third century CE) of the episode in Book 13 when Odysseus reaches Ithaca and comes to the cave of the Nymphs. Porphyry notes the fact that there is
apparently no such cave on Ithaca, and that the details of the description are extremely implausible. The passage must therefore, he suggests, be read as an extended metaphor for the soul’s place inside the material, terrestrial world.
The Odyssey continued to be read and studied, alongside The Iliad, throughout classical antiquity. But knowledge of Greek became extremely rare in the Western world after the fall of the western Roman Empire, in the fifth century CE. Dante had no access to the original Odyssey, though he knew the story of Odysseus. In his Inferno, he places Ulysses (the Romanized name for Odysseus) low down in Hell (the eighth circle out of nine, the circle of Fraud), because he leads his people by deceit into destruction. Dante’s silver-tongued, self-serving, and falsely inspiring Ulysses gives his men a rousing, deceitful speech urging them to continue their adventures for “virtue and knowledge”; he is urging them on, yet again, to shipwreck, on the Mountain of Purgatory. This rhetorically gifted version of Odysseus is not entirely alien to the character we meet in Homer. Texts of Homer were preserved in Arabic translation and in the Byzantine (eastern) Empire. We still have hundreds of important Homeric manuscripts from the eastern empire, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries CE. When Byzantium fell in 1453, refugees from Constantinople brought their knowledge of Greek with them to Italy. The Italian humanists of the fifteenth century learned Greek, read Homer, and began to spread their knowledge through Europe, by means of printed editions and translations of the Homeric poems. The poems were translated first into
Latin, and then into all the vernacular languages of Europe.
The first complete Odyssey in English was that of George Chapman, in 1615. Chapman’s Odyssey, in rhyming pentameter couplets, presents the hero as a true soldier and gentleman, a proto-Christian and proto-Stoic whose greatest virtue is his ability to endure suffering and control his impulses. But not everybody in seventeenth-century England was so optimistic about the possibility of claiming Odysseus as a Christian hero. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Odysseus’ clever, deceptively inspiring rhetoric and tendency to get lost on a long journey to a homeland from which he has been excluded by divine power are now the characteristics of Satan—the epic antihero who shows us what is wrong with classical notions of heroism from Milton’s perspective.
In the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope, along with a team of collaborators, produced translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey that dominated the market and transformed interpretation of the poems for several generations to come. Pope makes The Odyssey into a text about those essentially eighteenth-century preoccupations: proper manners and good government. In Pope’s version, Odysseus is the ultimate hero of politeness and tact, the man who always has the appropriate response to every social challenge. He is also a just monarch, whose knowledge of suffering informs his exertion of power over the “nations” whom he governs.
John Keats, who knew no Greek, wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in 1816; the appeal of Chapman, imagined in the sonnet like the discovery of the New World, comes partly from the fact that Chapman offered a glimpse of a Homer that was different from the familiar, normalized Homer of Pope. Dipping into Chapman’s Homer makes him feel like an astronomer, “when a new planet swims into his ken.” As we have seen, scholars in the nineteenth and then twentieth century discovered “new” versions of Homer by searching for the real places that might lie behind the texts, and also by reconstructing the conditions in which these poems were created. But The Odyssey could also be used as a way of thinking about what might be old and worn out in the Western cultural tradition. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” imagines the protagonist as a weary but compulsive imperial explorer, whose restless boredom makes it impossible for him ever to settle at home: he insists on pushing onward to the western stars, “made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The stubborn persistence of interest in The Odyssey in modern times makes it impossible to mention more than a tiny fraction of the adaptations that it has inspired. New versions of Odysseus’ story were created in the literary world, perhaps most famously by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), which uses the book structure of The Odyssey for a stylistically virtuosic narrative of one ordinary man’s day wandering around Dublin before returning to his wife. In Omeros (1990), Derek Walcott used some of the characters from The Odyssey as the basis for his poetic account of life on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. The Odyssey has been adapted numerous times in film, television, comic books, music, and visual art, as well as in poetry and novels.
Children often encounter stories from The Odyssey as their first exposure to ancient Greek culture. The Odyssey is also often used in college literature classes, as the starting point for studying Western or world literature. It is a poem that has the power to speak to people from many different social backgrounds in the contemporary Anglo-American world. Reading The Odyssey with fresh, curious, and critical eyes may help us not only rethink our assumptions about people in the past, but also break down some of our modern distinctions and assumptions. Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero. Immersing ourselves in his story, and considering how these categories can exist in the same imaginative space, may help us reconsider both the origins of Western literature, and our infinitely complex contemporary world.
