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. 

Homer

Reading Assignment 1

Iliad, Books 1, 2, 6, 9, 18, 24. As you read these selections, pay close attention to how the characters interact with each other.

There are at least four excellent, widely available modern English translations of both epics, by (in chronological order) Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, and Stanley Lombardo.

Available online is a fine contemporary translation by Ian Johnston –

http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/homer/iliad1.htm

Homer Online

https://www.coursera.org/learn/ancient-greeks/lecture/GUkPt/homer-1-iliad

Homer, The Iliad

/lecture/GUkPt/homer-1-

Interactive Transcript

You know, we've gone through several hundred years of history already, and that's fine. But it's somehow more daunting than anything to try to talk about a work as complex as the Iliad or the Odyssey in the relatively short time that we have available to us in these lectures. I'm not going to try to sum up the story. It's far to complicated for that. Instead, what I would like to do is to talk with you about how we've come to understand Homer in terms of the way he conveys a vision of a society and its values. The back story may be familiar to you. Here depicted on a vase painting where the Trojan prince Paris is asked by three goddesses to judge essentially a beauty contest, which of them is the most attractive, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Each of them tries to bribe him. And Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world and so he chooses her to be the most beautiful of the goddesses. Unfortunately, the most beautiful woman in the world is Helen, who is married to Menelaus, who is king of Sparta. When Paris goes to visit the royal couple, Helen takes off with him. They go to Troy and the Greeks mount a war of revenge to get her back. So, the setting for this great poem is war and all of its horror, its nobility, its baseness, and its glory. 

Before we start talking about that, we can go back to yet another one of the figures that we've already met, and that's Heinrich Schliemann. Remember, he was the German archaeologist, business man archaeologist, who excavated at Mycenae. Four years before going to Mycenae, he excavated at a site that he was sure was Troy. Modern day Hissarlik in the northwest corner of Turkey, right near the Dardanelles. Schliemann dug down into a great mound there, and just at about the place that he thought he would, he ran across a stratum burned, destroyed buildings, also a tremendous amount of jewelry. And he was convinced that he had found Troy. There's a lot of debate about whether there was actually a Trojan war and I'm not going to get into that now. But, there may have been, preserved by Homer, some remnant of a genuine historical event. Certainly, all of the heroes whom we'll be talking about, Achilles and Agamemnon and Hector, those are depictions. That doesn't mean that they're not important, of course. We'll come back to all of this as we go through. I want to give you a little sense of what this poem might have sounded like. These are the first five lines of The Iliad. I'm going to exaggerate the beat a little bit, just so you get some sense of the rhythm of what's called dactylic hexameter, which is the meter that these poems were composed in and it goes,[FOREIGN]. And the translation a little bit lumpy which I've put up here. Although literal, is, the wrath, sing, o goddess, of Peleus's son Achilles, carrying doom, which brought countless sorrows to the Achaians, and sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades, and left the rest as spoils for all dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was fulfilled. These lines have come down to us over the millenia. 

It seems that Homer, whoever he was or whoever they were, I'll come back to that in a moment, likeliest composed first in the eighth century BCE, that is the 700s. Homer is identified in the Romantic imagination as a blind bard from the island of Chios, just off the coast of Asia minor. This was partly because there is a blind bard in the Odyssey when Demodocus, and partly because an early poem, one of the so called Homeric hymns, talks about a blind bard of Chios. And for the longest period in the history of these poems, it was thought that there was a single great poet named Homer. I want to emphasize now, at the very beginning, the cultural importance of Homer. There is, I think very little, by way of a similarly dominant figure in other world literatures. For the Greeks Homer was the poet. Whenever subsequent authors talk about the poet, there's only one the poet that they're talking about. If you look for Homer in subsequent works of history, philosophy, tragedy, even comedy, you'll find him. Memorizing Homer was part of the education of any reasonably well brought up young Greek man. And this will also be very important for us because, knowing Homer was one of the most important ways that Greek society started to define itself at the end of the Dark Ages, the beginning of what's called the Archaic Age. We'll spend more time there later on, when Greeks separated themselves culturally from the rest of the eastern Mediterranean societies. So, what do we know about Homer? Not much. The great, great breakthrough in Homeric studies was made in the 1930's by a young American scholar named Milman Parry, then an assistant professor at Harvard. He had a theory that brought him to central Europe where he recorded Yugoslav bards singing great long poems. And what he found there, was that the bards didn't make these up as they went along. You can't do that. The Iliad is some 16,000 lines of verse. The Odyssey, some 12,000. You can't make this up as you go along. What the bards had, as they did what's called oral composition, was a set, a huge set to be sure, of one might call a database of pre-made phrases. Some of them are just two words. You saw one, although you didn't recognize it, in the first line of the Illiad. That two-word phrase, Peleus's son Achilles, [foreign] fits into this rhythm. This is what's called an epithet. That is an adjective attached to a name. And as you're reading Homer, you're probably struck by the enormous amount of repetition. So, that you have swift foot Achilles, or Achilles, son of Peleus, or grey-eyed Athena, or Zeus of the thunderbolt, et cetera. So, these are, these combinations of formulas in terms of epithets. But the formulas can be much more extensive as well. Sometimes a few words, he spoke answering him. Sometimes much more extensive even than that. So, a description of a sacrifice, is repeated again and again. This is the way these bards composed. And again, I just want to emphasize the importance of this kind of poetry, as a conveyor of cultural values, of cultural memory. Bards are heroes. But it's not just the bards that are heroes because in those very first few lines of the Iliad we hear that the wrath of Peleus's son sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades. Who were the heroes? 

When we use the word hero today, we generally think of somebody who demonstrates extraordinary virtue or courage under extraordinary circumstances. For the ancient Greeks heroism was not a kind of moral accomplishment, but was a status. What made you a hero? You were the son of a hero. Genealogy is the first, first criteria. In addition to that, you tended to be tall, and good looking. You had military courage. You had a group of retainers who would follow you with sort of unquestionable loyalty. And, you, like Achilles here depicted in his departure from his homeland, had constantly to prove yourself because this is a world of contest and competition. Heroism is in some ways a remarkably fragile status. It is constantly being tested. It's sort of a zero, a zero-sum game, as it's called, because anything that I win, you pretty much lose. We have constantly, all of us, to display arete, which can be translated as virtue or excellence. When we're really at our height, we're in a condition called aristeia, which means being at one's best. In combat, this means, as I sometimes joke, that you grow and glow. You take on a kind of superhuman power. You're compared to fire. 

Achilles has an aristeia in the Iliad that sort of involves the natural world. He starts fighting the river's commander because he is so far beyond himself. And what you hope to gain from all of this is kleos. Which is the word that means glory or renown. This is what heroes long for, yearn for, fight for, and strive for. So what happens? Well, sometimes the competition can take the form a friendly competition. One of the most common motifs, a very popular motif in vase painting, believe it or not, shows the two great Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax, having set their armor aside but holding onto their spears. And they're playing a kind of board game like chess or checkers. Nobody's quite sure what it was. But of course, it's really combat where heroes prove themselves. This is a representation of a scene which doesn't occur in the Illiad. It took place in another epic which has perished from the Itheos, and it shows Achilles fighting an Ethiopian warrior named Memnon. And if you look very closely, you can see on either side, their mothers are watching. The Iliad is a dominantly male poem. Women do appear, but they tend to be tokens that are exchanged. There's Helen of course, who had taken off with Paris, prince of Troy. There is also, at the beginning of the poem, Chryseis, the daughter of the priest of Apollo whom Agamemnon has taken. When he has to give her back, in a supreme display of ill temper, he takes Achilles' prize. This is what sets Achilles rage going. For a hero to be insulted like this, in public, is probably the worst thing that can happen. It is literally a fate worse than death. What happens is that Achilles withdraws from battle. Here, he is shown in a beautiful red figure vase tending the wound of his beloved companion, Patroclus. And when Achilles withdraws, the whole world is upset, the world of the Achaean warriors. And one of the ways that we can see how bad things have gotten, and I hope you all had a chance to read this in book two, there's a chaotic assembly. And who speaks up? The one named member of the mass, otherwise anonymous of regular warriors, one Thersites. He's not a hero. He is, if anything, an anti-hero. He's described as the ugliest man ever to appear under the walls of Troy. What he says is what Achilles has been saying, that Agamemnon is greedy, a bully, shouldn't behave the way he does. But Thersites doesn't have the right to say it and he is clubbed back into silence by Odysseus. Before we get too sentimental about this incidentally, the reaction of the other Greek soldiers should in form, ours. Instead of expressing sympathy for their fellow soldier, what they say is, this is an excellent thing Odysseus has done. Because when somebody like Thersites can speak up, it means that the world is sort of spinning out of control. As Achilles maintains his isolation, Agamemnon finally realizes that he has to get him back. And they send an embassy to try to get Achilles back. It doesn't work. But, what it does demonstrate is yet another one of these Homeric values, or, I should say attention in Homeric society. Who are you loyal to? Are you loyal to your family, to your community to your army? Here, Achilles, muffled, is maintaining his rage and his isolation. And in book nine of the Iliad, he makes a typically Achillean statement. He says, why should I fight? We all wind up dead anyhow. The heroic code to gain glory or to be more blunt, to help one's friends and to hurt one's enemies, is here undercut by the simple remark about mortality. Eventually though, Achilles has to come back into battle. And he does. And he faces off against the Trojans' great champion, Hector, whom we have seen on the battlefield. He is the son of Priam. He is the greatest of the Trojan warriors. And Achilles has been told that when he kills Hector, his own death will follow soon. He's willing to take that on because Hector has killed Patroclus. In the excess of rage and grief, Achilles tries to mutilate Hector's body, by dragging him around the walls of Troy, latched onto his chariot. The gods preserved the corpse from exfoliation. And then, at the very end, there's an extraordinary scene here represented in a fragment of a vase, when the old king of Troy, Priam, who has lost so much, comes to Achilles to beg for the return of the corpse of his son. The Iliad is a poem about the glory and the sorrow of war. Achilles and Priam share a moment of common grieving for all they have lost. Achilles does return the corpse to the king. And the poem that had begun with, sing, muse, the wrath of Achilles, ends with, that was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. The poet has taken a set of stories that he has inherited, that have been told and retold. We talked about how literacy died out, disappeared during the dark ages, and has given us one of the first, really the first and still one of the greatest monuments in the literature of the West. 

We'll now go on to talk about the other great Homeric poem, the Odyssey, which is very different in scope and tone.