The Odyssey

by Homer

The poem circles around the question of whether an elite woman’s worth depends entirely on sexual fidelity. Odysseus has affairs with Calypso and Circe in the course of his wanderings, as well as a carefully calibrated flirtation with young Nausicaa.

By contrast, the poem presents it as a matter of the utmost importance that Penelope must keep her suitors at bay and wait indefinitely for her absent husband. Female fidelity is important for maintaining a husband’s sense of honor and control; it is associated with the preservation of a particular wealthy household and the perpetuation of a particular elite family line.

The most insistent declarations that women’s value depends entirely on their loyalty to their husbands comes in the mouth of the murdered Agamemnon, who has good reason to be upset about adulterous wives; his wife’s sexual infidelity represents the takeover of his household by Aegisthus.

The story of Agamemnon’s death invites us to read Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors in terms of preemptive self-defense, as if he had to kill them in order to avoid being killed in turn.

The idea that male power depends on female sexual fidelity is also central to the myth of Clytemnestra’s sister, Helen, whose abduction by Paris led to the Trojan War.

Penelope seems to suggest that Helen was forced into adultery (because Aphrodite compelled her and Paris tricked her), and also that, insofar as she made a choice, it was informed, as perhaps most choices are, by limited knowledge of the outcome.

Helen describes her face, the face that, in Christopher Marlowe’s famous words, “launched a thousand ships,” not as beautiful but as “doglike”; it is a face that (in this translation) “hounded” the Greeks to war.

The night before the slaughter of the suitors, Odysseus feels his heart “bark” inside him, like a “mother dog” defending her puppies.

Dogs are kept not as pets, but as guards of the house and for hunting; they are low on the household hierarchy, but valued for their persistence and quick powers of observation—shown most touchingly by Odysseus’ old dog, Argos, who recognizes his old master even after twenty years’ absence.

Characteristics that are ostensibly presented as particularly “feminine” often turn out to be rather more complicated in their metaphorical gendering.

Penelope’s weaving is designed to be undone. Moreover, whereas the deceptive plots of Odysseus are geared towards a particular end (to invade a city, to reach his home, or to destroy the suitors), the deceptive plot of Penelope serves in the opposite direction: to hold off an end point, to avoid the end of the story. It is meant to be forever in a state of becoming, not completion.

The Odyssey tells the story not only of Odysseus and Penelope, but also of their son, Telemachus, whose slow and incomplete journey to adulthood is charted in the course of the poem.

Telemachus’ standard epithet, pepnumenos, suggests “of sound understanding” or “thoughtful”; the poem traces the boy’s developing cognitive maturity, as he begins to learn what adult masculinity might mean.

Unable to stand up to the suitors by himself, Telemachus instead practices masculine self-assertion by putting down his mother.

Eurycleia is an alternative mother-figure for Telemachus, and a preferable one, in that—being a slave—she always does exactly what he tells her to do.

Athena is a second and even better mother-figure: she enables him to succeed on his trip away from Ithaca, proving his ability to act independently of his human parents, albeit always under her watchful eyes.

“War,” says Hector, “is work for men, especially me.” Telemachus is trying to assert his masculinity and adult status by assuming the role of the heroic fighter who risks his life for his honor and the defense of his city.

Telemachus is consistent in his notion that masculine maturity means the suppression and exclusion of women and the suppression of female voices.

Odysseus wants the girls dead because their memories threaten his total ownership of his household.

But Telemachus is still resisting the adult male role of the warrior, which involves a quasi-sexual act of penetration—using a sharp weapon to pierce and kill human bodies at close quarters.

The orifices of female slaves, including their mouths, are a source of particular concern; the rope deprives Melantho of her attempt to have an autonomous voice. Male slaves are imagined not as mouths but limbs of their masters; a “bad” male slave uses his capacity to work or fight or procreate to serve an alternative master.

The name Dolius suggests “crafty” or “deceitful”; the poem shows us why dishonesty is the most essential survival tool for the “good” slave.

When Odysseus is in disguise as a poor beggar, the ways that people respond to him are presented as the test of their moral worth. It is a black mark against the suitors that they fail to behave politely or warmly to the wrinkled, ragged, hungry old stranger who shows up in the palace where they are living it up on somebody else’s meat and wine.

Elite people are supposed to treat slaves and homeless beggars well; but slaves and homeless beggars are themselves to be despised, unless they are royalty in disguise.

Odysseus suggests that his own inability to reach his homeland, even after twenty years’ absence, is the ultimate form of suffering, which trumps all other pain. But it is notable that Odysseus travels in elite fashion, without ever touching the oars himself.

At the start of the poem, we see Odysseus making a momentous and defining choice: to return to Penelope, his mortal wife, rather than stay forever with the goddess Calypso.

Calypso rescued him when he crawled, ragged and half drowned, onto the shore of her island, and he spends a good seven years—the majority of time spent returning from the war—sharing her bed.

She offers him everything, except a way back to his original, human home.

Like Circe and Athena, Calypso appreciates and understands Odysseus’ capacity for deceit and scheming, because she has similar qualities herself—albeit at a divine, more than mortal level.

Penelope, for obvious reasons, shows far less appreciation for Odysseus the liar, Odysseus the trickster, Odysseus the “scalawag.”

in choosing Penelope, Odysseus is also choosing to become old and, eventually, to die.

Achilles, makes the momentous choice to stay and fight at Troy, to gain honor among his fellow Greek warriors, rather than return home to his young son and dying father, where he might have lived a long life in obscurity.

The choice of Odysseus is parallel to the choice of Achilles, in that it is a decision to be mortal in order to gain a particular kind of masculine honor. If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso, he would have been alive forever, and never grown old; but he would have been forever subservient to a being more powerful than himself.

The Odyssey insists that Odysseus is fundamentally unchanged by his adventures.

Leaving Calypso is thus not only a choice to accept mortality and impermanence, but also, incompatibly, a choice to insist on the fantasy of permanent patriarchal dominance over a carefully regulated human household.

Most of the epithets applied to Odysseus begin with the prefix poly-, meaning “much” or “many”: he is a figure who possesses many attributes, and possesses them intensely.

The ideal of total autonomy and permanent essence depends on the process of constant self-reinvention.

Odysseus’ bed is difficult to move, but not immovable. Its permanence and its mutability stem from the same cause—the life of the olive tree.

With Calypso, Odysseus would have been frozen into the role of the weak, dependent survivor of shipwreck. The mortal Penelope may not know all of Odysseus’ many identities and may not have plumbed his capacity for lies. But she understands his suffering, because she too has lived through twenty years of pain—caused by his own absence, in war and with Calypso.

The verb odussomai, meaning “to be angry at,” “to dislike,” or “to hate,” sounds similar to Odysseus. Athena connects Odysseus with the same verb in Book 1, asking Zeus why he bears a grudge against her favorite: “Why do you dismiss Odysseus?” she asks. The etymology suggests that Odysseus is himself much disliked, by both gods and other human beings, and also that he takes after his grandfather by acting in hostile fashion to other people: he tricks, steals from, and hates.

When Odysseus is about to go through the straits between Scylla and Charybdis, Circe warns him not to put on his armor and try to fight against Scylla, which will be futile and will only make the situation worse. But Odysseus insists on doing so—increasing the danger to his men.

Odysseus cannot resist the urge to gain kleos—the honor that comes from being the named subject of heroic legend. He is able to become nameless (“No man”) only for a little while.

In modern terms, we can see Odysseus as a veteran soldier with his own version of PTSD: he is moody, prone to weeping, often withdrawn, and liable to sudden fits of aggression. We can also, rather differently, see Odysseus as a man who keeps on repeating the same behavior patterns that he has displayed in Troy.

The Sirens offer Odysseus what no single individual engaged in the conflict can have: a full and complete understanding of what happened in the war and what it meant. In resisting the Sirens, Odysseus acknowledges that he will have to go on acting out the consequences of the war, without ever being able fully to know what it was all about.

The simile compares the desperate weeping of Odysseus, a military conqueror, to the grief of a woman who is a victim of war, a woman whose husband is dying and who knows that she herself, and her children, will soon be led off into slavery by the victors.

Eupeithes’ speech reminds us also that the killing of the suitors is not an isolated incident; Odysseus has made an unfortunate habit of leading young men to their deaths.

Odysseus is a smart talker, who knows the best words to use for a particular audience. But the narrator instead calls these men hetairoi, “companions” or “servants,” a term that can suggest a much more hierarchical relationship.

They were “poor fools” (nepioi), a term that suggests childish thoughtlessness. This foolishness is sharply contrasted with Odysseus’ own characteristic qualities of scheming intelligence, quick planning, and forward thinking (metis).

The prophet Tiresias predicts that, if Odysseus hurts the Cattle of the Sun, he will arrive home only “late and exhausted, in a stranger’s boat, / having destroyed [his] men,” and a similar prophecy is made by the goddess Circe.

The Odyssey is obviously a story of nostos, meaning “homecoming” (the word from which we get “nostalgia,” the pain of missing home).