The Odyssey
The Odyssey
A New Translation
by Daniel Mendelsohn Homer
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For Jenny Strauss Clay, Mentor extraordinaire
I myself saw a deathless god standing next to Odysseus And in every way you could think of he had the look of Mentor. Sometimes that god immortal would appear in ont of Odysseus, Urging him on . . .
Contents
Introduction · 1 A Note on the Translation · 41
Pronunciation Guide · 63 Further Reading · 67
THE ODYSSEY
Book One • 73 Book Two • 87
Book ree • 101 Book Four • 116 Book Five • 142
Book Six • 157 Book Seven • 168
Book Eight • 179 Book Nine • 197 Book Ten • 215
Book Eleven • 233 Book Twelve • 253 Book irteen • 267
Book Fourteen • 281 Book Fi een • 298
Book Sixteen • 315 Book Seventeen • 330 Book Eighteen • 349
Book Nineteen • 362 Book Twenty • 381
Book Twenty-One • 393
Book Twenty-Two • 407 Book Twenty- ree • 423
Book Twenty-Four • 435
Notes and Commentary • 453 Variants from Allen • 531
Glossary of Proper Nouns • 533 Acknowledgments • 547
Introduction
In some ways, the Odyssey needs no introduction: it is everywhere around us. Over the nearly thirty centuries since Homer’s thrilling epic about the hero Odysseus’s homecoming from the Trojan War began to circulate, its story, characters, and themes have become so tightly woven into the fabric of our literature and art, music and drama, that they seem to us inevitable, natural. It’s with a start that we recall that someone had to invent them.
Whether you’re reading Virgil’s Aeneid or watching e Wizard of Oz or Finding Nemo, you are enjoying a story that borrows the Odyssey’s plot: a hero, separated from home and loved ones, must wander among strange peoples and fantastical places during a di cult and o en dangerous journey before arriving at last to reclaim both family and homeland. As you make your way through Dante’s Inferno, J. D. Salinger’s e Catcher in the Rye, or Stephen King’s Stand by Me, you are following a metaphorical arc rst traced by Homer: the journey through space and time as a symbol for intellectual growth and discovery, for a deepening appreciation of the relationship of the self to the world, for the trajectory, nally, that we all follow from birth to death. e most suspenseful and exciting of the Odyssey’s plot twists when the hero nally returns, he is in disguise and can thus secretly test the loyalty of those he le behind has been endlessly recycled, from authors such as Alexandre Dumas ( e Count of Monte Cristo) to lmmakers such as Ridley Scott (Gladiator). And the climactic testing of the Odyssey’s hero, who must prove both his identity and his worthiness to assume his
destined role by meeting a series of challenges both physical and mental, has resurfaced in modern epics like Harry Potter and Game of rones.
e Odyssey bequeathed to the West entire genres. e poem’s fascination with the alien creatures and unfamiliar cultures that its wandering hero confronts was the seed from which both fantasy literature and science ction would eventually blossom; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Star Trek share strands of an Odyssean DNA. e Odyssey also established the blueprint for the picaresque novel, whose rollicking narratives about sly characters barely scraping their way through a series of hair-raising escapades, from Don Quixote to e Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, echo Odysseus’s progress from Troy (where the ingenious ruse he dreamed up, the Trojan Horse, won the war) through encounters with monsters, seductresses, and ghosts, to Ithaka, the home he strives so hard to reach. e marital drama of Odysseus and his wife, Penelope a couple agonizingly separated, the man and woman each facing di erent kinds of peril, eventually reunited only a er a tense test of wits proves to each that the other is an ideal mate contains the germ of all romantic comedy. e pleasure readers experience when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy nally come together at the end of Pride and Prejudice is a direct descendant of an emotion experienced by Homer’s audience thirty centuries ago as they listened to a bard sing of the reunion of Ithaka’s royal couple, fully revealed to each other at last a er a separation of twenty years.
e Odyssey has provided inspiration for a number of important modernist and contemporary authors. James Joyce’s 1922 classic Ulysses (the title uses the Roman name for Homer’s wandering hero) is composed of sections that are both named for and modeled on episodes of Homer’s epic: “Circe,” “Proteus,” “Lotos-Eaters,” and so forth. Motifs and characters from both the Iliad and the Odyssey resurface in Omeros, a 1990 epic poem on themes of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade by the St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize, while the American poet Louise Glück, also a Nobel laureate, examined a collapsing marriage through a retelling of the Odyssey in her 1996 collection, Meadowlands. More recently, numerous women writers have taken the epic’s female characters and reimagined the
[2]Introduction
events of Homer’s story from their points of view. In books such as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe, the reorientation of narrative perspective reminds us that the ancient works, originally composed by men for primarily male audiences, are nonetheless rich in complex female characters whose literary potential is still being tapped.
e large themes of Homer’s epic have proved to be enduring ones. e poem’s presentation of Odysseus as someone whose desperation to return home is tempered by an endless curiosity about the strange places through which he wanders provokes questions about how we navigate between the allure of adventure and the satisfactions of home. e depiction of the poem’s protagonist as a gritty survivor who in stark contrast to the haughty warriors of the Iliad, for whom dying young in battle is a fair price to pay for everlasting glory will stoop to virtually anything in order to stay alive demands that we reevaluate what we mean by the word “hero.” Odysseus’s fraught interactions with immortals such as the nymph Kalypso, whose offer of eternal life and youth he rejects in favor of returning to his aging wife, force us, like the hero, to grapple with the meaning of mortality and the value of human love, even as his relationships with his wife, his bedmates, his son, and his father o er insights into the relations between men and women, parents and children. And the epic’s complex portrayal of its morally ambivalent main character a man whose impressive intellectual gi s, technological expertise, and “godlike” cunning nonetheless very o en leave destruction and sorrow in their wake o en reads like a dark parable about Western civilization itself.
e Odyssey further displays a marked interest in a subject that some readers are more likely to associate with the work of twentieth-century modernist writers: the workings of language and rhetoric, the nature of poetry and literature. Odysseus’s expertise as a talented raconteur (and, when the occasion demands, an expert liar), along with the epic’s many scenes of him and other characters telling, exchanging, and enjoying a tale whose point is clearly self-serving, raises tricky questions about the uses of narrative and its relationship to truth. Meanwhile, the Odyssey’s frequent references to and depictions of poets, singers, and bards, along with repeated episodes
[3]Introduction
in which professional bards like Homer himself give performances on whose formal qualities and emotional power other characters comment, can lend the proceedings a startlingly “meta,” even postmodern feel.
Strikingly modern, too, is the Odyssey’s sophisticated inquiry into the nature of identity. e vehicle for that investigation is the poem’s constantly shi ing presentation of its chameleon-like hero, whose adeptness at both falsifying his appearance and ctionalizing his life story makes it almost impossible to trust what we think we know about him and, hence, impossible to know who he is. e issue is slyly raised already in the Odyssey’s opening line, which avoids naming its protagonist, referring to him instead simply as “a man.” Not very helpfully, that same rst line allots this nameless man precisely one adjective polytropos, literally “having many twists and turns” which, at once vague and yet suggestive of endless possibilities, seems intended simultaneously to illuminate and to confound our understanding of just who this man might be. Over the twelve thousand one hundred and nine lines that follow that opening, we see so many “turns” or facets of this character that it sometimes feels as if he is becoming more, rather than less, di cult to grasp as his story proceeds.
And so we can read the Odyssey today with a bracing sense of déjà vu: we feel we know these narratives, we have met these characters, we recognize these themes. Yet the epic of Odysseus’s return is, in many ways, as unfathomably strange to us as the one-eyed giant Cyclops was to its hero. Its origins, even a er centuries of scholarly investigations, are opaque, its poetic conventions sometimes o puttingly foreign, certain of its values passé when not outright repugnant.
Small wonder. e Odyssey is the product of the civilization of Archaic Greece that is, Greece before the classical era, before the “golden age” of Pericles, Greek tragedy, Athenian democracy, the Parthenon. at civilization ourished between around 750 bce, when the Iliad and the Odyssey likely began circulating, and around 500 bce the moment when the Athenian democracy was established. But the civilization described in the Odyssey had ourished another half millennium earlier, in the nal stage of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600–1150 bce). is was the civilization of Greek
[4]Introduction
kingdoms such as Mycenae, Argos, Tiryns, and Pylos, of the luxurious and sophisticated cities of Knossos on Crete and of Troy in Asia Minor. ese states, known as “palace-cultures,” were organized around a royal palace, or megaron, as the center of social, political, and economic activity, and each palace was presided over by its warrior-king. e principal characters in both the Iliad and the Odyssey are such kings: Odysseus of Ithaka, Achilles of Phthía, Nestor of Pylos, Menelaos of Sparta, Agamemnon of Mycenae. Between 1200 and 1150 bce, nearly all these cities were destroyed, probably as the result of both natural disasters (drought, earthquakes, res) and of economic and political upheavals.1
During the centuries a er the fall of the Bronze Age palace-cultures a period of such greatly reduced literacy and such minimal large-scale building and cra production that it was long referred to as Greece’s “Dark Ages” the tales Homer would later tell about the Trojan War began cir-
1. ere is archaeological evidence that a major city on the site where Troy once stood, at Hissarlik in present-day Turkey, was violently destroyed around 1180 bce that is, within a decade of the date given by some ancient historians for the Fall of Troy. Were the heroic tales told by Homer based, then, on historical reality? e question, and the issues it raises, go back to the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman and lover of the Homeric epics, pioneered the eld of Homeric archaeology, digging at the sites of Troy, Mycenae, Ithaka, and other cities in search of evidence of Homer’s events and characters. Until Schliemann, few took seriously the idea that the epics were grounded in historical reality. But Schliemann’s excavations at Hissarlik, which began in 1870, indeed revealed traces of a major Bronze Age city that could only be Troy. His dig, which went on intermittently for the next twenty years, ultimately showed that there had been several successive Troys on the site over a period of millennia. ( e one that was violently destroyed around the traditional date for the Fall of Troy is known as “Troy VIIa.”) e German archaeologist proudly displayed the most lavish of his nds in a way intended to leave no doubt as to their Homeric provenance: “Priam’s Treasure,” “the Jewels of Helen.”
Schliemann’s activities paved the way for others who believed that archaeology could shed light on the Homeric texts. e work of some of those successors, it must be said, disproved some of his cherished theories: among other things, Priam’s Treasure and Helen’s jewels turned out to antedate the period traditionally assigned to the Trojan War by over a thousand years, while the so-called “Mask of Agamemnon” that he later discovered at Mycenae is even older. Since then, scholars have been far more judicious about making grand claims for the historicity of the poems, although it’s clear that both the Iliad and the Odyssey do preserve memories of the Hellenic past; digs at sites mentioned by Homer, such as Pylos and Mycenae, have provided evidence for a number of practices depicted in the poems. (See, for instance, the note on 3.6, p. 462.) But much of that evidence indicates that the world depicted in the epics its social and political institutions, courtship customs and military tactics, household objects and weapons of war, its burial practices and religious rituals is an amalgam of elements from di erent periods. Many of those elements belong to the culture of the Iron Age (ca. 1100–800 bce) which is to say, a period closer to Homer’s own time than to that of the Late Bronze Age.
[5]Introduction
culating, aglow with idealized reminiscences of the civilization that had so suddenly vanished. ese tales eventually coalesced into a grand sequence of epic verse narratives known as the Epic Cycle. Composed by various poets and together comprising many tens of thousands of lines and at least seventy-seven “books” that is, papyrus scrolls this cycle traced the arc of the war from its distant prehistory (the wedding of the parents of Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest warrior) through its proximate cause (the Trojan prince Paris’s seduction of Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaos), to the events of the Trojan War itself, culminating in the Sack of Troy; and therea er the adventures of a number of the Greek warriors as they returned home (related in an epic known as the Nostoi, or “Returns”). e nal bizarre rami cation of the cycle’s most attenuated plotline was the slaying of Odysseus, in his old age, by his son Telégonos, his child by the witch Circe, related in a work called the Telegony, at the conclusion of which Telégonos marries Penelope and Telémakhos marries Circe(!). Of this cycle, only fragments and summaries survive. e only two complete epics about the Trojan War that have come down to us are the Iliad, about events that took place during the nal year of the war, and the Odyssey, about the nostos, or “return,” of one particular hero. Scholars continue to debate the relationship between those two epics and the Epic Cycle: which came rst, and which inspired the other.
As distant as they were from each other, both the civilization that the Odyssey commemorates and the civilization that produced the epic shared a number of features that are profoundly alien to modern sensibilities. For one thing, both were deeply patriarchal cultures. Although they played key roles in religion and cults, women had no political rights or status, could not own property, and were themselves o en little more than chattel, objects of exchange whose chief role was to produce children and perform homely domestic tasks. (Even the queens in the Homeric epics, from Helen of Troy to Penelope, are o en depicted engaged in spinning and weaving; so, too, the goddesses Kalypso and Circe.) e economies of these cultures, moreover, were based largely on the labor of enslaved people prisoners taken in war, victims of forced abductions who, like many of the slaves depicted in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, spent their lives performing work both domestic
[6]Introduction
and agricultural for masters who expected their loyalty as a matter of course. Hence, like other great works of literature from remote eras and di erent cultures, the Homeric epics present us with a classic conundrum: How can a work that seems to speak with such truth about so much that matters to us have been produced by a culture with certain institutions and values so alien to us? Only an attentive reading of the poem can begin to forge an answer to that question.
As to the poem’s formal conventions, they are likely to strike modern readers as equally inscrutable. You don’t have to progress very far into the text before you notice a number of peculiarities unlike anything familiar from other literary encounters. Of these, the high degree of repetition is likely to be the most striking. Not only do most characters have descriptive epithets that are repeated nearly every time their names appear “Athena of the bright owl-eyes,” “Telémakhos, sensible lad,” “Penelope, clear-thinking woman” but entire lines and even whole passages are repeated, verbatim, throughout the poem. Scenes of feasting, for instance, nearly always include the line “ en they stretched out their hands toward the food that was spread before them,” while the end of the meal is just as regularly signaled by the phrase “But once they had put away their craving for drink and for food . . .” Between those two moments, Homer o en repeats the following ve-line passage, describing the dinner preparations and service:
A maidservant brought in water, pouring it out from a ewer Exquisite, wrought in gold into a basin of silver, For the guest to wash his hands. en she placed a table nearby. e housekeeper, worthy woman, brought the meal and served it, Glad to have so many dishes to set out from her storerooms inside.
(1.136–40)
Such devices were, in fact, almost certainly the products of the distinctive manner in which the epics were composed and transmitted which is to say, not in writing but orally. e texts of both epics were long thought to have been the work of a single genius named Homer, who wrote his poems. Scholars began to reconsider the origins of the poems, however, in the late
[7]Introduction
eighteenth century, when a manuscript of the Iliad containing not only the text of the epic but transcriptions of the “scholia” the marginal notes by various ancient commentators that had accreted over the centuries was discovered in Venice. ese precious annotations were of enormous value in their own right, since relatively little has survived of the vast body of ancient scholarship and commentary on Homer, which was o en impressively erudite. ( e Roman geographer Strabo, a contemporary of the emperor Augustus, makes reference to a thirty-volume work by someone called Demetrius of Skepsis that treated just sixty-two lines of the second book of the Iliad.) But what was so exciting about the marginalia in the Venetian manuscript was that many of the notes, which referred to a number of ancient editions of the poems, concerned questions that the ancient commentators had about the authenticity of certain lines and passages. If the epics had been penned by a single author, scholars wondered, why were there so many variants already in ancient times? Could the authentic text by Homer be recovered by judiciously si ing through the variant versions?
By the early nineteenth century, the Venetian manuscript and the writings of those who had studied it were roiling the intellectual and literary worlds by raising a di erent set of questions. What if there were no authentic Homeric versions of the poems what if, indeed, there had been no Homer in the rst place? As the century progressed, more and more classicists were persuaded that the epics must originally have been composed by illiterate oral poets in an era before the Greeks adopted an alphabet and writing became widespread; the Iliad and the Odyssey, they argued, could not have been the work of a single bard but instead represented an accumulation of smaller, self-contained poems (or “lays”) composed by di erent poets of different eras. Adherents of one school of thought, known as “Analysts” from the Greek word analyô, “to break [something] down into its component parts” claimed to be able to distinguish among the various strata of composition in each of the epics; some insisted that they could make out “original” versions of the poems lurking beneath the layers. e Analysts were opposed by so-called “Unitarians,” who continued to insist that the poems, whatever aws in consistency and irregularities in style and coherence they might occasionally display, were the product of a single genius.
[8]Introduction
e debate about the authorship and transmission of the epics, known as the “Homeric Question,” raged on into the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, a classicist named Milman Parry proposed a theory, based on an insight he had into Homer’s verbatim repetitions, that transformed the way we understand how the epics were composed. Parry suggested that those repeated lines, passages, and epithets the latter almost always occurring in the same position within a line of verse must have functioned as prefabricated placeholders for oral poets who composed their works in performance. e rigidly formulaic nature of the repetitions, he argued, were traces of a poetic process that combined memorization of traditional elements with improvisation: if the bard knew in advance how a line was going to end “Zeus, who marshals the clouds,” say or could count on being able to insert a formulaic passage of several lines, he could devote his energies to what we might think of as the “creative” parts. (It is worth noting, however, that within an oral tradition, a poet’s canny manipulation of traditional formulas and scenes could itself be considered creative.) Parry bolstered his hypothesis by drawing parallels between Homer’s epics and the epic verse of contemporary Yugoslav bards whom he had studied, who adapted and improvised on traditional material in the way he believed the Homeric performers may well have done.
Most contemporary classicists, it seems safe to say, accept Parry’s core theory about the oral tradition in which the Homeric epics evolved. e poems likely began as relatively short compositions by preliterate bards who drew on traditional material legends about the Trojan War, folklore about stock gures (wily tricksters, man-eating ogres, sage old kings), myths about the various gods to fashion their songs. With each performance, they might elaborate on earlier compositions, re ning and adding, even as they continued to rely on and employ traditional diction, epithets, and stock phrases and scenes. (Passages in the poem where a given epithet ts the meter but doesn’t t the occasion were, according to Parry, traces of the poems’ origins as oral performances: see, for instance, the note on 1.29, p. 456.) As successive generations of poet-performers kept adding new material to their own and their peers’ works, individual lays Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon over the enslaved captive Briseis, say, or Odysseus’s encounter with
[9]Introduction
the Cyclops presumably began to coalesce into larger works with grander arcs and themes: the climactic struggles of the Trojan War and what they tell us about the nature of human striving and mortality, Odysseus’s return from the war a er twenty years and what it tells us about time and identity, family and home. Eventually, these increasingly vast works were committed to writing, possibly by a gi ed poet-editor who collated the various versions known to him and assembled them into something like their present form. Just when this happened is, typically, up for debate. One theory that was long prevalent based, in part, on comments by ancient authors such as Cicero was that the rst de nitive written texts of the epics were compiled in the late 500s bce on the orders of the Athenian ruler Peisístratos, who was keen to institute a recitation of the epics as part of a grand civic festival known as the Panathenaia. (For some scholars, this explains why a minor character in the Odyssey is called Peisístratos: an ingratiating nod to the event’s sponsor.) Such festivals, along with religious occasions, funeral games, and Panhellenic gatherings such as the quadrennial athletic games, were important venues for public recitations of the epics as well as other works. ese performances, quite di erent from the intimate recitals in the courts of kings and nobles that are depicted in the epics themselves, were a vital part of Greek cultural life from the Archaic period on. e men who performed the recitations were known as rhapsodes, a term likely derived from the Greek verb “to stitch together,” presumably because they would piece together the mythic and folkloric material they inherited, the lays and various episodes, the traditional lines and formulas, into their performances. Ancient texts refer to a law enacted by a son of Peisístratos requiring that the epics be performed in their entirety at the Panathenaia, each work being divided into parts that were assigned to the rhapsodes by lot, with successive rhapsodes reciting the di erent sections in order. For this to happen, of course, there needed to be a xed text. And yet, it is clear that numerous versions and variants continued to circulate and the poems continued to evolve. Starting in the early 200s bce, the plethora of such variants in the collections of the Library of Alexandria convinced the scholars who worked there that it was imperative to create a de nitive critical edition of the poems. e version they and their successors produced eventually became the
[10]Introduction
basis of a standard edition, widely circulated throughout the classical world and eventually copied and recopied by hand over the next millennium and a half, until the invention of the printing press. e rst printed edition of the Odyssey was published in 1488, in Florence.
All this helps to explain why the existence of “Homer” the blind bard who, people thought for centuries, single-handedly composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey is now questioned. Today, the name has become a convenient way of referring to all the obscure processes by means of which a loose collection of legends about the Trojan War and its a ermath were transformed, over time, into the two great epics we have today: masterpieces of astonishing structural complexity and coherence, great dramatic power, and profound insight into the human condition. (I will use “Homer” in this way.) Indeed, whatever the controversies about the identity of the epics’ poet (or poets), whatever the debates about the date and manner of their composition, there has never been disagreement, either ancient or modern, about the importance of the two Homeric poems. rough two millennia of Greek civilization, they remained the twin foundations of Hellenic culture, from the Archaic Era through the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, twenty centuries later: an essential part of education, the inspiration or models for much if not most subsequent literary and dramatic works, revered as sources of insight into subjects from ethics to medical treatments, and enjoying the supreme status and exerting the pervasive in uence on Western culture that we associate with the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, which the Homeric poems eventually joined as the foundations of European civilization. Between the apparent familiarity of the Odyssey and the sometimes confusing strangeness of the text and its historical contexts, readers of the epic must, like its hero, nd a path forward. e point of this introduction is to be of use in that process, providing readers with the tools necessary to read the text with both pleasure and understanding. e “Notes and Commentary” section following the translation provides detailed information about names, cultural practices, geographical references, and other elements mentioned in the text with which ordinary readers may not be familiar; it also o ers interpretative comments on scenes of special interest, and ags certain lines and passages whose authenticity scholars either ancient or modern (or
[11]Introduction
both) have questioned.2 is introduction, by contrast, is intended simply to point to some major themes and motifs. Such an overview, I hope, will allow readers to understand and appreciate for themselves why the epic takes the form that it does and how it puts that form in the service of its larger meanings which is to say, how it functions as a work of literature.
For Aristotle (384–322 bce), the Odyssey was easily summarized. In his Poetics, the rst systematic analysis of literature in the European tradition, the philosopher remarks that
the storyline of the Odyssey is not long. A man has been away from his homeland for many years, and Poseidon is always on the watch for him, and he is all alone. Meanwhile, the situation at home is such that his wealth is being consumed by the Suitors, who are plotting against his son.
But a er a storm-tossed journey he returns, and a er revealing himself and attacking them is saved and destroys his enemies. at is the essential; everything else is episodes.
What strikes the modern reader about this description is that it barely refers to the adventures that are, for many readers, the best-known and most engrossing parts of the epic: Odysseus’s encounters with the spaced-out Lotos-Eaters, who happily subsist on a ower that makes them oblivious of all cares; the cannibalistic, one-eyed Cyclops, a Goliath type whom Odysseus overcomes by using his wits; the Sirens, whose mesmerizing song lures passing sailors to their deaths; the enchantress Circe, who with a tap of her wand turns men into pigs; the ghosts whom the hero meets during his trip to Hades, the Land of the Dead; the six-headed, man-eating monster Skylla and the deadly whirlpool Kharybdis.
Yet those adventures constitute only a fragment of the Odyssey’s narrative a total of four books (9–12) out of the twenty-four that make up the
2. e text of the present translation does not feature asterisks or other marks to alert readers to the presence of an endnote; but readers can rest assured that when they encounter material about which they may have questions, there will be a note on it. Readers are encouraged to peruse the notes for each book before reading, in order to have a sense of what to look out for.
[12]Introduction
e Odyssey begins, in fact, with an extended description of the “situation at home”: that is, the chaotic state into which Odysseus’s household and kingdom have fallen during his absence (Books 1 and 2). A group of young men known as the Suitors, intent on wooing and eventually marrying the absent hero’s queen, Penelope, have taken over Odysseus’s palace, whose resources they are draining with their constant feasting and carousing. (In Book 16, we learn that there are one hundred eight of them.) ey treat the queen as if she were a widow, although we, of course, know that she is not; despite her delaying tactics, the pressure on her to marry one of them has become increasingly di cult to resist by the time the poem begins.
Two other “situations at home” have similarly reached a breaking point by the time the action gets under way, adding to the aura of crisis that establishes the narrative stakes in these opening books. e rst is domestic. Telémakhos, the son whom Odysseus le behind as a baby when he went to ght at Troy, is now, at twenty, grown to manhood, and in Books 1 and 2, we see him struggling to assert his authority and to oust the Suitors from the palace actions that provoke the Suitors to begin plotting his death. e second is political. e political structure of Ithaka and the other Greek states mentioned in the Odyssey resembles that of many Greek states during the Archaic period: that is, a sole ruler governing in consultation with a Council or Assembly of his male warrior-citizens. Such assemblies, at which citizens
[13]Introduction epic. In those four books, known as the Apologoi, or “Narratives,” Odysseus (who, a er surviving the last of his shipwrecks, is now a guest at the court of the king and queen of a highly re ned people called the Phaiêkians) recounts everything he has experienced between the Fall of Troy and his arrival on their shores the last of his many stops before he reaches Ithaka again. All this is reduced by Aristotle to “a storm-tossed journey.” For him, what is evidently of equal, if not greater, interest are the remaining ve-sixths of the poem: on the one hand, the “situation at home” and, on the other, the hero’s “return” and the events it sets in motion. e reader of the Odyssey would do well to follow the philosopher’s lead, since only by considering the epic as a whole by seeing Odysseus’s adventures within the larger context of the poet’s interest in the home that has so long awaited the hero can we appreciate the coherence of its structure and themes.
could bring items of concern to the attention of the king and other citizens, took place in the agora (a word derived from the verb “to gather,” and which I translate throughout as “place of assembly”). But in Book 2, when Telémakhos, spurred on by Athena, calls an Assembly, it emerges that this is the rst time since Odysseus’s departure for Troy, twenty years earlier, that such a convocation of citizens has been convened (2.26–27): a sure sign of political disorder. As the poem opens, then, the polity is on the verge of collapse. ese three situations the marital crisis, the coming-of-age crisis, and the political crisis are elaborately interwoven throughout the epic. At one point, for instance (18.259–70), Penelope recalls that when Odysseus was about to embark for Troy, he had told her that she should remarry if he failed to return by the time their son’s beard began to grow in: the very moment, it so happens, that the poem begins. Telémakhos’s coming of age thus precipitates both the marriage crisis and the political crisis. Whichever Suitor is successful intends not only to marry Penelope but also to take over the kingship of Ithaka, an outcome that the queen has been desperately trying to stave o by means of her delaying tactics. e action of the poem must, therefore, not only bring its hero safely home from his storm-tossed adventures, but resolve the fates of his wife, his son, and his kingdom. is is why the epic ends neither with Odysseus’s return home, nor even with his reunions with his son and wife the “Hollywood ending” but with the resolution of the civil con ict triggered by the hero’s violent revenge against the young Suitors who had been besieging his home.
Even when Ithaka is relegated to the background of the action, it haunts the narrative. In Books 3 and 4, for instance, Telémakhos, urged on by Athena, leaves home to visit two of his father’s comrades from the Trojan War: Nestor, the venerable king of Pylos, already an old man when he fought in the Trojan War, and Menelaos, king of Sparta, whose wife’s seduction by the Trojan prince Paris was the proximate cause of the Trojan War. From those two men, the young man hopes to learn about Odysseus’s fate. ose hopes are ultimately disappointed, since neither Nestor nor Menelaos has solid information, but Telémakhos’s visits to these foreign lands do provide crucial information a er all about Ithaka. In Pylos, for instance, the palace is a model of e ciency and decorum, courtiers treat the royal family with re-
[14]Introduction
spect, married couples share a bed, meals are decorous a airs, and religious rituals are duly observed by the entire community. All this throws into relief the extent of the chaos and lawlessness that prevail back home.
From time to time, we are reminded of the situation at home more explicitly during the rst half of the epic, which occasionally cuts between Odysseus’s doings and those of the Suitors, Penelope, and Telémakhos on Ithaka. But it is during the second half of the epic that Ithaka its geography, economy, social customs, ruling family, citizens, and slaves becomes the exclusive focus of the narrative as it traces the events set in motion by the hero’s setting foot once again on the soil of “the beloved land of his fathers.” First, there is a series of wrenching reunions between Odysseus and various loved ones, from his son (Book 16) to his faithful dog (Book 17) to his wife (Book 23) and, nally, his father (Book 24) all twined around the methodical planning and eventual execution of Odysseus’s plot to take vengeance on the Suitors. And, nally, there is the resolution of the new crisis that this revenge has triggered: a con ict between the hero and his family, on the one hand, and the slain Suitors’ outraged relatives, on the other a civil war that threatens to destabilize the king’s freshly reestablished hold on power and to return to the chaotic state of a airs with which the epic began. Hence, despite the gripping quality of the adventures that many think of as the epic’s high point, most of the Odyssey either takes place at, or is preoccupied by, Ithaka: home. is in turn suggests that, whatever color, thrills, and exoticism the adventures provide, their ultimate function is to provide an instructive contrast to what an appropriate “home” for this hero might be. What is the proper place for Odysseus and, by implication, for any human being? Homer’s portrayal of the various cultures and peoples, humans and monsters, that Odysseus encounters allows us to ponder that question from many angles as the narrative proceeds, following the hero as he samples a wide array of social, religious, economic, dietary, erotic, and marital norms, many of them foreign to those he has known.
e descriptions of these norms o en seem to invite us to place them on a spectrum between starkly opposed poles between which, we irresistibly feel, lies the appropriate place for Odysseus. To take a well-known example: the brutish Cyclops a one-eyed giant who is ignorant of agriculture and
[15]Introduction
seafaring, who eats Odysseus’s men raw, and whose fellow Cyclopes are literally cavemen, each a ruler in his own cave, ignorant of the concept of community seems to represent one end of a spectrum de ning the possibilities for civilization, that end being “savagery.” At the other end of the spectrum stand the ultra-civilized Phaiêkians, whom Odysseus entertains with tales of his travels and who like the historical Greeks of the Archaic period enjoy song and dance, poetry, and athletic contests; their government, too, with its king presiding over an Assembly of elders, resembles that of a Greek city-state. As Odysseus must navigate between Skylla and Kharybdis, so, too, must he navigate, metaphorically, among these and other apparent polarities: between mortality and divinity, humanity and bestiality, the natural and supernatural, the world of the living and the realm of the dead. And yet appropriately for a poem about a man who is polytropos, “having many turns of mind” the Odyssey itself o en twists and toys with the apparent dichotomies it presents. Both the Cyclops and the Phaiêkians, for example, turn out to be o spring of Poseidon, the god whose hostility to Odysseus fuels much of the epic’s plot; and both races share a marked aversion to interacting with anyone but themselves. (For all their re ned habits, the Phaiêkians are described from the start as being suspicious, even hostile, to strangers; their resistance is only worn down by Odysseus’s charming behavior toward the royal couple, along with a well-timed display of his physical prowess.) A careful reading of the text thus reveals that each of the “poles” that seem to de ne its values is less stable than we might have thought. However brutal he may be, for instance, the Cyclops is in fact the injured party at the beginning of the episode: it is Odysseus who violates the rules of hospitality by barging into the Cyclops’s cave and raiding his larder without an invitation. As for the Phaiêkians, their life of endless entertainment and uncannily paradisical ease the fruit on their trees, the poet tells us, appears on the branches already ripened, subject to no natural process of growth and development suggests how easily “civilized” can curdle into “decadent.”
Such destabilizations are inevitable in a poem whose hero o en transcends categories: at once celebrated “sacker of cities” and a despised vagabond; long absent from home and yet eternally present in the minds of
[16]Introduction
the loved ones he le behind; a mortal whose ability to outsmart even his divine patroness, Athena, threatens to breach the divide between human and divine; a man who indeed crosses the boundary between life and death when he visits the Land of the Dead an episode that the poet positions, signi cantly, at the poem’s center (Book 11). All this suggests that the hero’s struggle to identify and nd the right home and community for him is made both more di cult and more provocatively interesting by their, and his, complex and o en contradictory nature.
Because its hero is a wanderer who o en nds himself at the mercy of those he encounters, the Odyssey shows a deep and ongoing interest in hospitality: the treatment of strangers, foreigners, and wanderers, the proper relationship between host and guest. Such relations, a matter of urgent importance in the society that produced the Iliad and the Odyssey, were subject to a set of protocols known as xenia (from the Greek xénos the word, signi cantly, for both “guest” and “stranger”). Such protocols mandated, among other things, that householders whether kings or slaves o er food and shelter to any stranger who appeared on their doorstep; such strangers could expect to be fed, bathed, and housed overnight. e ritual of bathing guests, so often depicted in the epic, clearly re ects a memory of the grand Mycenaean palaces: inscribed tablets found at Pylos record the presence of thirty-seven female “bath-pourers” among the household.
e elaborate courtesies of xenia forbid hosts even from asking the names of their guests until a proper welcome had been provided. Guests would, in time, be sent o with a gi and were expected to reciprocate when the opportunity presented itself a reminder that xenia always assumed an eventual reciprocation. In the real world, such reciprocity was a matter of practicality: in an age when travel was a perilous a air, travelers had to be able to rely on some kind of system that at least temporarily guaranteed their safety. Small wonder, then, that proper adherence to the protocols of xenia was considered a religious obligation and came under the jurisdiction of no less a deity than Zeus himself, who in his cultic role as Zeus Xenios, “Zeus who presides over strangers/guests,” was expected to avenge violations of these all-important rules. In the fragmented, sometimes lawless postwar
[17]Introduction
world of the Odyssey, xenia is the closest thing the epic o ers to a universal code of conduct.
e poem presents a broad array of examples of xenia both positive and negative. On the one hand, there are Nestor and Menelaos, both of whom welcome young Telémakhos to their palaces with lavish hospitality. ere is the Phaiêkian royal couple, Alkínoös and Arétê, who, a er some initial wariness, end by treating their mysterious guest with notable tact and courtesy, ordering their expert sailors to bring him back to Ithaka and showering him with such lavish gi s that he returns home with more treasure than the Trojan booty he had lost at sea. And there is the kindly swineherd Eúmaios, who gladly o ers his humble hospitality to Odysseus a er he has returned to Ithaka and appears, disguised as an aged beggar, on the loyal servant’s doorstep. e latter example may remind some readers of folktales such as that of Baucis and Philemon, the elderly peasants who o ered what meager hospitality they could to the disguised Zeus and Hermes, and were richly rewarded for it. And indeed, at one point in Book 17, a er Antínoös, the ringleader of the Suitors, hurls a stool at the bedraggled-looking Odysseus, some of the men around him protest on precisely the grounds that an itinerant beggar can turn out to be a disguised god:
“Antínoös, it wasn’t right to hit this ill-fated beggar Curses on you if he’s really some god from the heavens above!
For the gods o en take the appearance of strangers from far-o lands, Assuming all sorts of guises as they wander around our cities, Observing the deeds of mortals, whether insolent or righteous.”
(17.483–87)
But the possibility that the ragged beggar asking for a handout might in fact be a god “made no impression” on most of the “heedless” Suitors, as the poet goes on to comment in this passage. Camped out in Odysseus’s home against the will of their host, depleting the palace’s resources year a er year as they besiege Penelope, plotting against Telémakhos, whom they seek to supplant as eventual rulers of Ithaka, these men, whose greed and gluttony are frequently remarked on as being the most egregious aspect of an inso-
[18]Introduction
lence “that reach[es] the iron vault of the heavens,” are the poem’s preeminent example of bad guests just as the Cyclops, who eats his guests instead of feeding them, is its most memorable example of a bad host.
But the epic o ers other instructive examples of hosts who pervert their responsibilities. e entire plot of the Odyssey is haunted by the actions of the adulterous couple Aigisthos and Klytaimnêstra, he the cousin and she the wife of the Greeks’ commander in chief at Troy, Agamemnon. Together, the two lovers murder the war hero during a banquet meant to celebrate his triumphant return from Troy. at grisly scene, recalled by the ghost of Agamemnon during a conversation with Odysseus in Hades, horrifyingly transforms a feast into a battle eld which is to say, into the realm of the Iliad:
“No, Aigisthos was the one who contrived my death and my downfall.
He and his cursed bedmate killed me, a guest in his house,
As we broke bread he slew me the way you’d slaughter an ox at the trough.
And so I died a most pitiful death, while all around me my comrades
Were being slain, one by one, like swine with gleaming white tusks
At a feast in the home of a wealthy man grown great in power
Who is hosting a wedding or neighborly feast or a banquet with all the trimmings.
By now you have been a witness to the deaths of so many men Who fell in single combat or in battle’s brutal scrum.
But if you had witnessed this your heart would have burst out wailing, Seeing how, in the midst of the mixing-bowls and the tables still laden with food
We lay there in the Hall. e whole oor was oozing blood.”
(11.409–20)
e obscene inversion of xenia that characterized Agamemnon’s return from the war is referred to numerous times throughout the Odyssey and stands as a pointed warning of the kind of homecoming that Odysseus who is of course ignorant of the actual “situation at home” during most of his journey must nd a way to avoid. Ironically, the transformation of a feast into a killing ground will recur at the end of the poem, when Odysseus
[19]Introduction
punishes the Suitors for their violations of xenia by slaughtering them as they banquet, illicitly, in his own palace.
e emphasis on the importance of xenia is the proper context for evaluating a number of crucial moments. What the Suitors and their accomplices are punished for at the climax of the epic is what the poet repeatedly refers to as their “outrageous” and “arrogant” violation of xenia; this, far more than their courting of Penelope, earns them their terrible fate. Between their ongoing abuse of Odysseus’s hospitality while he is absent and, later, their wantonly cruel treatment of him once he has returned disguised as the elderly beggar in their midst, the Suitors have mortally o ended Zeus Xenios. So, too, certain of the female slaves who have been the Suitors’ bedmates and who connive with them against Penelope. As slaves, naturally, these women have little or no power or agency; whether they sleep with the Suitors by choice is a question that Homer never addresses. But the poet does take great care to portray the slave women’s ringleader, Melanthô, as willfully cruel and abusive to the poor elderly beggar whom she encounters at the palace Odysseus in disguise and, hence, as someone who earns her terrible fate as surely as does the Suitor she’s sleeping with. (It is instructive to compare her contemptuous treatment with the great respect that is shown to the “beggar” by another slave, the cowherd Philoítios, upon meeting him, at 20.199–225.) Although it can strike modern readers as excessive, the punishment for abuses of xenia demonstrates the seriousness with which this institution was treated by the Greeks.
e relationship between guests and hosts is hardly the only one in which the Odyssey shows a deep interest. roughout the poem, gods and mortals interact in a number of ways, both positive and negative, that shed light on the poem’s larger view of the human condition.
In Greek religious practice, relations between gods and humans were, like xenia, thought of as being reciprocal, the exchanges between immortals and mortals regulated by a number of ritual actions and customs. First among these was animal sacri ce. At every meal, a portion of the food (the sacri ce) and drink (the libation) was o ered to the gods; before meals of meat, ritual slaughter of a domesticated animal was performed according to a rigidly
[20]Introduction
prescribed formula of gestures and acts. ese include the adornment of the victim, which at lavish occasions involved gilding the animal’s horns; sprinkling of grain and water on the animal; the slaughter and subsequent butchering of the carcass; the removal of the thighbones, which were wrapped in fat and then grilled (the portion that belonged to the gods, who take pleasure in the aroma of the roasting fat); the tasting of the entrails; and, nally, the spitting and roasting of the meat for consumption by the celebrants. e fullest description of this ritual in the Odyssey occurs in Book 3, which devotes thirty-four lines to a solemn recitation of every step of the ritual, from gilding to feasting. Homer repeatedly makes clear that due performance of the ritual was expected of the great and lowly alike: Book 3 opens with a description of an impressive sacri ce to Poseidon eighty-one bulls in front of a congregation of forty- ve hundred celebrants by the king of Pylos, while Book 14 shows Odysseus’s slave, the swineherd Eúmaios, performing a homely sacri ce of a small pig and subsequently sharing his humble pork dinner with the stranger he believes to be an elderly beggar but who is, in fact, his disguised master.
It is equally clear that failure to execute the sacri cial ritual properly always forbodes disaster. In Book 12, Odysseus’s marooned crew, on the brink of starvation, slaughter the cattle belonging to the sun-god, Helios, which they have been forbidden to lay hands on, and then go on to bungle the ritual because they don’t have access to the requisite accoutrements, such as grain and wine; immediately a erward, every one of them perishes at the insistence of an outraged Helios. at this disaster is the only one of Odysseus’s adventures explicitly referred to in the epic’s opening lines testi es to the special status of sacri ce in the Greek imagination and focuses our attention on key concerns associated with that ritual: the importance of observing norms that regulate the consumption of food and, in so doing, help to demarcate the respective realms and prerogatives of mortals and immortals. In this light, the fact that the Suitors are never once represented as performing a sacri ce before their many meals and the animals they consume, as with the cattle of the Sun, have been stolen from their proper owner marks them for punishment as surely as does their failure to honor xenia. at sacri ce was considered to be part of a transaction between immor-
[21]Introduction
tals and mortals becomes apparent when characters make appeals to the gods for help. When mortals do make proper sacri ce, it is in the expectation, or at least the hope, that they will win divine favor or assistance. In Book 1, Athena chides Zeus for having unjustly abandoned Odysseus who, she reminds him, never forgot to sacri ce to him:
“Has your heart now Turned from him, Olympian? Were you not pleased when Odysseus
Sacri ced to you, Zeus, by the ships of the Achaeans
Among Troy’s sprawling plains? Yet you now nd Odysseus odious?”
(1.59–62)
is explains why, when mortal characters pray to the gods for assistance prayer being another mode of communication between humans and gods they o en refer pointedly to the sacri ces that they have made. In Book 17, for instance, the loyal swineherd Eúmaios prays to the local nymphs for his master’s return:
“Nymphs of this fountain, daughters of Zeus, if ever Odysseus Wrapped the thigh-bones of lambs and kids in rich folds of fat And burned them for you as an o ering, then grant this wish for me: May that man only return! May some Power lead him here!”
(17.240–43)
And a prayer made to Poseidon in Book 3, during Telémakhos’s visit to Pylos, reveals a similar expectation in this case, that a particularly impressive sacri ce would bene t the entire community:
“To Nestor and his sons, rst of all, may you grant renown; And then, in return for this illustrious hecatomb, Grant gracious recompense to the rest of the people of Pylos.”
(3.57–59)
It is hardly the case, however, that all prayers are answered or all sacrices accepted. In Book 3, Nestor, the king of Pylos, recalls how, a er Troy
[22]Introduction
fell, Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaos, had quarreled about how they ought to proceed. Menelaos, we learn, wanted to sail home immediately, but Agamemnon aware that the Greeks had o ended Athena during the sack of the city wanted
“To hold back the host and o er holy hecatombs
In the hope that he might appease Athena’s dreadful rage Fool that he was, like a child, he didn’t realize she’d never listen: For the minds of the gods, who exist always, are not easily swayed.”
(3.144–47)
Homer’s gods, like his human characters, have desires and goals of their own agendas that no amount of human entreaty can alter. e other important medium for communication between immortals and mortals was more one-sided: that is, divination. e Greeks believed that the gods revealed their designs to humans through signs anything from thunderbolts to the ight of birds, from the appearance of a sacricial victim’s entrails to the sound of the wind rustling in the leaves of oak trees. e interpretation of such signs was typically the province of a specially gi ed mortal: a seer, or mantis (from which the second part of the English word “necromancy” is ultimately derived). In Book 2, for instance, Telémakhos makes an impassioned speech before an Assembly of Ithakan citizens in which he denounces the Suitors’ behavior; at the moment he stops speaking, two eagles birds associated with Zeus appear and, a er wheeling over the heads of the onlookers, y o to the right: that is, the well-omened direction. ( e le sinister, in Latin is the ill-omened direction.) Immediately a erward, an aged citizen named Halithérses who, we are told, “surpassed all the men of his time / In knowing the ways of birds and uttering Fate’s decrees” addresses the people, telling them that this sign can only mean one thing: “a wave of great disaster [for the Suitors] is about to break: Odysseus / Will not be far from his loved ones much longer” (2.158–59, 163–64). As the epic nears its conclusion, such signs and portents accumulate, ratcheting up the narrative excitement: there are claps of thunder sent by Zeus at key moments, more ights of birds, and, in Book
[23]Introduction
20, a memorably grisly vision beheld by a seer who, as the Suitors feast away, sees blood oozing from the palace walls.
Sometimes, however, no prophet is needed to interpret the signs and omens through which the gods communicate. At the climax of Book 21, just a er Odysseus has won the Contest of the Bow, Zeus reveals “his sign” by thundering loudly a show of divine support at which Odysseus, who clearly understands what the thunderclap portends, “exulted.”
e distinction between divine and human in Greek religion, then, is underscored by the highly mediated ways in which mortals and immortals interact: sacri ce, prayer, divination. But in the mythical world of the epics, mortals and immortals intermingle more directly. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the gods are fully- edged characters who interact with one another as well as with mortals and who take vigorous part in the action, which they strongly in uence. e Odyssey, in fact, is framed by two crucial interventions by Zeus. Book 1 begins with “the Father of men and of gods” calling a council of the gods, at which he acquiesces to his daughter Athena’s urgent request to e ect the homecoming of Odysseus, the only Greek hero of the Trojan War who hasn’t returned home yet (because of the vengeful machinations of another god, Poseidon, whose son, the Cyclops, Odysseus blinded); and Book 24 concludes with Zeus dramatically imposing a cease re in the civil war that has begun between Odysseus and the Suitors’ relatives. Between those two instances of divine structuring of the plot, other gods work to serve Zeus’s agenda. In Book 1, Athena goads the hapless Telémakhos into action and later accompanies him, in disguise, as he travels in search of news of his father; in Book 6 again in disguise she helps the shipwrecked Odysseus reach the city of the Phaiêkians safely and provides him with information that will prove crucial to his ability to ingratiate himself with his hosts; and throughout the poem’s second half, she actively involves herself in the plan to take vengeance on the Suitors. Hermes, the messenger god, also makes a handful of crucial appearances in furtherance of Zeus’s plan: commanding the lovelorn nymph Kalypso, who has held Odysseus captive for seven years, to release him (Book 5); providing Odysseus with an antidote to the magic of Circe, who has transformed his crew into swine (Book 10); and escorting the shades of the dead Suitors to Hades (Book 24).
[24]Introduction
A number of lesser deities appear as well. Not the least of these are Kalypso and Circe themselves, both immortal nymphs who have sexual relationships with Odysseus liaisons that must be broken o if the hero is to return to his mortal existence. Other supernatural gures have small but critical roles in the plot while adding fantastical color to the proceedings: Leukothéa, the “white goddess,” who rises from the waves to save the hero from shipwreck at the end of Book 5, and Proteus, the shape-shi ing Old Man of the Sea, who in Book 4 gives Menelaos critical information during the Spartan king’s postwar wanderings. Occasionally, characters will attribute events that lie beyond their control to a daimôn, an anonymous divine force that makes itself felt in human a airs. (In the present translation, daimôn the ancestor of the English “demon” is always translated as “some Power.”)
And yet, despite all this, it is hard to escape the feeling that, in the Odyssey, as opposed to the Iliad, the gods have grown remote from the world of mortals. is is part of a larger dynamic that suggests in a variety of ways that the grandiose era of the Trojan War is giving way to a more modest period in human history. roughout the Odyssey, for instance, we are periodically reminded that the Trojan War, which had started twenty years earlier and has been over for a decade by the time the action begins, has already receded into myth, the subject now of entertaining songs by bards such as Phêmios, the resident poet at the royal court in Ithaka, who sings about the Greek warriors’ returns from Troy in Book 1, and Demódokos, the Phaiêkian singer, whose repertoire includes a song about the Trojan Horse. So, too, with the gods, most of whom, it would seem, have retreated to Olympos by the time the action of the Odyssey takes place. Certainly, they are nowhere near as active as they are in the Iliad, where virtually all the major Olympian deities from Zeus and his consort Hera to Poseidon, Ares, Aphrodite, Athena, Hephaístos, and Apollo take frequent and vigorous part in the action, interfering with the progress of the war, even donning armor and participating in the ghting, machinating on behalf of their mortal favorites, many of whom are their own half-human, half-divine children. e Odyssey, by contrast, is marked by the intervention of just a handful of major gods, of whom only Athena appears with any frequency and that, for the most part, only in the poem’s second half. roughout his adventures, Odysseus is largely on his own: an
[25]Introduction
isolation that showcases his much-vaunted cunning. When the few immortals who do gure in the epic involve themselves in mortal matters, it is, as we know, to tie up the war’s one remaining loose end the return of Odysseus. In so doing, they appear to be putting the nishing touches on a larger plan: to draw a nal and permanent line between the worlds of gods and men. For Odysseus seems to represent within himself a potential threat to that all-important boundary: mating with goddesses, outsmarting Athena herself on occasion, emerging unscathed from his voyage to Hades, the Land of the Dead, a place from which mortals do not ordinarily return. e hero’s capacity to upset the cosmic order is, in fact, agged from the start. We learn in the opening lines (1.14–16) that Kalypso is so besotted with her mortal lover that she has o ered to make him an immortal a gi that is not really hers to give, as it happens. e threat represented by her behavior is neutralized, however: Zeus sends Hermes to the amorous nymph’s remote cave in order to put an end to the a air and hasten Odysseus back where he belongs: with Penelope, on Ithaka, living the fully mortal life of a human being. We feel that, by the time he does so, the age in which gods and men interact freely will have come to an end.
e relative scarcity of the gods in the epic, the way it isolates its hero and so o en leaves him to his own devices, and its deep admiration for the human qualities and skills he exhibits in facing adversity suggest that the preeminent concern of this work is the meaning of mortal experience. And for good reason: this life, as Odysseus sees for himself during his trip to the Land of the Dead in Book 11, is all we have. ere, the dead are memorably described as being “vacant heads,” and death the price that so many of the epics’ warrior-heroes willingly pay in return for everlasting glory, or kleos turns out to be a shadowy state of non-existence to which even the most abject of lives is superior, as the ghost of Achilles, greatest of Iliadic heroes, mournfully observes to Odysseus:
“I would far rather live o the earth as the serf of another man Some man with a pitiful portion who barely ekes out a living an rule here as the lord of all those who are dead and gone.” (11.489–91)
[26]Introduction
Small wonder that the Odyssey again and again represents its hero as someone who will stop at nothing no e ort, no scruple, no abasement to stay alive. It is a poem of human life.
It is for this reason that the Odyssey is so preoccupied with relationships among mortals with, that is to say, marriage, sex, parents, children, and family life. e epic begins, as I have mentioned, with four books focused largely on the hero’s son, Telémakhos. e youth’s struggles to establish himself as an adult member of both his family and his community constitute a secondary narrative that shadows the story of his father’s struggles to return home. A handful of swaggering outbursts against Penelope, along with Telémakhos’s sadistic punishment of slave women who slept with the Suitors and conspired with them against his mother, are just a few of the many psychologically persuasive touches in Homer’s portrait of this immature young man, whose progress to adulthood is, to say the least, uneven. at progress reaches its climax toward the end of the poem’s second half, when, in Book 22, father and son come together as comrades in arms to slay the impious Suitors one of several signs late in the story that the son has reached the threshold of manhood and is poised to become his father’s equal.
It is not surprising, given the patriarchal culture from which the Odyssey emerged, that lial anxieties about meeting paternal expectations should run throughout the epic. ese anxieties are summed up by an axiom quoted by Athena herself early on in the story. In Book 2, the goddess, who has disguised herself as the loyal family adviser, Mentor, tries to pressure the youth into embarking on his fact- nding missions to Pylos and Sparta by alluding to his father’s glorious reputation, promising him that posterity won’t nd him wanting if
“. . . there’s even one drop of your father’s stalwart spirit in you
Oh, what a man was he to see words and deeds through to the end!
If there is, this voyage of yours won’t be in vain or fruitless.
But if you are not the child of that man and Penelope
I don’t expect that you’ll complete the journey you long to make.
[27]Introduction
Few are the sons and heirs who can measure up to their fathers; Most are worse by far, and few are those who can best them.”
(2.271–77)
As if that weren’t enough pressure, another model for ideal lial behavior haunts the Odyssey, embedded in a story rst mentioned by Zeus as the epic begins and subsequently alluded to regularly as the story proceeds, all the way through to its nal book: the so-called “Oresteia Narrative.” is is the tale of how Orestes, the son of the murdered Greek leader Agamemnon, avenges his father’s death by slaying the murderers his mother and her lover. In Book 1, Athena, disguised as an old family friend, explicitly uses Orestes’ exemplary conduct to goad Odysseus’s son into adult action:
“It’s time You let go of these childish ways since you are no longer a child. Or have you never heard how great was the fame that Orestes Won in the eyes of all mankind for killing his father’s killer Cra y Aigisthos, who had cut down his far-famed father?
My friend, I can see you’re a ne specimen, tall and good-looking: Be brave as well, so that people in times yet to come will praise you.”
(1.296–302)
Hence the tale of Agamemnon’s disastrous homecoming and its bloody a ermath serves a double purpose in the Odyssey: not only as a warning for Odysseus to assess the situation at home before he reveals his presence, but as a potential model for his son’s behavior.
If the epic begins with a son’s anxiety about living up to his father’s reputation, it also o ers a number of examples of fathers who show great concern for their sons. Poseidon is the rst we encounter: in Book 1, Zeus ruefully reminds Athena that “Poseidon who makes the earth tremble persists in his anger / All because of the Cyclops, whose one sole eye our man blinded . . .” (1.68–69). Only later, in Book 9, do we learn the whole story: called upon by Polyphêmos, the Cyclops, to avenge his blinding at Odysseus’s hands, the sea-god honors his son’s request, hounding Odysseus and doing his ut-
[28]Introduction
most to prevent him from returning home the reason for the hero’s years of wandering. Another father whose concern for his son is palpable is Achilles: when Odysseus encounters the ghost of the great hero in Hades, the “best of the Achaeans” wastes no time in inquiring whether his son, Neoptólemos, had turned out to be his equal: “But come now, tell me something about my splendid son. / Did he follow me into the war as the foremost ghter, or not?” (11.492–93). And indeed, the epic ends with the fathers of the slain Suitors demanding justice for their murdered sons a nal instance of fatherly solicitude and the nal obstacle to a satisfying resolution of the crisis on Ithaka precipitated by Odysseus’s absence and homecoming.
During that exchange in Hades, Achilles goes on to ask another question, one that reminds us that he is a son as well as a father one who is stereotypically anxious about his ability to do his parent honor:
“And tell me of faultless Peleus, if by chance you have heard any news
Does he still hold his place of honor in all the Myrmidon cities?
Or do men throughout Hellas and Phthía disrespect him now
Because old age has seized both his arms and legs in its grip?
For I myself can no longer defend him under the rays of the sun
And be as I once was by the sprawling plains of Troy
When I’d slaughter the enemy’s nest as I was defending the Argives. If I could only come back, even brie y, to my father’s house as I was!” (11.494–501)
Odysseus, too, is a son as well as a father, as the ending of the Odyssey makes clear. e epic’s nal reunion is not, as many people think, the one between Odysseus and Penelope the husband and wife but rather the moment in Book 24 when the hero is reunited at last with his aged father, Laërtes, who during his son’s long absence had retreated, bitter and griefstricken, to his farm far from the palace. e nal scene of the epic brings together Telémakhos, Odysseus, and Laërtes, the latter now miraculously rejuvenated by Athena, as they confront the enraged fathers of the Suitors. is moment of intergenerational male bonding elicits a proud exclamation from Odysseus’s father:
[29]Introduction
“What a day is this, dear gods! Truly do I rejoice To behold my son and grandson competing to see who is bravest!”
(24.514–15)
at this reunion of son, father, and grandfather represents the nale of the epic is a stark reminder of the Odyssey’s deeply patriarchal worldview. Like virtually all of extant Greek literature, Homer’s tale is concerned above all with models of male behavior. Over the past half century, since feminist criticism began to in uence how classicists read the canonical Greek and Roman authors, scholars have come to appreciate the ways in which even the most impressive and memorable female characters in classical works characters in which the Odyssey is particularly rich serve, ultimately, to illuminate the project of masculine self-de nition. It is through their interactions with powerful, seductive, vulnerable, or sympathetic female characters girls, women, and goddesses that the male heroes in these works come to achieve an understanding of themselves. It’s no accident that, in Greek, the rst word of the Odyssey is andra “a man.” It is, rst and foremost, the tale of a man a man who must learn to father a son he never knew and to rekindle a relationship with the father he le behind.
And yet, the Odyssey o ers a remarkably varied array of fascinating female characters, as well as a series of exceptionally nuanced portrayals of complicated relationships between women and men. Critics since ancient times have remarked on the epic’s interest in, and sympathy for, female psychology and experience, which are as profound as anything we might nd in much later works. e quality of that feeling for the poem’s women inspired the great British classical scholar Richard Bentley, in the early eighteenth century, to opine that “[t]he Iliad [Homer] made for the men, the Odysseis [= the Odyssey] for the other sex.” A century and a half later, the author and poet Samuel Butler was inspired by what he called “the preponderance of women in the Odyssey” to theorize that the author of the epic must have been a woman, and that the internal narrator of the epic must have been the Phaiêkian princess Nausikáa notions he expounded in an 1897 treatise called e Authoress of the “Odyssey.” Although few people today take these
[30]Introduction
claims seriously, it is certainly possible to read certain passages as attempts to question or even subvert the male-oriented assumptions of its own culture. At one point, for instance, the nymph Kalypso becomes a mouthpiece for what looks very much like a tart condemnation of the patriarchy. When, a er holding Odysseus captive for seven years, she receives orders from Zeus who has had more than his fair share of mortal mistresses, to say the least to give up Odysseus, her angry denunciation of the double standard for male and female sexual behavior can strike readers as startlingly modern: “What wretches you are, you gods, jealous beyond all others! / You’re full of resentment at goddesses who sleep with mortal men / Openly, when one of us wants to make him her wedded husband . . .” (5.118–20).
e oscillation between Ithaka and Odysseus’s far- ung journeys that structures the epic allows the poet to raise questions about the nature of relations between men and women: about sex, love, and marriage. Just as Ithaka is the destination to which Odysseus’s many travels must ultimately bring him despite the fascination and temptations o ered by some of the places he visits, so, too, is Penelope the ultimate goal of his travels, whatever the attractions of the females he encounters (and, in some cases, goes to bed with). As the hero is reminded by Kalypso, who for seven years was “burning to make him her husband” and even promised him eternal life, she herself will remain immortal and beautiful while the mortal Penelope is doomed to age and, eventually, die. Odysseus’s rejection of the goddess’s remarkable o er, his choice of Penelope over her divine rivals which is to say, his choice of death as her husband over a life without her is a powerfully moving testimony to the character and qualities of his wife and to the life that she represents.
On the divine level, the spectrum of female characters runs from “helper” gures such as Athena, Odysseus’s divine patroness, who intervenes at crucial moments to assist her favorite mortal and enjoys engaging in bantering repartee with him, to the sea-goddess Leukothéa, once a mortal woman but now divine, who materializes at a crucial moment to save the drowning Odysseus; from immortal femmes fatales such as the Sirens, whose tantalizing song lures sailors to their deaths, to the repellent monster Skylla, her six fanged heads barking like dogs, who devours the hero’s comrades. Some-
[31]Introduction
where on the spectrum between the two there are the two female divinities who can claim to be Penelope’s rivals: Kalypso and Circe. Both become the hero’s lovers, and both, in their di erent ways, are depicted as being simultaneously alluring, dangerous, and powerful and occasionally quite sympathetic, as Kalypso’s tirade against Zeus reminds us.
e spectrum on the mortal level is equally wide, o ering a panorama of women of all ages and types. ere are Nausikáa, the Phaiêkian princess who o ers succor to Odysseus a er he washes up on her country’s shores, and whose combination of beauty, mettle, and brains recalls Penelope; the ercely, even ferociously loyal Eurykleía, once Odysseus’s childhood nurse and now the housekeeper who presides over his palace, eventually playing a key role in his plot against the Suitors; and Penelope herself, who has been using her own mettle and brains to hold o the Suitors for years by the time the action of the epic begins. But there are also Helen of Troy, whose adultery triggered the Trojan War and who as we see when we meet her in Book 4, long since reunited with her cuckolded husband Menelaos is as seductive and manipulative as ever; and her sister, Klytaimnêstra, whose adulterous betrayal and subsequent murder of her husband, Agamemnon, is pointedly presented throughout the Odyssey as the worst-case scenario for the “situation at home” that might await a returning hero. e poet’s interest in all types of female character and experience is evident in an arresting sequence in Book 11 known as the “Catalogue of Heroines,” a parade of the ghosts of famous women from history some noble, others wicked which Odysseus observes during his visit to the Land of the Dead. e presentation of this varied array of female characters both human and divine provokes us, in turn, to ponder the nature of the connection between men and women in all its varied forms. e Odyssey presents its audience with depictions of relationships as richly varied as are its female gures: from the idealized bonds between Odysseus and Penelope and between Nestor and his wife to the hermetic, incestuous brother-sister unions among the six sons and six daughters of Aíolos, god of the winds; from the irtation between Odysseus and the young princess Nausikáa to the complicated marriages of Helen and Menelaos and the Phaiêkian royal couple, Alkínoös and
[32]Introduction
Arétê, both unions seemingly peaceful but troubled by submerged tensions arising from the wife’s higher status; to the outright adulteries of Helen and Paris and Klytaimnêstra and Aigisthos. And there are, of course, Odysseus’s liaisons with Kalypso and Circe themselves examples of the double standard about which Kalypso so furiously complains.
As we study these relationships, the question irresistibly comes to mind: why is Penelope the right choice for the hero? Certainly, she is as complex and sometimes contradictory as some of the other choices that face Odysseus and certainly as many-sided as he is. At times, particularly at the beginning of the poem, she can strike the reader as disconcertingly passive, seemingly capable of doing little more than retiring to her chamber and weeping for her apparently lost husband. Yet, from the start, she is simultaneously revealed as being as impressively wily and manipulative as Odysseus. As early as Book 2, we learn about the trick she played on the Suitors to keep them at bay, telling them that she would marry one of them when she’d nished the shroud she was weaving for her father-in-law, only to undo her weaving in secret each night. And a crucial scene at the end makes clear that she is the only character in the epic, including the goddess Athena, who is able to successfully trick her trickster husband.
All this helps us to perceive the source of the bond between this pair. ere is a moment in Book 6 when the shipwrecked and bedraggled Odysseus, who has been discovered by the princess Nausikáa during a trip with her handmaidens to the seaside, makes an urgent appeal to her for help. At the end of his speech, he announces his hope that one day she might enjoy an ideal union between husband and wife, the prerequisite for which, he declares, is homophrosynê literally, “having the same kind of mind.” is, he declares, is
“A worthy gi . For there’s nothing as powerful or as great
As when a husband and wife, united by oneness of mind in their thinking, Keep their home together a great bane to their enemies, A blessing to their friends, and their renown is on everyone’s lips.”
(6.182–85)
[33]Introduction
It is impossible not to take those lines as a statement about his own marriage a statement that helps us, the audience, understand the choice he has made. e opening lines of the epic tell us that the hero came to know “the ways of thinking” of many kinds of people during his storm-tossed voyages. His encounters with the poem’s female characters suggest that the mind that interests him most is, in the end, that of his wife.
Odysseus’s own mind, its nature and qualities, is the object of intense interest throughout the poem. A striking number of the hero’s epithets focus on his cleverness, ingenuity, inventiveness, and powers of mental endurance: polymêtis, “having great cunning”; polyphrôn, “having many kinds of intelligence”; polymêkhanos, “able to contrive many solutions”; poikilomêtis, “of subtle wiles.” ese talents express themselves, as o en as not, in the hero’s ability both to disguise himself and see through other people’s disguises. Among the rst stories we hear about him is related by Helen of Troy, who recalls how, while the Trojan War was still raging, Odysseus had managed to sneak through enemy lines and gain access to the royal palace in Troy:
“Breaking his own spirit, he dis gured himself with blows And threw some vile rags round his shoulders, like some serf, And entered the enemy’s city, lined with broad avenues, Hiding himself by assuming another man’s appearance, A beggar’s. ere was no one like him aboard the Achaeans’ ships. at’s how he looked when he entered the Trojans’ city, and Not one of them noticed a thing . . .” (4.244–50)
Later on, upon his return to Ithaka, Odysseus will once again be disguised as a beggar, this time by Athena, so that he might assess the “situation at home” incognito. At other times, the goddess alters the hero’s looks for the better, endowing him with youthful vigor and beauty so he can make a powerful impression at key moments, such as his reunions with his son and his wife. Readers should take note of the many instances throughout the epic when identities are altered, either by others (Odysseus’s alternating aging
[34]Introduction
For the same reason, characters who are able to see through such disguises are of special interest in the epic; their ability to do so hints at something uncanny or extraordinary in their natures. e semi-divine Helen of Troy, a daughter of Zeus, is certainly one such character: during her story about Odysseus’s spying mission in Troy, she claims to have immediately recognized him. (She herself, we learn later, has the ability to disguise her voice, another sign of her extraordinary nature.) Odysseus himself is another. During one of his teasing exchanges with Athena, he reveals that he had seen through even the goddess’s disguise, when, pretending to be a little girl, she had led him to safety in the land of the Phaiêkians.
Such disguises are the visual equivalent of the elaborate verbal “disguises” of which the hero repeatedly makes use: the many lies and tall tales he tells in order to manipulate people. Taken together, Odysseus’s adeptness at altering how he looks (with Athena’s help) and his penchant for controlling what people know about him raise a question that is both practical and philosophical, even existential: How do we know who someone is? is question becomes particularly vexed toward the end of the epic, when his talents threaten to become liabilities. When a notorious liar, one whose appearance is subject to frequent alteration, is called upon to reveal his true self, just how can he be “recognized”? One answer is that he can’t. In Book 16, Athena decides that it’s time for Odysseus, long since disguised as the elderly beggar, to be reunited with Telémakhos, and so gives the hero a magical makeover, not merely restoring his true appearance but enhancing his looks and making him appear more youthful. But when the father is presented to the son, the youth simply refuses to believe that this stranger is the parent he has dreamed of for so long. What, precisely, is le when the disguises come o ? is play with disguise and identity is one of the epic’s most pervasive and provocative themes. Even readers who have not read the Odyssey are likely
[35]Introduction and rejuvenation at Athena’s hands) or by themselves (Odysseus and his men disguising themselves as sheep in order to escape from the Cyclops’s cave in Book 9; Menelaos and his men using seal skins to conceal themselves from the Old Man of the Sea in Book 4). One of the dangers of the treacherous world through which Odysseus must travel to reach home again is, notably, the instability of appearances.
to have encountered references to one of its hero’s most notorious ruses: the way he triumphs over the Cyclops by means of the false name he gives the creature when the two rst meet: “No- One.” A er Odysseus and his men blind the Cyclops, the giant’s neighbors come running to nd out what’s happening but turn around and leave when the Cyclops declares that “NoOne” is trying to hurt him or kill him. Yet the irony of Odysseus’s use of this “false” name an irony that threads its way through the entire epic in a number of ways is that it is, in many ways, true. When the epic begins, Odysseus is very much a nobody: so long absent from home that his family and friends are convinced he is dead, constantly in danger of disappearing without a trace during his perilous return journey, repeatedly shipwrecked and cast away on distant shores that are far from the world familiar to him and from anyone who knows him. It’s a nice coincidence that the Greek word for “nobody” or “no one,” outis, can be described as a garbled approximation of the hero’s own name: it’s how “Odysseus” might sound in the mouth of someone who was dead drunk, which happens to be what the Cyclops is when Odysseus’s trap snaps shut. But then, this hero has been anonymized from the start: even the Proem, we remember, avoids naming him.
In fact, throughout the text, the pronoun outis o en functions as a sly substitute for “Odysseus.” Readers would do well to pay attention whenever the words “no one” appear and to read the passage in question as if “no one” refers to “Odysseus”: it is o en the case that a veiled and sometimes ironic allusion to the hero himself is intended. Toward the end of Book 8, for example, Alkínoös, the king of the Phaiêkians, calls upon his still-anonymous guest to reveal his name at last:
“Tell us the name that your mother and father would call you at home
And the others who dwelled in the city and those who lived nearby.
For no one among mortal folk goes without a name
Whether he’s evil or good a er he has been born.”
(8.550–53; italics added)
At one level, the king’s words amount to a bland maxim: everyone has a name of some sort. But in the context of the epic’s elaborately woven themes
[36]Introduction
And yet (the inevitable complication), as the incognito, anonymous Odysseus himself learns from those he meets during his travels, this “nobody” is simultaneously a very signi cant somebody indeed. Wherever he goes, the hero is reminded that he has become renowned throughout the world as the “man of great cunning,” the “sacker of cities” whose cra iness, which won the Greeks their decade-long war against Troy, is now celebrated in the songs of poets. One such song is sung in Book 8 by Demódokos, the bard at the court of the Phaiêkian king and queen; as he performs the ballad of the Trojan Horse, unaware that one of his “characters” is in the audience, Odysseus covers his head and weeps the tears that ultimately compel Alkínoös to ask his guest just who he is and why this particular song has so moved him. at request in turn triggers another, much longer recital: Odysseus’s recounting of his adventures in the section known as the Apologoi, which takes up the next four books of the epic and which the Phaiêkian king declares to be as gripping as the performance of a professional bard.
e hero’s split, or perhaps doubled, personality is evident throughout in the poet’s presentation of him. Sometimes we see the celebrated master of disguise and deception at work, cannily manipulating either his appearance or the stories he tells about himself in order to keep curious strangers in the dark as to who he really is (a necessary tactic, as he learns, given that those strangers’ intentions are not always friendly). At other times, however, we witness him giving in to abject despair, as he does at the beginning of Book 5, when we rst meet him, sitting by the seashore on the island of the amorous nymph Kalypso, weeping hopelessly before he nally starts out to sea toward home. And every now and then he acts the swaggering hero, unable to restrain himself from boasting about his fame and revealing his name, as
[37]Introduction of identity and naming, a deeper, ironic truth lies behind his generalization: “no one” that is, Odysseus does indeed go about without revealing his name for most of the story. Homer plays similarly with the pronoun keinos, “that man,” as a means of referring to the hero without mentioning his name: another ingenious means of conjuring the double-sided nature of this elusive hero, at once physically absent and forever present in the minds of those he le behind.
he does a er he vanquishes the Cyclops, with disastrous results. e poles of heroic renown and utter anonymity between which the hero moves throughout the epic, always simultaneously complicating and enriching our sense of who he is, are con ated at the end of the story. Here, Odysseus,nally returned to the land of which he is king, must nonetheless assume the disguise of a nameless beggar in order to in ltrate his own palace and test the loyalty of those nearest and dearest to him wife, son, father, members of his household, none of whom know, at rst, who he really is as part of a canny plot to reclaim his true, royal identity.
ese oscillations between apparent extremes of identity “no one” or rock star? beggar or king? “stranger” or native? singer or song? unknown stranger or intimate family member? help frame what are, perhaps, the poem’s most profound questions. How do we know who someone is? How do we know who we ourselves are? What is the di erence between our inner and outer selves between the “I” that remains constant as we make the journey from birth to death, and the self we present to the world, which we sometimes choose to alter but is sometimes changed by circumstances beyond our control? How is it we always feel that we are “ourselves” even as we acknowledge that we evolve and change over time, both physically and emotionally? e latter paradox in particular lends urgency and an almost tragic poignancy to the climax of the romantic plot. When Odysseus seeks to reveal himself at last to Penelope, he has to prove that he is the same person who le twenty years earlier. But of course, no one can be the same person a er twenty years of su ering. So just what is being “recognized” when those two come together again at last?
And so this work, famous for its exciting narrative of the hero’s adventures in exotic worlds and among strange creatures, is in fact preoccupied above all with the business of being a human being an identity that turns out to be de ned by relationships: between hosts and guests, strangers and intimates, foreigners and countrymen, mortals and immortals; between the idealized past and the troubled present, the dead and the living; between men and women, spouses and lovers, parents and children; relationships, nally, among the myriad and sometimes contradictory elements of our own natures. Readers who are attentive to this aspect of the epic will not
[38]Introduction
be surprised when, at the end of the story, it becomes clear that the object of Odysseus’s many wanderings through time and space was not simply to reach Ithaka, or even to reach his son, his wife, and his father, but rather to be reintegrated into the entire web of relationships emotional, familial, political that de ne his homeland and, hence, de ne him.
It’s worth noting, nally, that the Odyssey, too, o en de nes itself by opposition to its predecessor, the Iliad. 3 As scholars have long noted, the text of the Iliad shows no sign that it is aware of the Odyssey, whereas the Odyssey is lled with allusions to, and even quotations from, the other epic. ( e most important of these are discussed in the “Notes and Commentary.”) Sometimes, it seems to set itself at odds with Homer’s great war poem, challenging its assumptions and values. is is certainly one way to read that exchange between Odysseus and the ghost of Achilles in Book 11. As we have seen, a er the hero of the Odyssey congratulates the hero of the Iliad on the great fame that has outlived him the renown in return for which Achilles had been willing to forgo a long, inglorious existence and a return to his home the dead man declares that he would rather be alive and the lowly slave of a serf than rule as king over the dead. (One irony here is that we know that Odysseus himself, the hero of an epic of survival, willingly assumes the status of a “nobody” in order to stay alive.)
At other times, the Odyssey seems to take pleasure in its ability to tie up the Iliad ’s loose ends. In Book 3, the aged hero Nestor recounts to Telémakhos how a number of the other epic’s heroes made their way home (or didn’t) a er the end of the Trojan War a series of tales that would have reminded Homer’s audience of the Nostoi, or “Returns,” the now-lost epic devoted to the homecomings of the Greek warriors. Menelaos’s long account, in Book 4, of his own adventure- lled homecoming is another nostos narrative as of course is the fragmented account of Agamemnon’s home-
3. Scholars who adhere strictly to the oralist theory of the epics’ composition argue that there is no way to determine which epic came rst; in this view, lines common to both epics are the inheritance of a shared tradition and precedence cannot be determined. My own view, which informs my interpretations in the “Notes and Commentary,” is that the Iliad preceded the Odyssey, and hence that when the signi cant lines, phrases, and words that appear in the Iliad also appear in the Odyssey, the latter work is self-consciously quoting the former.
[39]Introduction
coming, the Oresteia Narrative, that is threaded through the Odyssey. In the same vein, Book 24, the nal book of the Odyssey, takes great pains to provide an “ending” as well to a number of the Iliad’s narrative arcs. ere, for instance, the shade of Agamemnon regales the shade of Achilles with a long description of the latter’s magni cent funeral an event that the Iliad cannot narrate, since Achilles’ death lies beyond the scope of its narrative.
e friendly conversation between these two dead heroes at the end of the Odyssey itself represents a coming full circle, since what triggers the action at the beginning of the Iliad is a bitter quarrel between them.
ese and other allusions indicate that the Odyssey has a deep awareness of its status as a sequel of its place, that is, within a literary tradition. at awareness, which can strike readers today as surprisingly self-conscious, even modern, is just one of many qualities that lend an eternal freshness to a work that is as fathomless, quicksilver, and many-faceted as its polytropos hero.
[40]Introduction
A Note on the Translation
When, in January 2018, the University of Chicago Press approached me about doing a new translation of the Odyssey, the moment was right. A few months earlier, I had published a book about the Odyssey about teaching the Odyssey, to be precise, and (among other things) what it means to be a link in the chain of teachers who have been sharing this rich and inexhaustibly fascinating work for twenty- ve centuries and the epic was still very much on my mind. In particular, I found that I was still preoccupied by questions that had arisen while I was translating a number of passages for my book. I had written a great deal over the years about the challenges of translating literature in French, Italian, German, Greek, and Latin, and had myself confronted the practical side of things when I worked on a translation of my own, of the modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.1 Working on those brief passages for my Odyssey book had allowed me to experiment with possible answers to the thorny questions that face the translator of Homer: about meter, diction, tone, and register, which I shall examine in more detail below; about what it means to be “accurate” when bringing across a work from a culture that in some respect resembles our own and in others is, as I have noted above, jarringly alien. All these were still on my mind when the editor from the University of Chicago Press contacted me that January night and asked if I might be interested; and so I said yes.
1. C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) and C. P. Cavafy: e Un nished Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), now collected in one volume as C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
e challenge I took up that evening was particularly daunting for reasons having to do with the Press’s own history. For, in the Press’s catalog, my Odyssey stands alongside the Iliad of Richmond Lattimore, the poet and classicist whose translation of that epic has rightly become, since its publication, in 1951, a classic of its own. (It is the translation I studied as a rstyear classics major at the University of Virginia in 1978.) Eschewing phony archaisms, on the one hand, and an equally falsifying “modernity,” on the other, Lattimore’s rendering of Homer captured, in a plain and digni ed English that was cast into a strong six-beat line, many of the salient qualities of the original. One reason I felt emboldened to take up the challenge of creating an Odyssey that could be paired with Lattimore’s Iliad is that the Odyssey is a work so di erent from the Iliad in its attitudes, preoccupations, and even diction as to be, for all intents and purposes, by a di erent author. (As many ancients suspected it was: although most thought that Homer had composed both the Iliad in his brash prime, the Odyssey in his sage old age a faction known as “Separatists” argued that they were by two di erent poets.) Most of us who have studied the classics are either “Iliad people” or “Odyssey people” a rather anecdotal division, but one borne out by the history of translation of the poems into English, which, beginning with Pope, strongly suggests that few translators render both poems equally well. (Lattimore is a rare exception.) I am an “Odyssey person”: the themes and preoccupations of the epic, particularly its focus on the relation of storytelling to truth, and of narrative to identity, are ones that I have pursued in my own writing and criticism for three decades. In the present translation, I hope to have adhered to the high standards for seriousness, dignity, and precision exempli ed by Lattimore’s approach just how I have tried to do so, I will discuss below while bringing to the task my particular sympathy for the poem, its world, and its meanings. e overriding aim of the present translation has been to o er an Englishlanguage Odyssey that is pleasurable to read by which I mean, has the uency, muscularity, and rhythm of poetry while reproducing, to the greatest extent possible, what I see in each dense line of Homer’s Greek. e latter has been of special importance to me, since the reproduction, wherever possible, of the text’s structural nuances and formal features signi cant repe-
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In the service of my own aims, I have chosen an approach that represents a departure from recent practice. e present translation is the rst contemporary English version of the Odyssey that renders the Greek on a linefor-line basis with full consideration of the poetic qualities of the original.2 It does so by eschewing the meter typically used by English translators of classical epic the ve-beat, ten-syllable line known as iambic pentameter, the “blank verse” familiar to readers of much Anglophone poetry. Instead, I have developed a much longer line, one that replicates, to a great extent, the distinctive pulse of the original, as o en as possible with its customary pauses and breaks.
To some extent, this choice was motivated by an aesthetic consideration. e line Homer used is a six-beat, theoretically seventeen-syllable-long behemoth known as dactylic hexameter that is, a string of ve somewhat waltz-like units, or “feet,” called dactyls, each dactyl consisting of one long and two short syllables, DUM-dah-dah, with a nal foot consisting of two syllables.3 is line, moreover, could be broken up by a strong pause some-
2. Anthony Verity’s admirably precise 2016 translation for Oxford World Classics follows the text line for line, but eschews attempts to render the text’s literary qualities “it does not attempt to be poetic,” as the translator puts it. Emily Wilson’s 2017 version has the same number of lines as the original, but does not adhere to a line-for-line schema and strips away many of the subtleties of the original, as I discuss below. Only in a few instances, where the syntax of Greek makes a strict equivalence impossible, do I depart from the line-for-line rule.
3. A “long” syllable is one featuring either a vowel that is naturally long long o, say, or the drawnout ay sound of the Greek letter eta; a diphthong or combination of two vowels, such as ai or ou or ei; or a syllable with a naturally short vowel that is followed by a combination of consonants, slowing down the pronunciation of that syllable and making it “long.” ink of the di erence between “hat”
[43]ANoteontheTranslation titions of key words and phrases, technical elements such as meter, alliteration, assonance, and enjambment makes for a richer and more complete experience of Homer’s text. Such an experience is crucial, to my mind, for students in both high school classes and in college literature courses like the ones I have taught over the past thirty- ve years. ese courses, a er all, are where students learn to look beyond “the story” and begin to appreciate the way in which a literary work’s form serves its content the way in which nuances and details come together to yield its larger meanings. A translation that merely conveys the “what” of a text the plot, the story but not the “how” commits a double injustice, cheating both the author and the reader.
where in the middle. Such pauses occur very o en within the third foot a break that clearly evolved as a good place for a singer to take a breath. A schema of a fairly common line looks like this:
DUM-dah-dah DUM-dah-dah DUM-dah // dah DUM-dah-dah DUM-dah-dah DUM-DUM
e rst line of the Odyssey ts that schema perfectly:
AND -ra moi4 ENN-epeh MOU-sa // pol-Y-tropon, HOS mala POLL-a . . .
I have tried to mimic this rhythm in my translation:
TELL me the TALE of a MAN, Muse // (who had) SO many ROUND -a-bout WAYS
e poet could vary this long, rolling, sometimes hypnotic line in a number of ways to prevent it from becoming monotonous by changing the location of the pauses, say, or by substituting one long syllable for two shorts. e most prestigious of classical verse forms, the hexameter was the magisterial meter used in epics and oracles. In works from the Iliad and the Odyssey to Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the length and stateliness of the lines re ect the gravity and import of the subject matter. e far shorter iambic pentameter line natural in English versi cation has to work much harder to convey the density and import so natural to the hexameter.
But even more, the adoption of a longer line was necessary to serve my
and “lamp”: both are monosyllabic words featuring short a’s, but the second takes longer to say because of the stoppage caused by the m and p. In Greek meter, “hat” would be considered a short and “lamp” a long syllable.
e poet could, at his discretion, substitute a long syllable for two shorts, resulting in a foot consisting of two long syllables, known as a spondee. Such manipulation could yield signi cant aesthetic e ects: a line consisting of mostly dactyls moves quickly, whereas a line consisting of mostly spondees feels heavy. e nal syllable of the line, called the “anceps” (from the Latin for “uncertain” or “undetermined”), could be either long or short.
4. e Greek moi, “to me,” is in fact a diphthong and therefore long, but in certain cases long syllables were treated as short for the purposes of the meter.
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larger goal of getting as much of each original line into the corresponding line of the translation. It boils down to arithmetic. Each of Homer’s lines is nearly twice as long as a line of blank verse; that, together with the fact that Greek has a far more supple syntax and an in nitely more e cient verbal system than English does (in Greek, “the women who are about to courted” can be expressed in a single word), suggests why any attempt to translate a given Homeric hexameter into a line of English pentameter must result in a severe reduction of the poem’s nuances and complexities.
ese di culties are apparent in the 2017 translation of the epic by Emily Wilson, which is cast in fairly strict iambics. Wilson’s handling of the verse produced a version that critics and readers admired for its speed, vigor, and clarity. Most other scholars and poets over the years have employed blank verse, typically using one and a half or even two lines for each line of Homer, in order to get around the disparity between hexameters and pentameters. Where Wilson departed from their practice was in her decision to create an Odyssey in English with exactly the same number of lines as the original. is meant subjecting Homer’s text to the procrustean rigors I just mentioned. e result was a version that necessarily omitted much of what was in each line. In the third and fourth lines of Book 1 of the Odyssey, for instance, the poet refers for the rst time to what his hero, whom he describes as andra polytropon, literally a “man of many turns,” encountered during his wanderings:
pollôn d’anthrôpôn iden astea kai noön egnô, polla d’ho g’en pontôi pathen algea hon kata thymon . . .
A literal translation of these lines might go something like this:
He saw the cities and learned about the mind/way of thinking of many people,
And su ered many pains in his heart upon the sea . . .
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ese two lines highlight vitally important themes that will arc throughout the epic. Line 3 alone introduces two considerations that are central. First, we learn here that the hero will encounter di erent kinds of civilizations and societies during his journeys, symbolized by the “cities” mentioned here. e Odyssey is a work unusually preoccupied with the meaning of civilized life; its hero samples a variety of communities and cultures that stand in implicit comparison to the home to which he is striving to return. Second, Odysseus is a character who learns through his travels and what he learns about, as o en as not, is how the various kinds of “others” think: part of what we might call the “anthropological” aspect of the epic. is one line already suggests that the poem’s hero is, in contrast to a number of the warrior-heroes we meet in the Iliad, a hero of mind, someone who both uses his mind and its manifold qualities to achieve his goals, and who is, moreover, motivated primarily by his curiosity about other people and places. Line 4, meanwhile, reminds us of the cost of that curiosity: the many pains that this polytlas, “much-enduring,” hero will su er as he travels. ere is, moreover, a subtle but important etymological ploy in the repetition of the words for “many” in both lines 3 and 4: for those words, pollôn and polla, each standing noticeably at the head of its respective line, are the same word as the poly- in polytropos, the compound epithet in line 1 that is the rst thing we learn about Odysseus. e repetition emphasizes that this hero of “many turns” is linked inextricably to both the positive (the many things he saw and learned) and the negative (the many pains he su ered) aspects of his journeys.
A number of previous translators found ways to bring these themes and nuances into English. Robert Fagles, in his 1994 version, which employed a loose six-beat line, has the breathing room to render the Greek straightforwardly (“Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, / many pains he su ered, heartsick on the open sea”), while Robert Fitzgerald in his much freer 1962 translation, which employs an easygoing pentameter with frequent expansion, in ates Homer’s two lines into three in order to bring across all that these lines have to say (and a bit more): “He saw the townlands and learned the minds of many distant men, / and weathered many bitter nights and days / in his deep heart at sea . . .” Stanley Lombardo’s 2000 version, characterized by a bracing terseness his lines are o en as short as four
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beats nonetheless ingeniously conveys the crucial information: “Speak / Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped, / e su ering deep in his heart at sea / As he struggled to survive and bring his men home.” In my own translation, I have sought not only to convey the meaning of the lines as fully as possible but to echo Homer’s emphasis on the important word “many” by placing it, as Homer does, rst in each line:5
Many the peoples whose cities he saw and whose ways of thinking he learned,
Many the toils he su ered at sea, anguish in his heart . . .
By contrast, Wilson’s commitment to preserving her line count while sticking to a strict pentameter leaves her little room to maneuver:
[Tell me]
where he went, and who he met, the pain he su ered in the storms at sea . . .
“Where he went, and who he met” does not begin to convey the various facets, all of them signi cant, of these lines. e reader of the Wilson translation remains unaware of all this has no way of knowing that Homer has pointedly foregrounded the themes of civilization and cities, of learning and minds, in his introduction to the entire epic.
e sense or “content” of a line or lines is not the only element that su ers from such treatment. At the beginning of Book 13, Odysseus nally sails home to Ithaka as a passenger in one of the magical ships of the Phaiêkians; as the ship speeds him home, the hero falls into a deep slumber (the Greek text and transliteration below are followed by a “literal” translation; my nal translation appears later on):
5. So, too, Verity: “Many were the men whose cities he saw, and learnt their minds, / many the su erings on the open sea he endured in his heart.”
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