Odyssey (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The only other book to which the Western imagination owes so much of its stock of heroes, monsters, images, and tales as it does to the Iliad and the Odyssey is the Bible. At the same time, these epic poems attributed to Homer, like the Bible, are not originally Western or even European texts; in fact, even to call them Greek is misleading. Telling the full story behind this apparent contradiction sets the Odyssey firmly in its historical context, clarifying its relation both to its own time and to ours.

Before embarking on this tale, however, one must recognize the three basic layers of the poem’s creation. First, the setting for the events the Homeric epics describe (to the extent such incidents as the Trojan War ever occurred in the first place) is a wealthy era known as the Mycenaean period. The dominant leaders of the most important city-states on the Greek peninsula, the Mycenaeans were speakers of an early form of Greek who made war with weapons of bronze. This period ended sometime between 1200 and 1100 B.C. Second, the characters, plots, and settings that appear in the epics, however much their origins may belong to the Mycenaean era, continued to develop during a period of oral transmission that spanned the so-called Grecian “Dark Age,” namely, the centuries from 1100 to 800 B.C. The level of physical culture declined so markedly at this time that most historians believe a separate tribe speaking a different Greek dialect, the Dorians, conquered and sacked all but a few of the Mycenaean city-states. Iron replaced bronze, and the art of writing, known to the Mycenaean world, was lost, leaving the period utterly without written records. Third, the Iliad and the Odyssey were among the earliest works to be written down when the Greeks reacquainted themselves with literacy in the early eighth century B.C.—the Iliad, most scholars agree, around 750 B.C., and the Odyssey twenty or thirty years later.

The modern concepts of “Europe” and “Greece” do not apply to such early periods. When the long story of the wanderings and homecoming of Odysseus was first committed to writing, no one regarded the disparate lands now identified on maps by the word “Europe” as a unified geographical entity, nor did any shared cultural inheritance (let alone the consciousness of one) unite those lands. Indeed, Homer unambiguously depicts the states of Phoenicia (Biblical Canaan; roughly, modern Lebanon) and Egypt as the most vital partners and rivals of the Greek-speaking world. While Homer does perceive a cultural and linguistic identity that distinguishes speakers of Greek from other peoples, the language was divided then into almost mutually unintelligible dialects. Also, though in making this distinction, Homer predates the formation of a politically unified Greece by something like 400 years (and that was a temporary union effected by Phillip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, representatives of a northern tribe whom the cultural leaders of Athens regarded as semibarbarous). The illiterate centuries of the Grecian “Dark Age,” when the tale of Odysseus began to take form in the mouths of storytellers, were, of course, even earlier before the advent of a unified Greek nation.

Tellingly, Homer lacks a word that corresponds to the modern term “Greek” as a simultaneous designation of a language, a culture, and a state. He refers to what we might call Greeks as “Danaans” or “Argives,” or “Achaeans,” all three of which relate to the names of places from which some Greek-speakers happened to come, a usage loosely akin to referring to people born in the United States by randomly selecting any one of the designations “Southerners,” “Yankees,” or “Californians.”

Unusual care is required to speak of Homer’s world, as distinct from the conditions and assumptions of the later Hellenized, Ro manized, and finally, Europeanized eras that unconsciously influence the ways most contemporary readers experience the poems. For that matter, the phrase “Homer’s world” is problematic: To which of the very different layers of the poem’s formation does such a phrase refer? In some respects, the materials of which the poem is composed seem to originate in the Mycenaean period. The city-states of Pylos and Mycenae, for instance, identified by Homer as the seats of the mighty kings Nestor and Agamemnon, reached the pinnacle of their power and wealth sometime between 1650 and 1400 B.C. The latter is the approximate date at which the magnificent artifacts of the Mycenaean tombs were assembled. (The self-trained archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann unearthed them in A.D. 1879 and naively assumed they came from Agamemnon’s resting place, a view no contemporary scholar holds.) The former date, 1650 B.C., is about the time by which the Minoan city of Knossos, on the island of Crete and formerly the leading power of the northeastern Mediterranean, seems to have been at least eclipsed and likely conquered by the Mycenaeans. Moreover, if the Trojan War ever took place, the best candidate for the date falls in the Mycenaean period; the archaeological evidence suggests that a prosperous era in the history of Troy was violently terminated—whether by war or misfortune has yet to be determined to the satisfaction of all scholars—in the late thirteenth century B.C. Since the site of Troy remained uninhabited from about 1100 to 700 B.C., at least some of the memories that inform the poems, which depict the city as a rich and powerful place, must reach back to the Mycenaean era.

But one cannot accurately describe the Mycenaean world as the Homeric nor assert without qualification that the poems were “set” in that time. After 1200 B.C., when Mycenaean culture went into its steep decline, the system of writing it had employed, Linear B, was forgotten (and, in fact, no literary texts have yet been found in that script, which apparently served mainly to record palace business). In this womb of historical silence, the Homeric epics gestated. So how—and to what extent—could the Mycenaean past have been preserved in the poems?

The answer lies in the nature of what has come to be called oral-formulaic verse. A young American scholar named Milman Parry deduced, by observing this form of poetic composition still being practiced in the Balkans during the 1920s, that the Iliad and the Odyssey had been composed and circulated as oral-formulaic verse for indeterminate generations before they were at last written down. In this method of poetic composition, a bard intimately familiar with the details of a traditional legend or set of legends improvises, often for hours at a time, night after night, a metrical chanting of the story. The bard often relies on a great many prefabricated phrases and lines that fit the metrical pattern conventional to the culture—in Ancient Greek, the pattern of long and short syllables. (The musical forms of calypso and hip-hop often work in roughly similar fashions.) Frequent repetition of such phrases as “early, rosy-fingered dawn” and “earth-shaking Poseidon,” as well as the tendency of characters to repeat word-for-word any message or description given them to repeat, demonstrates the origin of the Odyssey in oral-formulaic verse. Presumably, the same metrical phrases might be repeated in reference to the same characters, places, or incidents for centuries.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to imagine that the poem remained so little altered that Homer’s tale reflected the basic social facts of life in the time of the Mycenaeans. Oral-formulaic verse changes by nature. Not only does each retelling subtly alter the previous incarnations, but bards must appeal to the audience seated before them in order to earn their bread. Their incentive is to create a world that is meaningful to their listeners, not to preserve accurately the ways of life that belong to their ancestors. Homer, to be sure, clearly sets his tale in the golden age of what, even to his first readers, was the distant past, being careful to include archaisms such as chariot warfare and bronze weaponry that had vanished from the world of his own time. His gestures in this direction, however, are precisely what provide modern archaeologists with the proof that the Homeric poems reflect the Mycenaean world very imprecisely. Warriors in the Odyssey essentially fight as they did in Homer’s time: on foot, throwing and thrusting spears and, at close quarters, lunging with swords. When a Homeric hero steps into a chariot, he does so merely to arrive at the battlefield in high style, dismounting before drawing any of his weapons. The Mycenaeans, however, used their chariots as moving gunnery platforms from which to fire arrows. Indeed, some scholars believe they conquered the Grecian peninsula primarily by their mastery of chariots, part of a wave of victories by mainly Indo-European-speaking charioteers in India (the Aryan invasion), the Fertile Crescent (the misnamed “Hittite” Empire), and even Egypt (the Hyksos conquest). In Homer, the honored dead receive cremation; had this been the case in Mycenaean times, there would have been no tombs for Schliemann to open. Indeed, Homer’s poems record no suspicion that a major cultural and political disruption separated his own era from that of the Trojan War heroes. Certain Mycenaean fictions may survive in the poem, but few identifiable realities.

So the world of the Odyssey does not precisely reflect the Mycenaean period, in that Homer, coming at the end of 300 years without written records, knew little of this vanished way of life. Nor does the Odyssey reflect the world of the late eighth century B.C., when the epic was likely written down, since the poet introduced purposeful archaism and the poem accumulated undatable story elements during its years, decades, or even centuries of oral transmission. Rather, Homer creates a mythic past—perceptible as imaginary to us, but regarded as the authentic voice of tradition by its original audience—in order to translate the customs of his own time into a vision of universal values and eternal meaning. Homer evokes a sense of great but indefinite temporal distance in order to provide a metaphor for the idea of timelessness. Homer’s past is “always.”

Simply to attribute the poem’s intentions to Homer, though, hides another nest of complexities. While the poem circulated in oral form for some time, and at least certain elements of it reach back centuries, our Odyssey is and has long been a written text. Most scholars agree that it was first written down some time in the second half of the eighth century B.C., which makes it one of the earliest literary works to be committed to paper (or, more accurately, parchment) after the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet to transcribe their own language. No manuscripts from that era survive, however; in fact, the oldest complete copies of the poem still in existence are little more than a thousand years old. These texts preserve a poem in absolutely finished form, varying only negligibly from each other; essentially, what one reads in any modern English edition of the poem, including this one, is a translation of those manuscripts. Many scholars believe the first truly authoritative text of the epic was established at the great library of Alexandria in the first few centuries A.D., giving those anonymous editors at least a small share in the identity of “Homer.” A similar editorial effort may have occurred at the behest of the Athenian ruler Peisistratus even earlier, during the sixth century B.C., but no physical evidence to confirm this supposition has survived; only a few sentences of ancient historians attest to the possibility.

On the most crucial question concerning the poem’s authorship, though, no one has any evidence of any kind: How did a poem that normally would have been orally improvised on the spot become a written manuscript in the first place? Tradition invariably identifies the author of the poem as a blind bard named Homer, but at precisely what point in the creative process might this figure enter? The poetry of the Odyssey shows clear roots in oral-formulaic composition, but it shows just as clearly that the poem is not simply the transcript of a particular oral performance or set of performances. No scribe squatted at the blind poet’s knee hurriedly copying the 12,110 lines of the poem as he chanted them. The poem uses far fewer formulaic lines and phrases than any oral composition possibly could. The simplest solution is to assume that a literate poet intimately familiar with the materials and techniques of oral-formulaic poetry composed the poem in written form to sound as if it were orally composed, in keeping with tradition; one might as well call this figure “Homer” as anything else. Many scholars, however, regard “Homer” as a purely oral poet, relegating the scribe who reworked his poem into written form to secondary status. In any case, neither these half-invented Homers nor any other imaginable author of the texts that have survived can receive full credit for the contents of the poem, since the extent of its coalescence prior to the first appearance of any written text cannot be determined. The Homer of modern scholarly imagination, the poet on the cusp between oral and written composition, would not have invented the Trojan War or created the character of Odysseus or concocted his confrontation with the Cyclops—perhaps not even crafted the smaller details of his hero’s victory. Rather, he would have inherited these incidents more or less fully imagined from his unknown predecessors. Just as the poem speaks from an indefinite time, it speaks with a composite voice.

Regarded as the authentic record of the earliest pan-Hellenic history and the repository of age-tested wisdom, the Homeric epics soon came to be regarded almost as sacred texts in the Greek city-states. Part of the appeal was political: Faced with invasion by a vast Persian military in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the rival Greek states sought precedent in myth for laying aside their differences to face a common enemy. When Athenians rebuilt the Parthenon in marble after the Persians razed its wooden predecessor during the occupation of Athens in 480 B.C.—ended only by the combined efforts of a largely Athenian navy, a largely Spartan army, and the contributions of many smaller allies—they carved images of the mythical conflicts by which the Lapiths had subdued the Centaurs and Theseus the Amazons into the stone. Like the Centaurs and Amazons—and unlike the Greeks—the Persians fought from horseback; the Greeks self-servingly imagined their victories over Centaurs, Amazons, and Persians alike as an imposition of order on chaos, a reassertion of “natural” hierarchies against the “savage” ambitions of animal instincts, women, and foreigners. Similarly, Greek unity in the Trojan War became a rallying point. When Herodotus wrote his history of the Greco-Persian conflict, he included a pointed anecdote (of very dubious historicity) relating how Xerxes, the Persian ruler, visited the ruins of Priam’s palace (the nerve center of Troy) before embarking on his ill-fated invasion of the Greek mainland. In case the analogy escaped anyone’s perception, Herodotus noted that the Persian soldiers suffered unaccountable dread during the night they spent within the ruined walls.

But the poem’s influence far outstripped its momentary propaganda value. Not everyone considered Homer’s influence to be salutary. Judging by the Republic, Plato regarded the Homeric epics as his most dangerous rivals in teaching Athenians how to regulate their lives, tell good from evil, and know the truth of gods and humans. The immorality of Homer’s gods particularly troubled the philosopher, who in any case had little sympathy with what he envisioned (and condemned) as the essentially feminine act of poetic creation, with all the messy emotions it inspired in its audience. As thorough a literalist as any intellectual before the rise of empirical science, Plato often seems almost deaf to figurative meanings. He complains in his dialogue Ion, for instance, that a fisherman must surely be a better judge of the success of those Homeric passages in which a character attempts to catch fish than a rhapsodist (a dramatic reciter of poems also expected to explicate them ably).

The questionable morality of the poem’s eponymous hero, as much as the foibles of its gods, troubled the Romans. Or, perhaps more accurately, Roman poets attempted to distinguish the virtues of their people from those of the Greeks to whom they obviously had so great a cultural debt by unfavorably comparing the behavior of the brawling, self-absorbed Odysseus with the self-restrained Aeneas, a Trojan supposed to have escaped the ruin of his city and wandered for many years before landing near the Tiber and founding Rome. Virgil’s Aeneid, in fact, implicitly offers an almost point-by-point comparison of the Greek ethos with the Roman—curiously, always to the Roman advantage. Odysseus endangers his men by his curiosity to see a Cyclops, while Aeneas avoids the island altogether (pausing only to rescue a member of Odysseus’s crew heartlessly marooned in the great trickster’s haste to escape); Odysseus slaughters all the suitors besieging his home in order to reclaim his own property, while Aeneas unites his crewmen with the native tribes of Italy (even those who at first offer armed resistance) to create a new state, and so forth. Virgil does not directly depict Odysseus (or Ulysses, to use the Latin form of the name). But those Roman poets who did—most influentially, Ovid in his Metamorphoses—transformed the great warrior, the man of many devices, into something closer to a con man—and an unsympathetic one at that, always willing to take any unfair advantage that might present itself to bilk the weak or the stupid. The very qualities that made Odysseus so secure a guide to behavior in the Greek world of the eighth through the fifth centuries—a world of dangerous independence of city from city, estate from estate, and rulers from ruled—rendered him a virtual outlaw in the regulated precincts of philosophical reason and Roman polity, as purely theoretical as the rule of law may often have been in both those lands.

In the West, after the Roman Empire disintegrated in the last half of the fifth century A.D., the preservation of Greek manuscripts and the study of the Greek tongue so declined that Homer’s voice went unheard until the fifteenth century A.D. No manuscripts of the epic poems were available in any European library throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, no Greek literature of any kind, and very little else of the classical world’s immense literature, survived in Western Europe, aside from what the scribes of Charlemagne’s court happened to save. The Eastern (or Byzantine) Empire, centered on the citadel of Constantinople, conducted all its business in Greek and preserved the poems throughout its existence. Indeed, as Islam encroached farther and farther onto the older Empire’s lands between the seventh and the fifteenth centuries A.D., the Odyssey entered the Arabic tradition as the antecedent of Sindbad’s seven voyages, on one of which he defeats a cannibalistic giant by first intoxicating then blinding him. In his Inferno, meanwhile, Dante assigns Homer to an honored place among the five great epic poets (prior to himself) purely on the basis of reputation; his own guide being Virgil, he places Ulysses prominently in the eighth circle of damnation, the circle of deceivers. In sum, the poem that would later be claimed as a pillar of European civilization was absent from the long centuries that saw the foundation of European culture, except by its indirect influence over Roman poets with very different aesthetic and moral ideals. It took the colonizing hubris of the Renaissance to claim the poem as “European.”

Since chivalric codes of behavior are utterly foreign to the ethos of the Odyssey—when Odysseus settles his score with the suitors, he scrupulously avoids a fair fight, surprising his most dangerous foe with an arrow through the neck while the man is innocently raising a goblet to his lips—its appeal to the Middle Ages would likely have lagged far behind that of the Aeneid. Virgil seemed to anticipate Christian theology so closely that some pressure for his canonization ensued, a fate his Greek forebear never risked. But the rediscovery of Homer, after the flight of scholars from the Ottoman conquest of the last strongholds of the Byzantine empire in A.D. 1453, struck a chord in Renaissance Italy that echoed across the continent and still resonates today. As the fifteenth century rolled into the sixteenth, the universal Christian church fragmented into factions that were always in figurative and often in literal combat with each other. Europeans expanded into both geographical and scientific spheres for which their inherited world view seemed to offer inadequate explanation, and the checkerboard of localized feudal governments coalesced into the modern landscape of nation-states. As the plays of Shakespeare demonstrate, the nature of identity and authority became acute questions in such a world; the old criteria by which people determined who they were and what role they filled in their community no longer seemed reliable. The problems of self-definition and the maintenance of social order would so define the five hundred years between then and now that the designation “early modern Europe,” which stresses our continuity with the period, has replaced “Renaissance” in the vocabulary of many historians. In many ways, the newer term acknowledges, the fifteenth century is the beginning of now, of modernity. The Odyssey, in a sense, was reborn at the moment of the modern world’s own hard birth; reading it today, its discourse on the matters of authority and identity remain one of its chief fascinations.

The poem begins, in fact, with a four-book segment known as the Telemachy, an overture that announces the intertwined themes of identity and authority that reappear throughout the epic. Telemachus, the son of a father he has never seen, stands on the threshold between adolescence and adulthood. He is so unsure of his own identity that he refuses to affirm without qualification his relationship to Odysseus: “My mother says I am his child; I myself do not know; for no one ever yet knew his own parentage” (p. 6). The means by which Telemachus determines who he is and confirms his parentage to his own satisfaction establishes a model for self-formation that nearly every subsequent episode of the work will test, refine, or challenge. Separation from home and an independent encounter with the challenges of the outside world—in short, an odyssey—is the first requirement. Homer indicates the absolute necessity of this separation by putting the impetus for Telemachus’s journey in the mouth of Athene, the goddess of wisdom. The young man’s transformation as a result of his experience suggests that the literal journey he takes through space stands for his interior journey in time from adolescence to adulthood.

Nor does Telemachus literally find what he seeks—his father or trustworthy news of his whereabouts; instead, he discovers his progenitor in himself. For Athene does not send him on some flight of escape to a new land that will be wholly his own and from which he will never return—a romantic discovery of selfhood in utter freedom, in isolation from the lowering authority of all fathers, predecessors, and precedents. Instead, she sends him into the country of the past, from which he must return to confirm his new identity. Actually, this identity is not new at all, but is a repetition of his father’s great example. Repetition and revisiting the past, in fact, are the patterns on which the whole work is cut.

Telemachus’s adventure both parallels and contains his father’s longer excursion. We read little of Odysseus before book V, and he returns to Ithaca several books before Telemachus himself does. The sequence of events reinforces the epic’s narrative structure of repeated loops and circles. The Odyssey visits Athene and Zeus on Olympus in its first and last books, follows Odysseus onto the island of Scheria, circles back to his earlier travails on the return from Troy, then returns to Scheria, and so forth. Indeed, Telemachus returns almost to the days before the Trojan War began when he leaves Ithaca. He visits Nestor enthroned in Pylos, just as he had been before the conflict; Menelaus is eerily reunited with Helen, almost as if nothing had ever happened to separate them. In meeting his father’s old friends, Telemachus learns not only of the man’s heroism, but also of his own resemblance in both face and character to the lost hero, attested equally by Nestor, Menelaus, and Helen. He starts to claim his future by immersing himself in the past; he starts to become himself by learning how he replicates his father.

The identity Telemachus seeks, then, does not arise from any spring of unique selfhood inside him. He learns what sort of man he ought to be by seeing his situation from the outside, by stepping out of the distorted nightmare of Ithaca to see life from the perspective of his father’s generation, equally distant in place and time. The custom of unremitting hospitality, which attains a hypertrophic monstrosity on Ithaca when the all-consuming suitors occupy the household of the absent Odysseus, regains its proper dimension as the guarantor of peaceful and orderly conduct in the lands of Pylos and Sparta. Here, both Telemachus and the poem’s audience quietly receive an education in the traditions of civility. Telemachus sees a grimmer potential in the mirror of Orestes, held constantly before his eyes by virtually everyone he meets on his journey. While explicitly offered to Telemachus in his quest to know his progenitor (and so himself) as a model of generational loyalty, the Orestian precedent implicitly raises a possibility too horrible ever to be named outright. Just as Orestes kills his mother, Clytaemnestra, to avenge her betrayal of his father, Agamemnon, so may Telemachus need to enforce Penelope’s fidelity with the sword, should she falter in her long struggle to hold the suitors at bay. To be held a man, the analogy of Orestes implies, requires a son to identify himself absolutely with his father’s affairs.

Indeed, while never literally required to slay his mother, Telemachus must nevertheless kill her influence over him in order to claim an adult male identity—kill her, that is, as a mothering figure. The point of his little odyssey seems to be as much to escape his mother as to find his father, for the two actions are symbolically the same. Hiding the fact of his departure behind the robes of the old nursemaid Eurycleia instead of declaring his intentions to Penelope may indicate an imperfect degree of separation. But Telemachus shows, even before he sets foot on his hollow ship, that he is ready to assume the burdens and privileges of patriarchy by commanding his mother rather than being commanded by her. He does so by permitting the bard Phemius to sing the fates of the returning heroes of the Trojan War, affirming the value of the male, warrior’s world of his father. He insists upon masculine control over language itself, in contrast with the woman’s sphere of “the loom, the distaff” (p. 9), making the point both acutely and, for most modern readers, chill ingly in its casual repressiveness. The text also suggests several times that Telemachus exhibits a lingering childishness in his very anxiety to demonstrate his maturity by rejecting the feminine so deter minedly. Late in the work, he turns upon the slave maids who have made themselves the suitors’ mistresses with more savagery than his father has sanctioned, killing them by the cruel and dishonorable means of hanging rather than dispatching them with the quick sword. More comically, he condemns with boyish heat his mother’s failure to accept Odysseus as her returned husband on sight, at which “royal Odysseus smiled, and said . . . ‘Telemachus, leave your mother in the hall to try my truth’ ” (p. 286). At the same time, the young man’s journey toward identity demands that he take his place in a hierarchical structure that elevates men over women and leaders over followers. The fact that Telemachus takes command of a ship, planning and accomplishing an adventure in which his fellows acknowledge his leadership, establishes him as the true son of Odysseus with equal if not greater force than what he finds on his voyage. To know oneself in the Telemachy is to know one’s place.

Such a system requires Penelope not only to know her place but virtually to become a place. Confined as Greek wives generally were to the interior life of the home, she can exercise no leadership even there. She cannot administer her missing husband’s property; were she to admit his death, she would have to marry one of the suitors and be carried off to provide the foundation of his household, to bear his heirs and superintend the spinning of his cloth. Instead, she must maintain her identity with the home or risk the fate of Clytaemnestra. She must be the unaltered place to which Odysseus may return, just as women, nymphs, and witches give being to the destinations between which he travels: ten years in pursuit of Helen at Troy, nine years as Calypso’s consort, a year of dalliance with Circe, a few final days as Nausicaaä’s potential fianceé. As little of the Trojan War as the epic recounts, Helen’s flight from home and husband shadows every inch of its ground: The whole tragedy of combat and frustrated homecoming follows from the consequences of just one woman’s mobility. That the reviled Clytaemnestra, who betrays her husband’s bed and conspires with her lover to murder him, is also Helen’s sister suggests that their twin offenses stem from a single root.

If male identity follows lineally in descent from father to son, if the son ideally inherits his father’s exact slot in the social hierarchy, only the mother’s fidelity can guarantee the legitimate succession of a male child who is genuinely his father’s offspring. Indeed, in Greek medical theory, the mother’s womb merely supplied the ground in which the male seed took hold and grew; again, the woman slipped from person to place. Any feminine movement, whether of Helen’s body or Clytaemnestra’s heart, undermines the system. Penelope, by contrast, demonstrates her transcendent worth by a brilliantly creative act of annulment: She delays the suitors by secretly unweaving in the concealing night the strands of the burial shroud of Laäertes, which she has begged time to finish before she chooses her new mate. In the past thirty years or so, the image of Penelope endlessly weaving and unweaving the same garment, going no place and completing nothing, has come to serve as a cautionary symbol for the frustration of women’s creativity, so powerfully does it encapsulate the consequences of the logic of gender hierarchy. In contrast to her son’s challenge of becoming what he is not, Penelope must continue always to be what she has been.

As Virginia Woolf noted, modern sympathies fall more easily on Clytaemnestra’s side than on that of Agamemnon—who, after all, took the sacrificial knife to their daughter Iphigenia in order to satisfy oracles for the departure to Troy. While the Telemachy’s assertion of hierarchical authority against the rule of chaos may have appealed to the uncertainties of the educated elite of the Renaissance (and after), it may well repel contemporary readers, however engaging they find the tale in other respects. But the Odyssey does not end after four books. The small odyssey of Telemachus takes the boy from his home island—all he has ever known—and reveals by contrast the nature of the conditions prevailing back on Ithaca. The great odyssey of his father carries the poem’s audience entirely outside the realm of normal human reality—all we have ever known—and casts us into a series of inhuman worlds, some beautiful and some terrifying, against which we come to judge the values of the human community itself. The work thus sets the pattern of fabulous travel narratives from Dante’s Commedia to The Wizard of Oz to the revealingly titled 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The tale suggests the upper and lower bounds of (particularly masculine) behavior when Odysseus carries human custom into the semidivine worlds of the Phaeacians and the Cyclopes, whose common descent from Poseidon emphasizes their equal but opposite distance from normal reality. The victory Odysseus wins over the much larger, much stronger herdsman Polyphemus reflects the widespread belief of ancient agricultural societies that tilling the land marked the boundary between the civilized and the savage, superior and inferior. Indeed, the work constructs Cyclopean “society” in contrast with human society as utterly lacking not only farming, but any governmental or communal structures, any unit larger than the family. The Cyclopes see only half so well as humans, who live in social union with each other; hence, the single eye proves the downfall of Polyphemus. That Odysseus overcomes the giant largely by the use of words, whose meaning comes from a shared act of communication between people using a system communally inherited rather than individually created—that is, a language—further attests to the power of shared culture against the mere brute force of the mountainous Cyclopes, who defy even the gods. (Of course, the suitors, who show little respect for custom or for the council of elders that represents government on the island of Ithaca in the absence of its king, demonstrate the human capacity for monstrosity when men’s eyes close to social responsibility.)

More tellingly, the episode ultimately reveals a fissure within the values set forth in the Telemachy. Despite his triumph, Odysseus cannot stand to remain a “Noman” to Polyphemus and reveals to the monster his true identity and lineage—in modern terms, practically giving away his home address, phone number, and ATM code. This act not only nearly allows the blinded Polyphemus to capsize the hero’s ship by hurling boulders toward the sound of his voice, but directs the curse of Poseidon onto Odysseus as the self-confessed culprit in the maiming of the sea god’s descendant. Thus, in his zeal to affirm his heroic identity, the very deed that seems to promise Telemachus a way to cure his land’s disorder, Odysseus courts discord. He doubly endangers his crew by asserting himself at the expense of their safety from Polyphemus and Poseidon, reversing the relation of individual to communal needs that had seemed to be integral to his victory over the Cyclops. Examined in this distant mirror, a contradiction that is suppressed when Homer looks directly at his culture emerges: The hero’s responsibility to demonstrate his greatness ill-suits the role of hierarchical leader for which his heroism is supposed to guarantee he is fit.

If, in his barbaric individualism, Polyphemus disguises what is finally a very human face behind a mask of monstrosity, then his cousins the Phaeacians conceal a virtual divinity in what seem to be merely human features. Sympathetic and generous, they accept the wrath of their father, Poseidon, to land the stranger Odysseus safely on Ithaca, first enriching him with greater treasure than he had obtained in the sack of Troy and lost in the wreck of his last ship before he washed up on Ogygia, the island of Calypso. The values of the Phaeacians’ orderly, productive realm quietly challenge those even of the kingdoms Telemachus has visited on the Greek mainland, the epic’s prior images of well-regulated society, throwing into question the whole heroic ethos of connecting masculine worth to military leadership. When the son of Alcinouäs goads Odysseus into showing his athletic prowess, he offers, in effect, to lick any man in the house. But his host gently reminds him of that house’s different nature: “We are not faultless boxers, no, nor wrestlers; but in the foot-race we run swiftly, and in our ships excel. Dear to us ever is the feast, the harp, the dance, changes of clothes, warm baths, and bed” (p. 94). Rivalry without violence, bravery without warfare, peace without conquest: The paradise of Scheria may lie beyond human capacity, just as Poseidon finally removes the land itself from human access, but the achievements of the Grecian kings still diminish in its distant light.

Through the figure of Arete, the Phaeacian Queen, the episode particularly reconsiders the traditions into which the Telemachy initiates the youthful son of Odysseus. While Telemachus must turn from his mother to prove his maturity, Athene advises Odysseus to humble himself before the Phaeacian woman, whose status so differs from anything known in the Grecian world: “For of sound judgment, woman though she is, she has no lack; and those whom she regards, though men, find troubles clear away” (p. 80). Though Homer subsequently seems unable actually to depict Arete wielding power, so foreign a concept is this, his mere nod in this direction raises the possibility that not all is right with his own world’s gender divisions. In particular, Arete’s position is juxtaposed with those of Penelope and Helen. Like Arete, Helen surpasses her husband by reason of her descent from a major god; like Arete, Penelope shows surpassing wisdom, establishing herself as her husband’s sole equal in stratagems (or he as hers). But neither of the Greek women has any public charge over men, exercising their powers only privately, even secretly. Helen’s value lies in her beauty, not in her intelligence—indeed, the guile she employs while among the Trojans to coax the Greek warriors hidden in the belly of the wooden horse to reveal themselves makes her seem a dangerous figure. Penelope is driven to the lonely heroism of her silent resistance, misread even by her own son, precisely because she can render no judgments that the public world of men will respect: She cannot make the suitors quit the home she ostensibly controls. The reaction of Odysseus, when he later awakens alone and dazed on the shore of a home island he at first fails to recognize, measures to the inch how far Ithaca lies from paradise, even with its king at last restored. His reaction is at once comical and ugly: He abuses the Phaeacian sailors he immediately assumes have marooned him on some distant land, and even takes the outlandish precaution of counting the gifts they have themselves given him to ensure he has not been robbed.

Of all the strange worlds Odysseus visits—and I leave my readers the pleasure of exploring many of them without a map—the land of the dead, the voyage to which is known as the Nekyia (from nekos, dead body, corpse), apparently stands furthest from ordinary life. This voyage leaves Homer’s audience with much greater knowledge than the manner of Odysseus’s homecoming, its ostensible purpose, does. In narrative terms, a trip among the ghosts of the past would be far out of proportion to such limited returns; a story could more easily dispatch its hero to some oracle for such information. No, the Nekyia represents an encounter with ultimate knowledge, the knowledge of endings—of the story, of the hero’s life, of human life itself. Most strikingly, the Homeric dead declare both directly and indirectly the final sovereignty of bodily existence. The fact that they cannot speak without a fresh infusion of the blood they lack shows the utter dependence of the bodiless dead on the embodied living. In contrast to later theologies that regarded the soul as the true essence of being, in the Odyssey the soul survives as a mere reminder of real existence, insubstantial as memory. As Anticleia, mother of Odysseus, informs her son, “like a dream the spirit flies away” (p. 136), an image that draws its power from the reality the dead commonly assume when we dream of them, only to vanish from our sight at waking.

For Homer, the departed intervene in present life only as shades cast in the minds of those whose hearts still beat. The way a poet envisions the afterlife reveals his or her (or his or her culture’s) sense of the timeless, of what survives death. In the Odyssey, nothing of the individual remains when breath leaves the body, reputation and lineage alone outlasting time: All the spirits to whom Odysseus speaks bear great names, children, or both. The ordinary dead are not even acknowledged. And yet, the Nekyia reveals, fame lacks the value from the perspective of finality that it carries in the living world; again, the alternative reality forces a reevaluation of cherished assumptions. Meeting Achilles in the underworld, Odysseus proposes that even death can make little difference to so mighty a hero; just as his fame was secure among the living, so must he be a king among the dead. But the intangible reward of glory offers little consolation for an early death: “Better to be the hireling of a stranger,” Achilles answers, “and serve a man of mean estate whose living is but small, than be the ruler over all these dead and gone” (p. 142 ). The Greek word translated as “hireling” is thes, which refers specifically to a laborer employed for a daily wage, a position even lower than that of a slave, who at least belonged to a household that had some concern for his or (usually) her welfare. To live as a thes, the antithesis of heroic glory, meant an almost total social exclusion, a faceless, unremembered anonymity. From the perspective of the dead—that is, taking the unavoidable fact of death into full account—the rage for identity typified by Odysseus’s exultant declaration of self as he departed the island of the Cyclopes is not only dangerous, but fruitless. The immortality of fame is an empty bubble.

This leaves a son as the sole means to continue a man’s existence beyond his own end. The poem’s insistence on women’s fidelity takes on new meaning from this perspective, being revealed as the consequence of male fears of annihilation. A man’s children must positively have sprung from his own being if his real afterlife comes only through the continuation of his lineage, as both Agamemnon and Achilles affirm. The long catalogue of famous women who greet Odysseus at the gates of Hades all owe their fame—that is, the element of their existence that survives death—to their role as life-givers to male children. This fact emphasizes the idea that only passage through the gates of the womb balances passage through the gates of Hades, that women’s power lies in their special connection to sexuality and birth. Paradoxically, such a system assigns women an equal association with death, as they are analogized to the productive earth from which life comes and to which it returns. Significantly, the episode makes continual reference to Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, while entirely neglecting her husband. The periodic disappearance and reappearance of the goddess, daughter of the agricultural deity Demeter, creates the seasons, the dead months of the year corresponding with the time when Persephone’s mother mourns her daughter’s departure and the earth’s revival with their joyous reunion.

The fact that Anticleia dies from the absence of her son shows how purely women’s identity was bodily defined—the very existence of Anticleia, it seems, collapses when the prop of her motherhood is withdrawn. By so firmly tying women to the body, the poem avoids recognizing the idea that women might themselves possess less tangible identities whose continuation after death would concern them. Odysseus actually talks to none of the famous women who have won a kind of immortality through the success or failure of their children. Their importance, unlike that of Odysseus’s old Trojan War companions, lies strictly—and probably, for most modern readers, depressingly—in the products of their bodies, not in their own ambitions and accomplishments (of which none are recorded). The poem fails even to remark that Leda bore Helen and Clytaemnestra, recording only her achievement in presenting her husband with sons who earned themselves a portion of immortality. While the Nekyia does far less than the Phaeacian episode to question the gender hierarchy that formed an inextricable part of the heroic code, it reveals the nature of male anxiety for women’s sexual faith.

When Odysseus awakens from his dream-like voyage on the shore of his own island, he fails to recognize the place, asking: “To what men’s land am I come now? Lawless and savage are they, with no regard for right, or are they kind to strangers and reverent toward the gods?” (p. 162). While the mists of Athene have produced the mariner’s confusion, his questions do not vanish with their dissipation. Is Ithaca the ordered kingdom he left behind or a new realm of incurable savagery? And, after all the alternative worlds through which we have passed, to what land have we finally come? After meeting Arete and Polyphemus and Anticleia and Achilles and Circe and Calypso and the Sirens and the Lotus-eaters and many others, how do we now perceive Ithaca? The poem offers no unified answers, instead multiplying the complications it has engaged since Telemachus set sail for Pylos.

The first surprise of the Ithacan episode, at least to many modern readers, is its length; the landfall of Odysseus on his home shore marks only about the halfway point of the tale. Homer’s buildup to the battle with the suitors is one of the slowest and most suspenseful in literature—even though his original audience knew the outcome from the start. As Alfred Hitchcock once observed, the sudden explosion of a bomb of which viewers know nothing generates a half-second’s shock, while the slow ticking of a bomb of whose existence they do know generates a quarter-hour’s suspense. Moreover, Homer fills the delay with its own significance. In the period between Odysseus’s landing and the fight with the suitors, a series of recognition scenes unfolds, of disguises adopted and then penetrated or let fall. Odysseus reveals himself to his son, Telemachus, and to his loyal swineherd and cowherd. The old dog Argos, who had known his master as a pup, and the old nurse Eurycleia see on their own through the guise of age and poverty that Athene has helped the man of strategies don. To recognize Odysseus means more than simply to know who this particular individual is—or was, for if Odysseus remains unrecognized as the island’s patriarch, if he cannot reclaim his old identity, he will become the old beggar he appears to be. To acknowledge the identity of this stranger as Odysseus is, in effect, to acknowledge authority itself, to demonstrate one’s acquiescence to the whole system that legitimizes a king’s rule. After all, no one who opposes the rights of Odysseus learns who the old beggar really is until he puts an arrow through Antinouäs’s throat. Not even such old, disloyal servants as Melantho and Melanthius show the slightest suspicion that the mysterious stranger they enjoy abusing is their dangerous master returned. Only those who submit themselves to the hierarchical system, who recognize their own places, can also recognize Odysseus. Indeed, Argos not only recognizes but directly mirrors his master, who also risks consignment to the dung heap in his disregarded age if he can no longer prove himself the man he used to be, bend the great bow he once wielded, and, in an image suggestive of continued sexual prowess, fire an arrow through a dozen axes.

The Telemachy’s emphasis on the twin values of authority and identity dovetail with particular neatness in the token by which Odysseus is known. An old scar received years earlier in a boar hunt, the first heroic episode that vaulted the youth toward his maturity, made him who he is, written into his body so long as he lives. As in the Nekyia, bodily existence—bodily prowess and endurance—measure the value of life; indeed, the scar suggests that one defines oneself by exterior, bodily deeds, not by any individual interior psychology. The violence of Odysseus’s reaction to his old nurse’s discovery of the scar, a symbol of his passage from boyhood to maturity, even recalls the curt rejection of Penelope by her son, a parallel reinforced by the nurturing role Eurycleia has played for both father and son. In these respects, the return to Ithaca seems also to be a return to the familiar, hierarchical values presented to Telemachus on his miniature odyssey.

And yet identity is never so fluid as it is in the second half of the epic, authority never so elusive. Though the scar represents the absolute fixity of self, what saves Odysseus on Ithaca is his capacity not to be who he is. This same ability to reconstruct himself in accordance with the demands of circumstance freed him from the cave of Polyphemus and taught him how to approach Nausicaaä. Were Odysseus merely to weave these impostures to overcome imminent danger, little sense of contradiction with the idea of a solid core of self would result. But such shifting marks Odysseus’s character even more deeply than the scar does. So habitually does he transform himself into someone else that by the time he approaches his father, the aged Laeärtes, in the guise of yet another wandering stranger, the excuse that he needs to test the old man’s loyalty has worn nearly transparent. The hero’s tendency to assume other selves has not only come to define him, it connects him most nearly with the divine. For the gods can be anything, as Athene’s transformations into man, woman, child, and bird affirm; to be stuck as oneself is to be merely human. Odysseus reaches his apogee not by his glorious force of arms, but by his lies and fictions. In one of the most charming moments of the work, Athene recognizes their unity in owning the divine gift of the creation of what is not: “Bold, shifty, and insatiate of wiles, will you not now within your land cease from the false misleading tales which from the bottom of your heart you love? . . . you are far the best of men in plots and tales, and I of all the gods am famed for craft and wiles” (p. 165). When Odysseus acknowledges of his patron that “You take all forms” (p. 165), he might as well be talking about himself. Nor does the scar suffice to confirm the hero’s identity to his feminine alter ego, Penelope. She acknowledges her husband only when he shows that he remembers the secret of their bed. Such a test of identity—with all the erotic overtones that a private, mutual knowledge of the bed evokes, an implicitly carnal knowledge—depends not on the exterior, public reputation preserved in that reminder of past deeds, the scar, but on a private, intangible, even unspeakable knowing of who someone is. Nowhere does the work come closer to identifying the interior sense of desire as the heart of selfhood.

The poem also equivocates in its rhetorical support for the hierarchical system by which the man at the top of the ladder, so long as he acts justly, exercises complete authority to enforce order down to the bottom rung. The careful differentiation the poem makes between the really vicious, the merely weak, and the nearly sympathetic suitors transforms the hero’s slaughter of his foes from exultant triumph to, at best, regrettable necessity. While Homer never challenges the morality of Odysseus’s actions, this differentiation modulates the emotional tone of his victory. Even more tellingly, the poem refuses to allow the killing of the suitors and their mistresses to be a resolution. Since the first book, the confrontation of Odysseus and the enemies occupying his house has been anticipated as a climax, a final judgment between chaos and authority. Surprisingly, it is nothing of the kind. Indeed, Odysseus’s victory lasts only the length of a single night, after which he must embark on a new journey, leaving Penelope yet again to escape the vengeance of his victims’ families. In the hills, he gathers fresh support from his father’s household; the suitors’ families pursue and the fighting begins all over again. Since what the poem seems to have advertised as Odysseus’s greatest triumph fails to bring peace, the human capacity to enforce order by strength of arms falls into grave doubt. The killing only stops when the gods command it, forestalling its resumption by blacking out the bitter memories of the survivors. If memory itself leads men to war, how can it be in any king’s power to make a lasting peace?

So Ithaca appears after the Odyssean tour of alternative worlds. And yet in a sense we remain in an alternative world even after the hero of the epic has come among the familiar scenes of his home-land: the alternative world of fiction. The second half of the epic makes readers more conscious of storytelling than ever, virtually offering a seminar on the nature and uses of fiction. When Odysseus spends his first night with his wife, he tells her the whole tale of the Odyssey in compressed and chronological form (p. 291). This condensation neatly contains the epic and at the same time alerts us by contrast to the complexities of the tale’s nonchronological, expansive construction. For that matter, little occurs in the poem that is not also narrated; even the suitors tell the story of their slaughter amid the shades of the underworld, delighting Agamemnon. What is real, what lasts, it seems, is the story, not the event. Fictions may, of course, be simple lies; the disguised Odysseus deceives both Eumaeus and Penelope by claiming to be a Cretan veteran of the Trojan War who suffered difficulties among the Phoenicians and Egyptians—and who has encountered the great Odysseus himself. Every detail of this moonshine rings true, the tale confining itself to plausible circumstances among well-known peoples of the Mediterranean coast; as the narrator observes about his surrogate story-teller: “He made the many falsehoods of his tale seem like the truth” (p. 239). No monsters haunt the tracks of Aethon—the name Odysseus adopts in deceiving Penelope—no one hears the Sirens sing, no one changes form, and no one speaks to the dead. Within the confines of the poem, then, the apparently impossible (the actual voyage of Odysseus) is true and the entirely plausible (the journey Odysseus makes up) is false, implicitly suggesting that the truth of a story is not to be found in the accuracy of its events to what we perceive as daily reality, but in their significance, their capacity to show us some previously unknown way of understanding the world.

Most vitally, though, in a work that dwells so continually on the borders—it explores the intersection of living and dead, the flimsy barriers between human and inhuman, the double natures of authority and identity, and so on—the ideal of storytelling is to erase the boundary between the characters within the tale and the listeners outside it. When, in book XIV, a disguised Odysseus tells his swineherd a story of a night he spent outside the gates of Troy when he was cold, the man recognizes the present relevance in the narrative of the past and hands the old beggar a coat. By his reception of the story, Eumaeus proves more than his loyalty to his absent master or the customs of hospitality; he shows his humanity, his willingness to recognize that another man’s story is also his own, another man’s discomfort his responsibility. To see themselves in the tales of others is precisely what Antinouäs and the other suitors fail to do, despite the explicit invitation of Odysseus, who warns them (in his beggar’s rags) that he too prospered once but was brought low. The suitors fail to acknowledge their image in the old man’s words—“What god has brought us this pest?” is the substance of Antinouäs’s answer—and in so doing exclude themselves from humanity. It comes as little surprise when one of their number mocks poetic diction in aiming an empty jest at the old beggar’s baldness (p. 232). The song reserved for those who fail to read themselves in another’s story is only that sung by the bowstring, an analogy the poem makes explicit: “even as one well-skilled to play the lyre and sing stretches with ease round its new peg a cord, securing at each end the twisted sheep-gut; so without effort did Odysseus string the mighty bow” (p. 268). To rule oneself outside the common circle of humanity, in other words, is to die.

Each reader today faces the suitors’ choice: to read the story as if it concerns himself—or herself—or to turn it aside as an extraordinarily old man’s babble. No arrow will pierce the throat of those who make the latter choice. But a contracted sense of humanity may follow. Whether one regards the conflicts that the poem relates as fundamentally the same as or fundamentally different from those of our own time makes little difference. The poem largely does not offer an argument for the validity of the civilization that produced it, but instead allows the reader to view from different angles that world’s ideas of life and death, women and men, order and chaos, war and peace, wealth and poverty, and so on. In this way, the Odyssey makes room for many sympathies. Its enduring wisdom is that only by encountering what seems unlike oneself does one come to gain any self-knowledge at all.