The proem’s sly refusal to commit itself to a name is mirrored in another bizarre evasion. The Iliad begins with a precisely worded request to the Muse to start singing from a specific moment in the story—from the moment when first the two stood forth in strife, / Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and Achilles, a man like a god. The poet of the Odyssey, by contrast, doesn’t seem to care particularly about where his epic ought to begin. He asks the Muse to begin telling her story at “some point or another,” hamothen—anywhere in Odysseus’ journey that suits her. But hamothen also has a temporal
...more
