ENDNOTES
Book I
1 (p. 1)
O Muse: The invocations of the muse that begin the
Iliad and the
Odyssey set the pattern for the epic tradition to follow, in both the Roman world and the European. The muses were the nine daughters of Zeus, and they personified artistic inspiration in all fields, from dance to history. Calliope was the muse of epic poetry. The earlier Near Eastern epic
Gilgamesh begins with a similar description of its hero’s epic journey.
2 (p. 2)
Our father, son of Kronos: According to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, Zeus, the youngest son of Kronos, usurps his father’s place as chief god and frees his siblings, who include his brother Poseidon and his sister/wife, Here, from Kronos’s stomach. Zeus and Leto produce the twins Apollo and Artemis, while Zeus gives birth to Athene, goddess of wisdom, out of his own head. As punishment for supporting Kronos, Atlas must hold up the pillars of the earth.
3 (p. 4)
a stranger . . . before his gate: Telemachus immediately shows his worth by observing the conventions of hospitality, which dictated that strangers were to be safely harbored and guests honored with gifts. Such customs were regarded as the will of Zeus and, in the absence of any police, courts, or even body of laws universal to the Greek-speaking world, they afforded travelers a small measure of security and reinforced the host’s social standing.
4 (p. 5)
sailing over the wine-dark sea . . . to Temeseê, for bronze: Temeseê, today called Tamassos, is a city on the island of Cyprus. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and at the time the
Odyssey was composed, the mining of copper had already been an important industry on Cyprus for many centuries. The web of Mediterranean trade in Homer’s time drew the Greek-speaking world into close contact with Egypt and Phoenicia, as the poem reflects.
5 (p. 6)
no skill in birds: Soothsayers interpreted the flight of birds, particularly of the predatory variety, to foretell the future throughout the ancient Greco-Roman world; see, for instance, page 15.
6 (p. 7)
nor has she power to end it: In Homer’s world, only men could inherit property. Penelope and her son, then, face a dilemma: Telemachus cannot control his father’s property without acknowledging the man’s death, but to do so would remove Penelope’s protection from a marriage that would force her to leave her own home for her new husband’s.
7 (p. 9)
slave-maids followed her: Slave labor was fundamental to the Greco-Roman economy. Slaves were generally foreign-born, and most were captured in raids or warfare. Men were relegated to field work and women to the home. Women slaves were often the sexual chattel of the house’s patriarch, as Homer’s praise for Laeärtes’ gallant behavior toward Eurycleia indirectly indicates on page 11. Slaves could own property; Eumaeus even buys his own slave; see page 179.
8 (p. 9)
the distaff: A distaff is a stick used for spinning thread. Historically, women in the Mediterranean and throughout Europe were so identified with the production of cloth—a domestic task, performed inside the household—that the word “distaff” came to stand for the feminine realm or perspective in general. In the
Odyssey, even the nymph Calypso tends the loom. Women had very little scope for a life outside the domestic sphere.
Book II
9 (p. 12)
early, rosy-fingered dawn: Epithets such as this one, repeated frequently throughout the text, reflect the original oral composition of Greek epic poetry. Rather than memorize a long text word-for-word, a poet intimately familiar with a particular epic story would employ many such formulaic phrases to improvise a fresh version of the tale on each new occasion, so that the telling would never be exactly the same twice.
10 (p. 12)
summon to an assembly: Homer includes only a sketchy picture of the form of government practiced in what to him was the long-past world of epic heroes. While Odysseus serves as Ithaca’s king, the council Telemachus attends—which apparently includes only older citizens—seems to exercise some leadership function. At any rate, no new king has been anointed despite the hero’s twenty-year absence.
11 (p. 15)
Tyro, Alcmene, and crowned Mycene: All three of these women evidently bore human or partly human children to gods. Tyro founded the line that leads to Nestor with Poseidon, and Alcmene bore Heracles after union with Zeus. Mycene’s story has not survived, but since her name is the root of Mycenae, Agamemnon’s city, one may assume that she, too, favored some divinity with offspring.
Book III
12 (p. 24)
Peisistratus: The disproportionate attention paid to Peisistratus, son of Nestor, may reflect a reported attempt by the Athenian ruler Peisistratus (sixth century B.C.) to collect and regularize all the manuscripts of Homer then in existence. The Athenian Peisistratus claimed ancestry from Nestor (called the Neleid line, after Neleus, son of Tyro and father of Nestor).
13 (p. 25)
as the pirates roam the seas: Like the Vikings, the early Greeks considered sea raiding a legitimate, if dangerous, means of acquiring wealth. Odysseus earns his epithet “spoiler of cities” by many more depredations than the sack of Troy, as the plundering raids on the Ciconians and Laestrygonians, described in books IX and X, demonstrate.
14 (p. 27)
safely, too, Philoctetes: Greek warriors maroon the archer Philoctetes on the island of Lemnos after he suffers a snakebite that festers to an unbearable pungency. But Odysseus and his comrades eventually retrieve the archer because a prophecy connected with his bow prevents Troy from falling in his absence.
15 (p. 30)
his gentle arrows: The Greek world often pictured the arrows of Apollo or Artemis as inflicting death by what the modern world understands as disease. In the
Odyssey, Apollo strikes suddenly, in the fashion of a heart attack or stroke, while Artemis effects more gradual and gentler ends.
16 (p. 30)
to Egypt: The association of Egypt with the accumulation of wealth also figures in the tale Odysseus concocts to hide his identity after he returns to Ithaca (book XIV) and in the biblical story of Joseph; the element of bondage unites the latter two stories as well. The stability and prosperity of Egyptian civilization was long unique in the ancient Mediterranean.
Book IV
17 (p. 36)
Hermione: According to some ancient sources, Hermione eventually marries Orestes, the avenging son of Agamemnon. The
Odyssey, however, does not specifically allude to such an outcome.
18 (p. 40)
child of Zeus: Homer does not specify the manner of Helen’s descent from Zeus. Other sources explain that Zeus took the form of a swan to rape Helen’s mother, Leda, resulting in the birth of four children from eggs: Helen, Clytaemnestra, Castor, and Polydeuces. The two males became symbols of loyalty (see p. 138) and the two females of betrayal, illustrating the fundamental male bias of ancient Greek culture.
19 (p. 49)
son-in-law of Zeus: That Menelaus merits immortality as the spouse of semidivine Helen suggests that fragments of earlier, less patriarchal belief systems may underlie the mythic universe Homer inherits. In the ancient Near East, for instance, kings frequently affirmed their standing by a “sacred marriage” to a representation of a female divinity associated with fertility—often a priestess of the goddesses Inanna or Ishtar, the predecessors of Aphrodite.
Book V
20 (p. 57)
Tithonus: According to texts a few generations after Homer, Tithonus is a human beloved by the goddess of the dawn. She grants him eternal life but forgets to preserve his youth. Consequently, he dwindles to almost nothing; in some versions of the story his faint voice becomes the chirp of the cricket.
21 (p. 58)
charms to sleep: Hermes’ most famous exploit was the killing of Argus, the many-eyed watchman. The goddess Here had set Argus to guard Io, with whom Zeus wished to make love. Hermes, on his ruler’s orders, charmed all of Argus’s eyes asleep at once (doing so in many versions by telling stories, which makes the function of the wand or rod Homer mentions puzzling) and cut off his head. Here preserved the eyes in the tail of the peacock.
22 (p. 60)
Jason: The reference here is not to the Jason who leads the Argonauts, but to the mortal being (whose name is usually transcribed as “Iasion”) who marries the fertility goddess Demeter. He fathers the god of wealth, Plutus, before his destruction at the hands of jealous Zeus; the whole tale likely relates to rites of the sort described in book IV, note 3, above.
23 (p. 66)
Ino: She is the daughter of Cadmus, founder of the cursed royal line of Thebes. By a plot of Here, a lightning bolt annihilates one of Ino’s sisters, Semele, yet another of Zeus’ lovers. Later, Zeus and Semele’s divine child, Dionysus, inspires Ino’s sister Agave to tear her own son, Pentheus, to pieces. Ino, driven mad by Here, eventually leaps into the sea, but a merciful Zeus turns her into a nymph.
24 (p. 68)
whoe’er thou art!: Odysseus offers a prayer to the god of Scheria’s river, whose name he does not know. In Greek mythology, every location boasts a minor deity as its presiding spirit.
Book VI
25 (p. 73)
like a lion: Such extended similes—direct comparisons by use of “like” or “as”—so characterize Homeric poetry that they have come to be known as “epic similes.” Every later writer of epic influenced by Homer, from Virgil to Milton to Derek Walcott, has imitated the technique.
Book VII
26 (p. 80)
Eurymedon . . . giants: Zeus faced two wars to establish his dominance, one against the gods of his father’s generation, known as Titans, and one against an army of earth-born giants. Hesiod tells the story of both wars fully in his
Theogony, but, writing within thirty to fifty years after Homer, he identifies the leader of the giants as Typhoeus, not Eurymedon. Later writers tend to conflate the two struggles.
Book VIII
27 (pp. 89-90)
how they once quarreled: The quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles to which the poem refers is a shadowy incident, never mentioned in the
Iliad itself. Later texts claim that the argument concerned the means by which Troy was to fall, through an Achillean frontal assault or an Odyssean strategy, but Homer offers only the limited information found in this passage.
Book IX
28 (p. 105)
Cyclops: The origin of the Cyclops myth may lie in misread bones. It has been suggested that the Greeks came across the skeletons of elephants and, being unfamiliar with the living animal, assumed that the cavity in the center of the gigantic skull, to which the trunk is attached, had once contained a single, monstrous eye. Unicorns, similarly, may have been inspired by the remains of the narwhal; the males of this whale species have a long, twisted ivory tusk.
Book X
29 (p. 120)
the sorcerer Aeeütes: The Aeeätes identified here as Circe’s brother may conceivably be King Aeeätes of Colchis, from whom Jason wrests the Golden Fleece. (Aeeätes’ daughter, Medea, was also a noted enchanter.) That both characters named Aeeätes are the same, however, cannot be proven.
30 (p. 129)
the prophet blind: Teiresias, the most famous seer in the ancient Greek tradition, foretold the death of Pentheus and identified Oedipus as the source of the plague afflicting Thebes. Later sources relate his transformation into a woman and back into a man; when Zeus and Here ask him which gender enjoys greater sexual pleasure, Teiresias answers “women,” pleasing Zeus. Piqued, Here blinds the man, but Zeus repays him with the gift of prophecy.
Book XI
31 (p. 136)
great men’s wives and daughters: Homer’s catalogue of famous women is too long for full annotation here. Suffice it to say that none of these figures gains immortal repute for her own deeds, but for her relation to men—to sons and husbands in particular. The text neglects even to mention that Leda also bore Helen and Clytaemnestra, noting only her heroic sons.
32 (p. 144)
his wrath: Most commentators agree that the section beginning with the words “Yet then, despite his wrath” and ending with “back he went into the house of Hades” (p. 146), does not date to the Homeric composition of the poem in the eighth century B.C., though it was added early in the text’s history.
Book XII
33 (p. 148)
Jason: Heir to the throne of Corinth, Jason needed to retrieve the Golden Fleece from the Black Sea city of Colchis, on the edge of the world known to the early Greeks, in order to wrest the kingdom from the usurper Pelias. He accomplished both tasks with the aid of Medea, whom he subsequently divorced for political gain, an act for which she revenged herself by the murder of their children.
Book XV
34 (p. 187)
lineage of Melampus: Theoclymenus has impeccable credentials as a reader of omens, his ancestor Melampus having been renowned for understanding the language of beasts and birds and for his skill as a physician. Telemachus does not hesitate to shelter a wanted murderer, demonstrating the degree to which personal loyalty outweighed civil responsibility in the heroic world Homer describes.
Book XIX
35 (p. 236)
under his righteous sway: Belief in the unity of the king with the land he ruled has a long history. Crops fail in Thebes when Oedipus violates the natural progression of time by marrying his mother; the God of Genesis curses the land for Adam’s sake; the Fisher King of the medieval Grail story rules an autumnal land because he can neither cure his thigh’s deep wound nor die.
36 (p. 246)
one day blindly slew: Pandareos’s daughter, Aedon (which means “nightingale”), intends to kill the son of her sister-in-law, Niobe, who brags incessantly about the boy, but in the dark mistakenly kills her own child, Itylus. Zeus pities her and transforms her into the eternally grieving bird. Post-Homeric stories of the transformation of an entirely different character, Phil omel, into a nightingale, and of the death of Niobe’s children at the hands of Apollo and Artemis, have outlasted this now-obscure tale.
Book XXI
37 (pp. 260-261)
bend the bow: A similar test of the bow appears in the Indian epic
The Ramayana, when Rama must lift, bend, and string Shiva’s bow to prove himself worthy to marry Sita.
38 (p. 266)
Lapithae: The war between the Lapithae, a Greek tribe from Thessaly, and the Centaurs, narrated perhaps most memorably in book XII of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, involved many of the earlier heroes of Greek myth, including Theseus and Nestor. The irony, of course, is that Antinouäs himself behaves like the Centaurs, to whom he compares Odysseus in this passage.
Book XXIV
39 (p. 306)
Cease from the struggle: Athene’s intervention to cut short an apparently endless blood feud anticipates the role she plays in Aeschylus’s
Oresteia, in which she removes the guilt that plagues Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytaemnestra, an incident to which the
Odyssey frequently refers. Aeschylus marks the advent of civil government by casting Athene’s involvement in the form of judging a trial.