The Odyssey

by Homer

The Greek word epos means simply “word” or “story” or “song.” It is related to a verb meaning “to say” or “to tell,” which is used (in a form with a prefix) in the first line of the poem. The narrator commands the Muse, “Tell me”: enn-epe. An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that is told.

It is a story, as the first word of the original Greek tells us, about “a man” (andra).

In The Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back to the way it was before he went away. For this hero, mere survival is the most amazing feat of all.

The story begins in an unexpected place, in medias res (“in the middle of things”—the proper starting point for an epic, according to Horace).

The ambiguity about what the suitors are seeking matches an even more central ambiguity, about what Penelope herself wants. Indefinitely, tearfully, Penelope waits, keeping everyone guessing about her innermost feelings and intentions.

Telemachus must complete several difficult quests in the course of the poem: to survive the mortal danger posed by the suitors; to mature and grow up to manhood; to find his lost father, and help him regain control of the house.

The tension between strangeness and familiarity is in fact the poem’s central subject.

Odysseus himself seems to contain multitudes: he is a migrant, a pirate, a carpenter, a king, an athlete, a beggar, a husband, a lover, a father, a son, a fighter, a liar, a leader, and a thief.

The poem promotes but also questions its own fantasies and ideals, such as the idea that time and change can be undone, and the notion that there is such a thing as home, where people and relationships can stay forever the same.

There is a vast array of such formulaic expressions in Homeric verse, which suggest that things have an eternal, infinitely repeatable presence. Different things will happen every day, but Dawn always appears, always with rosy fingers, always early.

Through its formulaic mode, The Odyssey assures us that, once we know the patterns, the world will follow a predictable rhythm. This feature of the Homeric poems is a mark of their debt to a Greek oral tradition of poetic song that extends back hundreds of years before the poems in their current forms came into existence.

Demodocus does not read out his poetry from a script; his inability to do so is underlined by the fact that he is blind (not incidentally, no one in the entire Odyssey reads or writes anything). Moreover, Demodocus does not invent an original story of his own composition. Instead, Demodocus is inspired by the Muse to sing the “deeds of heroes”—which are, at least in outline, already well-known to his audience.

The Unitarians opposed Wolf’s ideas, largely on literary grounds, and argued that the poems as we have them are not an aggregate of earlier, shorter compositions, but were composed by a lone author with a single overarching structure in mind. The Analysts, by contrast, argued that the epics were produced by many different hands.

Subsequent studies, building on the work of Parry and Lord, have shown that there are marked differences in the ways that oral and literate cultures think about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literate cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as cliché; we think of it as boring or lazy writing. In primarily oral cultures, repetition tends to be much more highly valued. Repeated phrases, stories, or tropes can be preserved to some extent over many generations without the use of writing, allowing people in an oral culture to remember their own past. In Greek mythology, Memory (Mnemosyne) is said to be the mother of the Muses, because poetry, music, and storytelling are all imagined as modes by which people remember the times before they were born.

It is a written text based on an oral tradition, which is not at all the same as being an actual oral composition.

These “song-stitchers”—professional poetry performers—competed in public competitions, and imagined themselves as stitching together a quilt of poetic narrative out of an already existing cloth, one often presented as the poetry of “Homer.” It seems likely that rhapsodes made use of written texts to learn their lines of Homer, although they may also have ad-libbed and riffed off the script.

In 566 BCE, Pisistratus, the tyrant of the city (which was not yet a democracy), instituted a civic and religious festival, the Panathenaia, which included a poetic competition, featuring performances of the Homeric poems. The institution is particularly significant because we are told that the Homeric poems had to be performed “correctly,” which implies the canonization of a particular written text of The Iliad and The Odyssey at this date.

Odysseus is depicted as a master of deceit, a compulsive liar; he is also, like a Phoenician or Taphian trader or pirate, hoping to return home with as large a pile of loot as he can. He enriches himself from the sacked city of Troy, and from various other places along the way, where the inhabitants either willingly equip him with presents (as in the case of Calypso, Circe, Aeolus, and the Phaeacians) or are robbed by Odysseus and his men.

Being a “hero,” heros—which in archaic Greek suggests a warrior, and does not imply virtue—is different from being a “pirate” in that it is a much more positive term, which a man can proudly apply to himself; nobody in Homer admits to being a pirate.

The narrative is told only through the mouth of Odysseus himself, and we may well see him as an unreliable narrator.

But the dichotomy hints at the importance in The Odyssey of xenia, a word that means both “hospitality” and “friendship.” The cognate word xenos can mean both “stranger” and “friend”; it is the root from which we get the English word “xenophobia,” the fear of strangers or foreigners, as well as the sadly less common “xenophilia,” the love of strangers or of unknown objects.

Guest-friendship is different from philia, the friendship, affection, love, and loyalty that connects a person to his or her family members and neighborhood friends.

When xenia is absent or is abused, violence follows.

The poem’s episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia. In the first four books—known as the Telemachy, the story of Telemachus—Odysseus’ young son grapples with the suitors, who are presented as bad guests: they have taken over Odysseus’ household without his permission and are abusing its resources and inhabitants.

Calypso gives her human guest more than enough of everything a visitor could ask for, except the final crucial ingredient: pompe—the ability to get away.

The poem shows us the rewards that come to the “much-enduring” or “long-suffering” protagonist through his willingness to wait for the right moment to act, without ever giving up the goal.

Eating is important in The Odyssey, and eating the wrong things or eating in the wrong way results in violence or death.

The standard epithets applied to the suitors often emphasize their excessive desire to be “above” or “beyond” others (hyper: above and beyond): they are hyper-phialos or hyper-thymos (“self-indulgent,” “heedless,” “overbearing”). These words can be neutral or even positive (suggesting “noble” or “high-minded”—above the norms in a good way), but they acquire a sinister connotation here, since they are also applied to the man-eating Laestrygonians and Cyclops. We are repeatedly told that the suitors are devouring not only the literal “property” of Odysseus, but also, metonymically, his “house” and hence his “livelihood” or “life”—the words bios and biotos can mean both “way of making a living” and “life” itself.

Xenios (“God of Strangers”).

At the start of The Odyssey, Zeus is contemplating a problem in the human world.

People are already destined to suffer a certain amount, and yet sometimes they increase their quota of suffering by making bad choices—as Aegisthus did in killing Agamemnon and partnering with Clytemnestra, despite the warnings of the gods.

neither Zeus’ words nor the narrative of the poem suggests that morally good behavior guarantees a happy life. Zeus says nothing about virtue as such in this speech.

he insists that Aegisthus was imprudent and foolish in pursuing a course of action that he should have known would result in his doom.

Athena reminds Zeus that Odysseus “is more sensible than other humans.” His intelligence sets him apart from other adulterers and murderers.

The gods in this poem, like the human characters, prefer people who show them respect and provide plenty of lavish gifts. Gods in Homer, like humans, care about eating and drinking, and associate the proper forms of consumption with honor and identity.

The gods are the most important guests who are always present at human feasts.

the epithet diotrephes, “sprung from Zeus”; in The Odyssey, this epithet is applied exclusively to Odysseus himself, whose role as king of Ithaca is apparently important to Zeus.

The god most hostile to the hero is Zeus’ brother Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes. Indeed, the narrative of the poem can be seen as an extended balancing act between Athena’s desire to restore Odysseus to a place of honor and stability in his household, and Poseidon’s to curse him with eternal wandering.

Great charm and magic comes from the notion that the divine and human worlds are less separate than we might otherwise imagine.

Hermes has a certain elusive quality, appearing and disappearing at will; he is, like Odysseus himself, a trickster.

The most important deity in the poem, however, is Athena, the goddess of technical expertise and strategic thinking. She is a military deity, often represented as dressed in battle armor, and she reminds Odysseus that she is the one who helped him sack the city of Troy, inspiring the construction of the Wooden Horse.

Athena’s most common epithet, glaucopis, suggests bright or shimmering eyes. The poem constantly reminds us that Athena is alert to whatever is happening to Odysseus and Telemachus; nothing escapes her intelligent, careful notice.

When Odysseus is in disguise in Ithaca, Athena goads him to greater and greater rage, and prompts the suitors to mistreat him. Athena loves violence, and knows how to manipulate events so as to maximize her own pleasure in battle. Her skill in weaving clothing for domestic use sits uneasily with her ability to weave deception and military strategy for the tapestry of war.

In myth, Athena’s mother is Metis, a goddess who is the personification of Odysseus’ central quality: metis, which means “cunning,” “skill,” “scheming,” or “purpose.”

Unlike the English word “wisdom,” which tends to suggest a staid, peaceful, possibly moral kind of intelligence acquired by long years of experience, metis suggests cunning plots and deception employed in the service of self-interest. It is not necessarily seen as a bad thing; metis is a very useful quality for a person who hopes to survive in a dangerous environment.

Odysseus is often described as polymetis, a term that suggests an abundance of metis.

The relationships of Odysseus with Calypso, Circe, and especially Athena give us glimpses of an alternative to the “normal” mortal world, in which female characters are always less powerful than their male partners.

We see in The Iliad a world in which women were often treated by elite warrior men as if they were objects, prizes traded in war for men’s honor, along with other possessions, like bronze tripods and piles of treasure.

It is more plausible to view The Odyssey as the product of archaic male imaginations, questioning and defending the inequalities of male dominance within the status quo.

Only through female divine power can his patriarchal dominance over his household be regained.