Odyssey

Reading Assignment 2

Odyssey, Books 1, 5, 9-12, 21-24. As you read, think about how this poem is similar to, and different from, the Iliad.

Also available online are: a late-19th-century version by Samuel Butler –

http://www.online-literature.com/homer/odyssey/

and an early-20th-century version by A. T. Taylor –

http://www.theoi.com/Text/HomerOdyssey1.html

/lecture/e58bz/homer-2-odyssey

The Iliad ends under a haze of smoke from a funeral pyre. And really one of the striking things about the Trojan War is how in subsequent literature, it's not the good war. It's depicted as being sort of catastrophic for both victims and victors alike. But, there is another epic attached to it. And that is the Odyssey. Generally thought to be a little bit later than the Iliad. Perhaps composed by a bard, or brought into some sort of compositional unity by a master bard who took a whole bunch of different stories and brought them together. And we talked a little bit last time about theories of Homeric authorship and how they have changed. But the Oddessey has a very different tone from the Illeiad. In fact, its hero, Odysseus, has been called an atypical hero. This may or may not be Odysseus. Some people identify this little figure as being the hero himself. But what makes him an atypical hero? Well, he's short, unlike say Achilles or Ajax or Hector, are always described as being towering. He's clever. He's eloquent. He's a master of words. In that embassy to Achilles, Odysseus is one of the lead ambassadors. And Achilles says to him, with scarcely concealed irritation. I hate like the gates of Hades the man who says one thing and keeps another in his heart. Well, that's Odysseus all over. So he's short. He's clever. He's eloquent. He's tricky. It's Odysseus who's credited with the ruse of the Trojan horse, which doesn't appear in either of the surviving epics. But which we know about from, of course, from other stories. He's curious. The beginning of the Odyssey is tell me, muse, of a man of many turnings, polytropon. We'll come back to that in a moment. And Odysseus is a man of twists and turns. He is also, and quite unusually, interested in food. There's no other hero who talks so much about eating as does Odysseus. And in fact, the Odyssey has been described, and I think accurately, as a poem of appetite versus intelligence. In a very real sense, you are what you eat and how you eat it. And we'll come back to that too. Moreover, Odysseus's weapon of choice is the bow. He's a great archer. Now, what is it about the bow? Well, it puts you at a little bit safer distance from the enemy than does hand to hand combat with sword. And spear and shield. So Odysseus, after the fall of Troy, wanders trying to make his way home and to bring his companions safely home. This is also from the first few lines of the Odyssey. And on his travels, Homer says, he saw the towns and learned the minds of many different men. What has happened at home is trouble, and we'll come back to that in a moment. But I want to introduce you, introduce to you three more key terms. One of them is metis. And this is a particular kind of cunning intelligence. It's different from wisdom. It's different even from a kind of theoretical philosophical intelligence. This is a kind of tricky, conniving intelligence. And that's Odysseus all over, too. I mentioned a moment ago, this term polytropos, meaning versatile, adaptable and even well traveled. That's Odysseus too. But another key element of the Odyssey is a very important cultural value called xenia. This is the ritualized exchange between a host and a guest. This is one of the most important cultural values that the Homeric poems convey. To give you just one very small example, in Book Five of the Iliad, a Greek warrior named Diomedes is in a condition of aristeia. He's killing every Trojan who gets in his way. And he finally winds up face to face with a Trojan named Glaucus. And Diomedes says, tell me who you are so you, so I'll know who I'm killing. And Glaucus says, give me a break or something, the Greek equivalent of it. And tells him his lineage. And as Glaucus describes his family. Diomedes, who, remember, has been in a killing fury, says, from now on, we must avoid each other on the battlefield. Why? Because their grandfathers had shared xenia. This is in a world of constant contest, strife, the need to excel. This a very important break on that. But what has happened in Odysseus' absence in his palace at Ithica is that a number of suitors have settled in to woo his wife, Penelope, who is, after all, thought to be an eligible widow. And what they do is take and eat, and take and eat without any gesture at reciprocity. They're living in a constant violation of xenia. And there's nobody there, not even Odysseus's son Telemachus, who can get rid of them, at least not yet. Where's Odysseus been? He's been on the island of Calypso. And he's been living a life of total, one might say, physical satisfaction. She's beautiful, she's a nymph, they have sex a lot. And yet what does he do? He often just sits on the shore weeping. And as soon as he can, he takes the opportunity to leave. Because a life of total physical satisfaction but without any kind of glory is not a life a hero can live. And then he lands on the island of Phiecia, is drawn slowly back into society. And we have probably the best known part of the Odyssey, the so called Adventure Books. These are interwoven tales. They have some folktale motifs, but we can group them roughly. And there are three groups of three, interrupted with a trip to the underworld. And in those three groups of three there are, they're characterized. Each tale is characterized, I'm sorry, I should say, by a monster or by temptation or by folly. The monsters are generally identified as cannibals. And the most famous is certainly the huge one-eyed monster Polyphemus. The description that Odysseus gives of his interaction with Polyphemus involves not only xenia and its violations. I mean, Polyphemus isn't a great host, he starts killing Odysseus's men and eating them. Odysseus isn't a great guest, he comes in and starts stealing stuff. But even more than that, there are some hints of the social reality of the time. 

The island on which Polyphemus lives, is described as having a good harbor, plentiful timber, good water supply. We'll see in a lecture or two that the Greeks are starting to send out colonies now into the Mediterranean. And this is a perfect site to set up a colony. 

But even more important than that, the cyclops is described as not eating bread, and as not performing sacrifice. A great french scholar, Pierre Vidal Naquet, has analyzed this. And he has pointed out that not eating bread means that the cyclops don't do agricultural labor. And the fact that they don't perform sacrifice means that they don't recognize the importance of the gods. These two characteristics, that is, not doing farmwork and not recognizing the gods, marks the cyclops as inhuman. Even more than does his enormous size and canabalistic appetite and single eye in the middle of his forehead. Using cunning, cleverness, Oddyseus and his men blind the cyclops and manage to escape. But as he's leaving, Odysseus taunts the cyclops. Up to this point, Odysseus has called himself. Ootus, no man. But now he says, you can tell the other cyclopes that the one who blinded you is Odysseus. Bad mistake, it's a bad point for Odysseus to claim his identity, because it give the cyclops the opportunity to curse him. If cyclops called that a curse on no man, of course it wouldn't work. But the cyclops's father is the great god of earth and sea, Poseidon, and he's furious. And Odysseus is set a wandering with Poseidon, Poseidon's rage kind of overshadowing him. Odysseus also meets temptation in various forms. Probably the most famous is in the form of the witch, Circe, who turns his men, by means of a magic potion, into swine. And we could hardly have a clearer illustration of what I was talking about, in terms of appetite versus intelligence. Odysseus gets a little bit of divine assistance, manages to overcome Circe. But she sends him on a quest, and the quest is to the underworld. This is Book 11 of the Odyssey, and it gives us our first and in many ways, the most detailed description. Of what life was thought to be like after one died. It's not hell. That is, it's not a place of constant torment. It is instead a place that's cold, it's dark. And people exist in a kind of shadow form of themselves. When Odysseus descends to the underworld, he meets some of his former companions from the war at Troy. There's Agamemnon, who has been killed by his treacherous wife, Clytemnestra. There's always a tension in this poem about what's really going to happen when Odysseus gets home. That we know, so to speak, what's going to happen. But the, the poem keeps setting up a counter possibility, that faithful Penelope might not turn out to be so faithful after all. And maybe, like, Chlytemestra, wind up killing her hero husband when he finally shows up. 

Odysseus also sees Achilles. And with that same kind of directness that he had shown in the Iliad, Achilles says to him, what are you doing here? Odysseus says we're on a quest and he says, you have everything a hero could want. You have a great reputation. You have fame. You have clay offs everywhere. You have a son who's carrying on after you. And Achilles says, don't talk to me so lightly of death. You get to go back. And then in one of the most striking sentences in all of the Odyssey, Achilles says I would rather be a live serf. That is the lowest form of free agricultural laborer. I'd rather be a live serf than a dead hero. So much for the heroic code. And then Odysseus sees Ajax, who had committed suicide after Odysseus had cheated him out of Achilles armor. 

Ajax just refuses to talk to him. Even in the underworld, that help your friends in hurt your enemies, that code persists. Odysseus also faces instances of folly, but sometimes manages to follow instructions. A famous scene has him fill his men's ears with wax. And he has then tied himself to a mast so he can listen to the song of the sirens, who otherwise lure ships to destruction on the rocks. Some wonderful paintings shows a siren with a harp. And people have suggested that what she might be singing is heroic verse. The songs of the heroes, like Homer. The Odyssey is full of these folk tales which are sort of spun into the main narrative. And when Odysseus gets back to Ithaca he has to find out who's been loyal and who hasn't. And so he disquises himself as a beggar. The whole question of recognition and identity comes to the fore. Odysseus has managed to achieve the 1st of his goals, which is to get himself home. But here in this wonderful plaque, he is disgusted as a beggar, and he is talking to his wife Penelope. But the old heroic code from the battle field is now brought into the hall at Ithica. Odysseus lines up allies. There is the noble swineherd Eumaeus. There is his own son, Telemachus, who has now come to a kind of maturity and one or two others. And they face off against the suitors. This is once again an instance of an absolute division between allies and opponents. The slaughter in the great hall, sorry, this is a little blurry but you get some sense of the suitors cowering behind the tables. The slaughter in the great hall is awful. No one is spared, not even the good suitor. The only ones who are spared are the bard, Phemius, and the herald. They're too precious to waste, they're too precious to kill. So, we have Odessyus home, he's gotten rid of the suitors. There still remains a reunion with Penelope that has to be accomplished. Recent scholarship has paid much more attention to the role of women in general in the ancient world. To women in the Odyssey, there are many, many more powerful female characters in the Odyssey, certainly than in the Iliad. We've seen one of them already, Circe, but Penelope is so to speak the center of these. She is in some ways the ideal Greek wife, faithful, an extraordinary weaver, a good manager of the household. But at the end of this poem, she also reveals that she is a master of trickery, a peer of her long-wandering husband. When she tricks him into identifying himself by saying that he has to move the bed. He says, you can't move the bed, I put that bed there. It's built into the trunk of an olive tree. And Penelope finally realizes that he is the only one who knows the secret other than herself. And Odysseus tells her his story. So, where are we? Again, at the end of a far too cursory introduction to this magnificent epic. 

But we can also think about a couple of larger issues. One, the Iliad is generally described as being similar to tragedy and the Odyssey to comedy. It's got a much broader range, of course geographically, much more extensive. And it's sort of atypical hero at the center of things. But we also have, and we will talk much more about this later on, the introduction of the gods. I want to make one point, and only one point only. The gods are powerful. They can take favorites, or have enemies among humans. But the only thing that really distinguishes the gods from us is that we die and they don't. The gods are not in any way morally exemplary. They're not meant to be looked up to, in that regard. 

The great historian, Herodotus, says that Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks their gods. We'll talk about Hesiod soon. But for now, you may want to think about the fact that human life, as depicted in the Homeric poems, is much more serious than divine life. The gods simply don't have any consequences for what they do. For humans, male and female, all of us, there are real consequences. And at the outset, at the sort of wellspring of Western literature, we are so lucky to have Homer with the two great epics. To give us some sense of how we put ourselves into the world.