V

The Iliad and the Odyssey

From Homer and Polygnotus I every day learn more clearly, that in our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact hell.

GOETHE, letter to Schiller¹

In Book VIII of the Odyssey, the blind bard Demodocus entertains King Alcinous and his anonymous guest, whom we know to be Odysseus, with songs about Greek deeds during the Trojan War. In particular, he sings of the wooden horse. The Phaeacian court is attentive; twice the guest sheds secret tears into his rucked-up hood.

He weeps, the poem says, the way a woman weeps for her husband. It is an arresting simile: this most masculine of men is emasculated by deep feeling. But the poem does not leave it there. Like many epic similes it works towards metamorphosis. Here is Samuel Butler’s prose translation of the passage:² “Odysseus was overcome as he heard him, and his cheeks were wet with tears. He wept as a woman weeps when she throws herself on the body of her husband who has fallen before his own city and people, fighting bravely in defence of his home and children.” It is so real to him that, helpless to affect the narrative (it is now history and cannot be touched), all he can do is lament in the unbridled yet formal way of Mediterranean mourning. The poem follows the woman in her grief: “She screams aloud and flings her arms about him as he lies gasping for breath and dying, but her enemies beat her from behind about the back and shoulders, and carry her off into slavery, to a life of labour and sorrow, and the beauty fades from her cheeks—even so piteously did Ulysses weep …” Only Alcinous hears his stifled lamentation.

The simile is not content simply to illuminate its immediate visual and emotional context. The woman Odysseus is likened to reminds us of all Trojan women but especially of Hector’s widow, Andromache.³ She laments, but her lamentations are interrupted by her captors, who herd her and her sister into captivity and slavery. The poet fades out the simile with a simple finality, “and the beauty fades from her cheeks.” A cruder translation says, “while with most pitiful grief her cheeks are wasted.” The metaphor is conducted in the present tense.

This is the impact Demodocus’ poem has on Odysseus, as it would on any man who is capable of being moved by heroism and tragedy. The experience belongs not to the victorious Greeks but to their foes, and yet after victory they can feel for and, more important, feel with the victims. This is also the power of the Homeric poems themselves. They are about wars and victors but the victims have a palpable and at some points an equal reality. Though the “insistently male orientation” of the Iliad has been noted, there is even in that poem a strong sense that, in the world that underpins the epic deeds of the main story, there exist people whose heroism, on a different scale, merits inclusion if only by way of simile. Thus in the Iliad, Book XII, we read, in Butler’s version, “But even so the Trojans could not rout the Achaeans, who still held on; and as some honest hard-working woman weighs wool in her balance and sees that the scales be true, for she would gain some pitiful earnings for her little ones, even so was the fight balanced evenly between them till the time came when Zeus gave the greater glory to Hector son of Priam, who was first to spring towards the wall of the Achaeans.” What, we may ask, once this startling image has had its incongruous impact, is this spinner—a mother with hungry children, perhaps a widow since she is sole provider, or a woman whose husband is away at war, a Penelope who weaves and unweaves—doing in the thick of battle, not only with the heroes but with Zeus himself, to whom she ultimately is the point of comparison? Is she another one of the bereaved? In Book VIII we have already seen Zeus with his golden scales. In Book XVI they are there again: Hector realises that the “scales of Zeus” are now weighted against him. In Book XXII the golden scales dip decisively, and Achilles knows the day is his.⁴ Yet the most memorable scales are those of the widow spinner.

Even heroes can be even-handed in describing their foes. Standing on the battlements, Priam notes how much larger the gathering of men is than when he and his armies fought in Phrygia as allies, against the Amazons. He spots Odysseus and describes him as fleecy and ramlike, keeping his ewes in line. Antenor interposes: he recalls how Odysseus and Menelaus came to discuss Helen with Priam before war began. He recalls how well they spoke: first Menelaus, direct and rather precipitate, and then Odysseus, seeming slow-witted, but then unfolding a speech that dazzled and persuaded. In the Iliad, certainly, Odysseus is a rhetorician, always politic, sent on missions as a trusted emissary of Agamemnon. In the Odyssey, he is released from direct responsibility to a king. Whenever he comes into contact with courts or with common people and his story is required, he becomes a poet, sometimes telling the truth, sometimes inventing a fictitious life to keep himself safe.

The first evidence of his poetic talents comes just after he meets Nausicaa. Naked, holding a branch before his private parts (her maids having run off because he emerged like a lion from his bed of leaves), he addresses her. He says he has been adrift for twenty days. Dazzled by her beauty, he com pares her to a lovely palm tree he saw once at Delos, near Apollo’s altar. It is a pretty image, certainly, and the mention of Delos calls to mind not only the gods born there, Athena and Apollo, but the great festival and the poetic activities that it hosted.

At the Phaeacian court, after Demodocus reduces him to tears and draws his identity from him, it is his turn to sing his story to the assembled court. The king, he says, requires him to revisit an unspeakably painful subject. (One of Virgil’s most famous lines, put into the mouth of Aeneas, is based on this speech: Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem.) Odysseus wonders how to shape his tale (“What shall I tell first, what shall I save to tell you until later?”). His concerns are those of the narrative artist, to get it in the right order and proportion so that it will affect his audience properly.

When he is telling the Cyclops story, he reports on how he and the crew had stocked up on strong sweet wine. This is a crucial ingredient in drugging the monster. In terms of plot, it is crafty of Odysseus to put in the crucial detail well in advance of the point when the wine will be made use of. He prepares the story. Certainly his telling of the fantastic adventures he has undergone is fast-paced and thrifty. His visit to the underworld at Circe’s command (Book XI) is a complicated weave of memory and prophecy, and the poet Odysseus handles it well. Indeed, his success is such that in the midst of his account of the dead he asks for largesse from the assembled court, and when the figurative hat is passed around he does remarkably well. He returns to Ithaca in a Phaeacian ship ballasted with Phaeacian treasure.

His creative phase is not over. Having told Alcinous’ court the truth, he must make a fictional life to hide behind while he tests the ground at Ithaca. Athena turns him into a bald shrivelled old man and he visits the swineherd Eumaeus. He sits wizened and smelly under a cloak and tells his old retainer a plausible life story, developing one he first told to a handsome young shepherd (Athena, disguised), when he woke up on the unrecognised shore of his homeland that morning. Later he repeats the tale to the suitors.

The Iliad and Odyssey were intended for recitation, not by a hero but by a rhapsode. They were delivered at a certain speed and many of the effects which detain us as readers would have been at best fleetingly sensed by a member of an audience. But if they were recited regularly and people heard them again and again, and if the versions they heard were indeed, thanks to Solon and Pisistratus and even Onomacritos, the same, they would have heard more at each performance. Thus in time the self-subversiveness of these poems which anchor the Greek imagination, and in which Greek philosophy and drama have their origin, would have communicated itself to many. Whatever the brutality of the deeds recounted in the poems, what marks them both is their balance (to take up the image of the scales), an absence of partisanship, a reluctance to moralise. One is tempted, even in this age of relativities, to speak of the poems’ objectivity, their insistence on telling it (even the fantasy passages in the Odyssey, even Xanthus, the loquacious horse in the Iliad) how it was. This involves an absence of sentimentality. What feelings are expressed belong to the characters and their situations, and the poem reports without colluding in them.

“Poets and their audience,” Taplin insists, are a constant theme in the Odyssey. He exaggerates, but we do meet our first poet in line 150 of Book I. Phemius (“Famous”) sings to the cithern harp. We ignore his song at first because we are listening to Athena, disguised as Mentes, talking to Telemachus about his father and prophesying his return. When she has departed, Telemachus realises a god has been with him. Phemius is still singing, bitter tales of the returning Achaeans. Penelope comes down the long stairway from her high room and tells the singer to desist. But Telemachus overrides her instructions. The poet should sing “what he has a mind to; bards do not make the ills they sing of; it is Zeus, not they, who makes them […] Go, then, within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for speech is man’s matter, and mine above all others—for it is I who am master here.” To modern eyes, certainly, Telemachus comes across as a young man with much to learn about good manners, and women.

Here the verse is listened to and it has an impact on Penelope and the suitors. The theme of return is itself inadvertently prophetic in this context. Phemius the bard leads a charmed life: he and Medon the herald alone are spared by Odysseus in Book XXII, when the suitors perish. He insists that he sang for the suitors unwillingly.

Those of us with a memory of school Latin may share a pro-Trojan take on the Trojan War. This is because Virgil, praising his emperor through legendary narrative in the Aeneid, knows that the Roman empire has its origins in the Trojan defeat, followed by the Trojan hero Aeneas’ epic journey to Italy. By the time of Virgil, poets no longer aspired to the inclusive objectivity of Homer. Homer did not, as one critic claims, side with Troy because it was on his side of the Aegean: he belonged (a man of Smyrna) to the East. But his lack of bias does have the effect of seeming to commend Phoenician, or “eastern,” values to Greek audiences that may have been a bit short on civility and sophistication when the poems were first recited. Ford Madox Ford makes no bones about it: the war was “an immense Affair—an immense, almost chemical reaction between a higher, more luxurious and more aesthetic civilisation from the East, attacking or attacked by a relatively lean, relatively puritanical, relatively, perhaps, better armed civilisation coming from the West.”⁵ The effects of Homeric even-handedness may be political, but they are not political by design, and their politics will be different in different ages. Perhaps Homer in the Iliad tells the truth. Troy was a handsome, civilised city with open spaces; it is described as having broad streets and horse pastures within the walls. The Greek camp was temporary, without history, without elegance, though because nine years had passed there was some solidity to it. Achilles’ hut was well built (Book IX). Defences are suddenly erected and as suddenly breached during the course of the poem. The bivouacs are mapped in Homer’s mind, a kind of corniche with Ajax at one end and Achilles at the other. The camp, in which the men enjoy temporary women, is flanked by the ships, a perpetual reminder of arrival and departure. The Greeks don’t belong. Unlike the later seafaring Greeks, they have come not to establish a colony but to sack a great city and then go home with the booty. They are in some respects little better, and little worse, than pirates.

The Trojans, on the other hand, whether inside the walls of their city or on the rare night when, getting the upper hand, they risk camping on the plain, belong, much as the stars belong in heaven. So at the end of Book VIII they are evoked: “Thus high in hope they sat through the livelong night by the highways of war, and many a watch fire did they kindle. As when the stars shine clear, and the moon is bright—there is not a breath of air, not a peak nor glade nor jutting headland but it stands out in the ineffable radiance that breaks from the serene of heaven; the stars can all of them be told and the heart of the shepherd is glad—even thus shone the watch fires of the Trojans before Ilium midway between the ships and the river Xanthus. A thousand camp-fires gleamed upon the plain, and in the glow of each there sat fifty men, while the horses, champing oats and corn beside their chariots, waited till dawn should come.”

At some time between 750 and 650 BC, says Taplin, the two epics we associate with the name of Homer were written, or written down. He tries to reconcile the idea of a rooted “oral tradition” with the participation of an actual author. The poet we call Homer flourished on “the northern-Aegean coast of Asia Minor in the Smyrna area” and acquired his art from other bards. “I take it as axiomatic that these great works of art would not have come into existence without an audience.”⁶ This is not a very helpful axiom because “we have no firm external evidence of Homer’s audience or circumstances of performance.”⁷ So Taplin tries to discover things about Homer’s audience from the poems, both from what they say about poets and audiences and from the ways in which they speak. We can assume that the audience would have known the larger story and expected to see where consequences arose. Everything from Paris’ abduction to the sack of Troy is contained as it were metonymically in the text.

Taplin believes the audience for Homer was unitary, with shared values and perspectives. Yet if the poems came from an oral tradition, or if there was room for variations in a scripted performance, the audiences would have elicited different versions from place to place, season to season, performance to performance; in sophisticated centres, a discriminating audience might engage critically with the rhapsode, the way Socrates does with Ion. Elsewhere, a star performer would be greeted with adulation. Audiences must have differed, too, at different periods. An oral tradition might have addressed Greeks right through the “dark age” between the Trojan War and the writing down of the poems. A ninth- and a seventh-century audience would have had little in common. Readers of written versions would again be quite different from the auditors of their day.

We know nothing for sure “about the original circumstances of production,” Taplin concedes. “Production” is a curious word to use for the recital of the poem or its composition out of pre-existing songs. Modern theory is drawn to analogies between manufacture and creative work, forgetting that “production” is systematic, its processes mechanical, replicable, whereas creation is neither. He is drawn to using the word “production” because he has a sense of the determining role of “consumers” (the audience) in that “production.”

Taplin identifies “internal audiences,” those represented in the poems themselves, but cautions us: they “should not be treated as direct or ‘literal’ evidence for the world of the external” or actual “audiences—though that does not mean that there is no relationship between them.” Critics and scholars tiptoe about, fearing to assert too much. It is worth remarking that, unlike Virgil, Dante, Langland, Camoões or Milton, the poet in these poems never steps out of the fiction into a “real” world, never turns to address us as a man narrating a story. Taplin is convinced (we may not be) that both Homeric poems were created “very much for the same audiences and occasions,”⁸ despite the quite marked differences in tone, structure, character and ethos between them.

Blind Demodocus’ performance of a poem not unlike the Iliad has its effect on Odysseus. Odysseus himself sings of his own deeds, and lies about his own deeds, with eloquence and at length, to noble and rustic auditors. The Iliad itself contains no such accounts of performance. Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix on their embassy to sulking Achilles, to try and persuade him to return to the warring fold (Iliad IX, 86–91), find him “playing on a lyre, fair, of cunning workmanship, and its cross-bar was of silver. It was part of the spoils which he had taken when he sacked the city of Eetion, and he was now diverting himself with it and singing the feats of heroes. He was alone with Patroclus, who sat opposite to him and said nothing, waiting till he should cease singing.”⁹ Perhaps from time to time they would exchange the song, Patroclus (who, it is well to remember, is older than Achilles) taking up the familiar story and moving it forward, then handing it back to his friend. This private scene, the accompaniment provided by a harp which is the spoils of some previous sacking, is remote from the performances of Demodocus and Odysseus in the Odyssey. At the end of Book VIII of the Odyssey King Alcinous explains human suffering in the strangest way: “The gods arranged all this, and sent them their misfortunes in order that future generations might have something to sing about.” And he urges his nameless guest to come clean: “Did you lose some brave kinsman of your wife’s when you were before Troy? a son-in-law or father-in-law—which are the nearest relations a man has outside his own flesh and blood? or was it some brave and kindly-natured comrade—for a good friend is as dear to a man as his own brother?”¹⁰

In the Iliad no such aesthetic malice is attributed to the gods. The “deeds of men,” the feats of heroes, are what Achilles sings in his private symposium with Patroclus, suggesting a much later convention of performance. This is not a poet singing, however, but a warrior; and when he sings it is not to aggrandise himself but to pass the time, to remember, to entertain. The singer here is himself historical, part of the world of which he sings. Odysseus fulfils the same role in Odyssey XI, 367ff, but celebrates his own deeds, not without a degree of self-censure. He and Achilles are different in kind from Demodocus, a mere rhapsode, led in to the feast to entertain the mysterious visitor and the Phaeacian court. When he starts to sing we are near the opening lines of the Iliad.¹¹ Though blind, Demodocus makes his audience see the things and deeds that furnish the Greek and the Trojan worlds. He also fulfils a liturgical function in singing of Aphrodite, Ares and Hephaestus, using words that might well become the Homeric Hymns.¹² He is paid with food and drink.

We can assume that the audience for the Homeric poems knew the stories well, understood the conventions of the verse and accepted that its language belonged not to one dialect or city but was of a more generalised nature, combining archaic elements and dialect from different quarters around the Aegean. This syncretistic language is where the sense of “shared Hellenism” comes from: in the area of culture it overrides local patriotisms and inter-city rivalries.

Jacob Burckhardt notes that numerous people and places feature in the poems, yet none is singled out for special emphasis. We might instance the deaths in the Iliad, the catalogue of ships and the survey of the Trojan army, which are like lists of dramatis personae.¹³ When the poems were performed in different cities, the specifics of that city or monarchy might be singled out and expanded, formulas for local courtesies deployed to increase the rhapsode’s purse. The neutrality of the surviving text may be an aspect of a libretto susceptible to local and occasional improvisations and embellishments. Taplin leaves little room in his theories for the possibilities of variation in an oral text. He likes the “Delos model,” where the text’s neutrality is deliberate, politically balanced. “The Homeric poems are in a sense ‘panhellenic.’” They universalise the gatherings and festivals at which (wherever) they are performed. If this is the case, it reflects a highly deliberated aesthetic intent and—unless the decision was taken by the priests of a universalising religion or politicians scheming for unification—might at first itself seem an anachronism.

Still, “Whatever their enmities,” Taplin insists, the Greek city-states “share the gods, the athletics, the architecture, and the art. And they share poetry. It is here that the non-local amalgam of the ‘dialect’ of hexameter poetry becomes really important. And this is, I would claim, the context for the absence of ‘localisation’ in Homer: the poems do not give prestige and advantage to some participants over others.”¹⁴ Given the precise geography of the poems, the claims Taplin makes seem exaggerated. With a curiously Germanic sense of the nature of the “courts” of pre-democratic Greece, Burckhardt says the Iliad “reveals an intimate acquaintance with the whole district about Mount Ida; in the courts there, Homer’s predecessors may have sung their songs …”¹⁵ Most modern critics who are attentive to archaeological developments agree with him. New excavations show, for example, that Troy VI/VII was larger than Mycenae and very like the Troy depicted by Homer in his poems.

There is, however, a problem with the variety of dialect elements and archaisms included, as with the cacophony of chronological elements, namely the abundant cultural anachronisms. Taplin’s sense of audience is geographical, arrested in time between 750 and 650 BC; the persistent historical incongruities are not so seriously considered. Anachronisms make the poems a real playground for archaeologists, though, given the sparsity of archaeological evidence, there can be no final answers or categorical statements about the incongruities. We conveniently divide the past into closed periods, but those periods are closed only if they end in a military or natural cataclysm. All the same, certain things are juxtaposed in the Homeric poems which look historically awkward together, and there are some passages which are, without much doubt, later interpolations.

Fundamental political and technological changes occurred between the time of the Trojan War, around 1200 BC, and the singers performing the poems, around the ninth century BC. There is an even deeper gulf between this time and Pisistratus’ Athens, when the text may have been written down definitively. Three time-frames need to be considered: the time of the action, its formulation into song, and the stabilisation of the song as text. The phases have distinct historical contexts: first, a Cretan-dominated period; then the rise of Greek political identity in the city-states and the development of trade and colonial expansion, with renewed contact between Greece and Asia Minor; and finally the cultural maturity that continues during the tyranny of Pisistratus, after the archonate of his friend and eventual enemy Solon.

In Solon’s time there may have been a decree that “at the four-yearly Pantheon the rhapsodes should recite the epics of Homer in order, one taking up where another left off.”¹⁶ Perhaps even before Pisistratus an established text of some kind existed. Without writing, each successive generation forgets some of the sense of what has come before, even though the lines continue to be mouthed because the poem is inviolable. The audience loses the meanings of words, lines and images, and either doggedly reiterates the incomprehensible, which becomes a form of mystery and magic, or substitutes new details and adjusts the poem so that it “makes sense.” Once written down, the obscure image or allusion sticks to the poem like a burr. Scholars may debate its sense, but, without some clear metrical or linguistic imperfection, an inconsistency will not be adjusted or excised.

Here are some of the anachronisms encountered in the poems. Iron, widely used in the eighth and seventh centuries, was probably unknown to the Achaeans. Bronze was their common metal. In the Iliad, Book IV, anachronistic iron plays a key part. Pandarus, tricked by Athena, raises his famous bow of ibex horns and lets an arrow loose at red-headed Menelaus. He breaks the Trojan vow that the war should be settled by single combat between Menelaus, Helen’s wronged husband, and Alexandrus (a.k.a. Paris). Robert Fitzgerald translates the scene with excessive particularity.

Pinching the grooved butt and the string, he pulled

evenly till the bent string reached his nipple,

the arrowhead of iron touched the bow,

and when the great bow under tension made

a semi-circular arc, it sprang.

The arrow makes its way through layers and layers of Menelaean, padding and pricks the skin. He bleeds. Agamemnon declares the truce is at an end. He is afraid Menelaus is worse wounded than he is. Indeed, he thinks he may be dying.

The shields the poem portrays and the shields the Greeks and Trojans actually used are quite different. Some weapons are Mezzanine, or “archaic,” some earlier, some contemporary with the age of the poems’ inscription. The customs of cremation and inhumation are conflated. The scale and nature of ancient kingship are distorted and the heroes swollen out of all proportion by their identification with later notions of kingship. The structures of households and the wider sense of the material and spiritual organisation of the camps and cities involved are tenuous. The poems omit the Dorians, who were a real presence at the time, but include the Phoenicians as traders and pirates even though they became prominent only two or three centuries after “the events.” Heroes eat roast meat, not fish; yet fishing is a crucial element in the simile structure of the poem.

Two passages, one in each poem, appear on the evidence of diction and formal incongruity to be later interpolations, literary in conception and intention. In the Iliad, the “Doloneia” (Book X) tells of the ill-favoured, cowardly and treacherous Trojan “volunteer” Dolon, tricked into betrayal by Odysseus and Diomede. The incident is pasted in, not referred to elsewhere in the poem, not integrated into the larger structure. We would not be without it, it is a vivid and arresting vignette, but it cannot be made to belong to the poem. Here Odysseus and Diomede ride horses. At no other point in the poem are horses ridden. Tradition says that the long passage was added by Pisistratus (or on his authority) in the sixth century. The other substantial “spurious” addition occurs at the end of the Odyssey, the last two hundred lines of Book XXIII and Book XXIV. The editors Aristarchus and Aristophanes both think the poem should end at Book XXIII, line 296, when Odysseus and Penelope go to bed. What follows is a reprise, Penelope telling what she did, Odysseus what he did, without much addition or development, a pointless coda. In Book XXIV, where the relatives of the murdered suitors confront Odysseus, the language and technique go out of focus (apart from the quite remarkable simile at the opening of the book).

Oliver Taplin, despite his initial demurs, finds himself a Homer in the end, one who has become a whole creaturely cat, but he isn’t smiling: perhaps, Taplin reflects, Homer’s health was deteriorating at the time he was composing those passages. His Homer has acquired a human physiological identity; what is more, he revises his poems. Did Taplin consider the approach of another critic and translator of Homer, Samuel Butler, whose intimacy with the poem leads him to an unexpected conclusion? The Odyssey is not the work of an old man: “They say no woman could possibly have written the Odyssey. To me, on the other hand, it seems even less possible that a man could have done so. As for its being by a practised and elderly writer, nothing but youth and inexperience could produce anything so naive and so lovely.”¹⁷ Butler’s reading stimulated Robert Graves to identify Nausicaa as a candidate for authorship and write his beguiling treatment Homer’s Daughter.

On the analogy of the slow-growing mediaeval cathedral, every new phase extending, distorting and reconfiguring the work of the preceding phase, it is possible that the poem was “modernised” by interpolation; it was never demolished or remodelled. It hardly seems likely that the rhapsodes carrying the poem forward deliberately applied familiar templates to what was unfamiliar: it was more a case of shoring up the sense of actuality with detail which, the history having faded into legend, only the present could supply, whether literally or figuratively. The oral tradition is, as we noted, conservative by design and conserving, accurate, its function being to remember rather than to invent. It does not “make it new,” and in this respect it is remote from the lyric.

A mix of elements from different histories, a mix of words and forms from different dialects and times: yet the syntheses that occur in the poems do not feel synthetic. We accept, if we recognise, the Peloponnesian, Aeolic, Ionic and Attic elements in the language. We are unlikely to have sufficient archaeology to disbelieve the material world portrayed. It may be a world that never was, quite. Yet it is the core of what we “know” of the ancient Greek world, what the early historians took to be early history. This is the anciency of Greece which we, and they, related to and visualised most comprehensively in later verse, in pottery, painting and sculpture.

At least five centuries of Greek tradition, much of it stylised in legend, precedes the writing down of “Homer.” Orpheus, Musaeus, Linus and others stand behind him, and eastern traditions stand behind them: there is nothing ex nihilo about the art or the narrative of either the Iliad or the Odyssey even if time has kicked away the ladder of precedents up which they climbed. But how did a composer and indeed a later rhapsode, singing the tales, conceive of the language they were using? Did they have a sense of the individual word? Performers in Balkan oral traditions in the last century, asked what certain clusters of syllables (which we call words) “meant,” could not understand the question they were asked, or separate out from the context of the verse discreet verbal elements for definition. They could not analyse. This is certainly the case with complex synthetic languages such as Nahuatl, the Aztec tongue, where the units of meaning consist not of words but of an accumulation of syllables and particles that, taken singly, mean little. It is hard for us to conceive of a literary culture without a sense of “the word.” For the archaic bard it was equally hard to conceive of an analytical language that was built up from, or could be broken down into, word units.

Early Greek manuscripts run words together, leave no spaces, show no division at all. Up until the classical period scribes wrote in capital letters without spaces between words, without accents or breathings.¹⁸ Metrical divisions might be indicated, if at all, by “a coronis or hook placed before the parágraphos.”¹⁹ A singer who did not know what a word is might have been equally puzzled by the notion of a line, with a beginning and an end. Again, the indication of lineation in manuscripts comes rather late in the day: a composer, a bard, knew what he was doing, but without being able to externalise or analyse it. “What is time?” asks the child. “I knew until you asked me,” replies the parent. What was the composer’s and the performer’s concept of the unit of sense, and was it congruent with their sense of the melodic unit? Or is it only later, when there is leisure literature, when there is writing, that language was teased out into its constituent parts? Taplin says, “Achilles remains swift however inactive he may be.”²⁰ The sea is wine-dark, dawn rosy-fingered and Odysseus “wily” at the most inappropriate times. In epithets and other formulaic passages the sound values—metre in particular—can be strictly meaningless, which is not to say that they are without poetic effect.

Writers of blank verse, heroic couplets, ballad quatrains and other traditional forms accept certain limitations when they adopt a convention. Considering a poetry rooted in the oral formulaic tradition, we can begin by establishing the areas in which a singer of tales is not expected to invent, even not allowed to invent. With the epic, the plots, the names of principal and most minor characters, their provenance and fate were “historical” and non-negotiable. The story was given, though there might be flexibility in disposition, sequence, emphasis. Moreover, the metre, various as it can be thanks to the movable caesura, is fundamentally non-negotiable. Syntax and the rules of language are given, too. They too can prescribe diction and word order; and repeated epithets and other verbal constructs and iterations have their formal place.

For Aristotle, poetry could exercise more freedom than Homer allowed himself, but Aristotle wrote with the benefit of hindsight and was chiefly concerned with the drama. Homer’s is a primary, not a secondary, intelligence: he makes with language a way through shared memory and animates that memory in his present world, and therefore in ours. His use of similes is not decorative: they bring distant facts into imaginative focus, they imply other possibilities of life than warfare, they are, as Frederic Raphael has written, “windows.” Some critics, who follow Aristotle, assume that Homer felt free to invent how his characters moved in a given geography and to make up the stories of their existence. Others, supported by modern archaeology, argue that these elements were given, specifically remembered in the verse of the oral tradition. The poet provided an account of actual events set in the places where they occurred. An oral tradition keeps genealogies, sequences, catalogues in memory in proper order and proportion. The mnemonics are not to aid invention but to inhibit it, to enable memory and recitation. The singer’s task is to evoke as truthfully as memory will permit “a world suitable for heroes.”

The sense of closure that we impose on historic periods is itself a miasma. The dark age in the Greek world, from 1200 to 800 BC, is unlikely to have been uniformly dark, any more than that the European Dark Ages were, or the Renaissance uniformly renascent. Mezzanine elements, cultural customs and traditions, survived Mycenae. When the Homeric poems were composed, the lines were not all down between the age of Troy and the time in which the bard lived. “Time” moved then, as it does now, at different speeds in different places, even places adjacent to one another.

The Iliad and Odyssey survive from what scholars believe were comprehensive cycles of poems, their narrative beginning with the wars in heaven. Such cycles, orally transmitted, may have grown up during the dark ages, and Homer or “Homer” may have built on them.²¹ They grew, says Hugh G. Evelyn-White, who edited the surviving fragments, without preconceived design into “a kind of epic history of the world, as known to the Greeks, down to the death of Odysseus, at which the heroic age, a categorical critic will tell us, came to an end.” Alexandrian editors, Zenodotus in particular, shuffled these poems into a chronology order early in the third century BC. In the Byzantine age, Photius preserved an abridged synopsis of some of the poems which Proclus (second or fifth century AD) had recorded in his vast, largely vanished Chrestomatheia.

There are allusions to and quotations from the Iliad in the Odyssey and vice versa. Listeners and later readers would have noticed them. Throughout the Odyssey we are reminded, in considering Odysseus’ actions in relation to his wife, of Agamemnon’s disastrous return home, where he was murdered by his wife’s lover. Shrewd Odysseus learned caution from the tale. Parts of the Odyssey are “modelled on an old poem, now lost, of the journey of the Argonauts to Aeetes, ruler of Aea. Circe’s allusion to this poem (XI, 70) can then be taken as a valuable datum for literary history.”²² Odysseus’ dog in Book XVII, which dies of old age and surprise when Odysseus returns, is called Argos. Other histories and legends are alluded to in the poems, so that we can assume they were familiar. Nestor brings in many elements not strictly related to Troy, from the stories of Thebes for example, another tale of confrontation between large powers, in central Greece and the Argolid. Diomede is a hero but (he is reminded) his father, Tydeus, was greater, one of the Seven Against Thebes. Diomede’s companion Sthenelus’ father, too, was involved in that war, and both are epigoni, enacting at Troy what their forebears failed to fulfil in their war. When Odysseus faces the terrifying trial in “the blue Symplegades,” we are reminded that only the Argo had ever successfully navigated through. Critics looking at the anger of Achilles are inclined to ask whether it is historical, an independent legend, or based on the now almost vanished story of the wrath of Meleager.²³

The power of the Iliad and Odyssey overshadowed the memory of prior traditions of epic history; it also “exercised a paralysing influence over the successors of Homer.”²⁴ In the Poetics (XXIII) Aristotle justifies the superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey over the other poems in the cycle. The heroic poem “should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it.” These are the famous dramatic unities, stretched a little, but not too far, beyond the drama for epic. The epic poem “will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be. For as the sea-fight at Salamis and the battle with the Carthaginians in Sicily took place at the same time, but did not tend to any one result, so in the sequence of events, one thing sometimes follows another, and yet no single result is thereby produced. Such is the practice, we may say, of most poets.” But not Homer.

His “transcendent excellence” is paradoxically manifest in his setting himself limits. When, centuries later, a lesser poet, Apollonius, revives the story of the Argonauts’ expedition, he doggedly follows their itinerary. Homer does not set out to tell the whole story of Troy, though it had a beginning and an end. He chooses to pursue one part of the war, and while at every stage remembering the wider context, the larger narrative, he frames his tale in time. There are intrusions from outside the time-frame: the catalogue of ships, for example. But they are functional, adding to the context without dissipating the narrative. Other poets writing within the cycle focus on more than one hero, one period or action. For this reason the Iliad and the Odyssey each furnish the subject of one tragedy, or, at most, two. The Cypria supplies several plots, and the Little Iliad up to eight.²⁵

There is another take on the epic cycles which better fits the hypothetical chronology of composition: that the Iliad and Odyssey were so central to Greek culture and identity, so important and celebrated, that other epics by lesser composers were built around them, the poets hitching their wagons to Homer’s star and effacing themselves out of exalted respect.

The cycle would have begun with the Titanomachia (“War of the Titans”), composed perhaps by Eumelus (“sweet melody”) of Corinth or Arctinus of Miletus, about whom we know nothing.²⁶ After the gods have settled their affairs, the human poems begin with the Oidipodeia (“The Story of Oedipus”) “by Cinaethon in six thousand six hundred verses,” which was to serve Sophocles as a source-book for his plays. In The Contest Between Hesiod and Homer, the Thebaid and the Epigoni are attributed to Homer and constitute a Theban cycle or sub-cycle. Then comes the Kypria, of which a full synopsis survives from Proclus’ Chrestomatheia. The author may have been Hegesias (not the third-century rhetorician from Magnesia, but an earlier Hegesias) or Stasinus. Some say Homer gave it to Stasinus as a dowry, along with some cash. Here the full story of the Judgement of Paris is told succinctly. Alexandrus (Paris) chose Aphrodite not because she was the most beautiful but because she bribed him with the promise of Helen. Zeus plotted the Trojan War in part to depopulate the world: “the countless tribes of men, though wide-dispersed, oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed earth.” Among the fragments is some Stalinist wisdom: “He is a simple man who kills the father and lets the children live.”²⁷ After the Kypria comes the Iliad itself.

Proclus’ Chrestomatheia summarises the sequel to the Iliad in the cycle the Aithiopis. It was in five books, written by Arctinus of Miletus. It recounted the arrival at Troy of Memnon the Ethiopian, of the mighty Amazon Penthiseleia and her death at Achilles’ hand, followed by the death of Achilles himself and the angry contest of Odysseus and Ajax for Achilles’ armour. The sequel, the action-packed Ilias Mikra (“Little Iliad”), is said to have been by Lesches of Mitylene. It begins by settling the issue of Achilles’ arms. Athena contrives that they go to Odysseus. Ajax, driven to madness, destroys the Achaean herd and slays himself. Philoctetes is brought back from Lemnos, cured of his festering snake-bite by Machaon, and kills Paris with an arrow from the bow of Heracles, which he happens to possess. Menelaus defiles Paris’ body, but the Trojans recover and bury it. Odysseus, having given Neoptolemus his father, Achilles’, arms, disguises himself and sneaks into Troy. He is recognised by Helen and they plot the city’s overthrow. The Trojan Horse is built, the city falls. Neoptolemus captures Andromache and hurls her child Astyanax from a tower. Judging from the surviving summary, many of the images we have of the fall of Troy derive from this poem. It is followed by Iliou Persis (“The Sack of Ilium”), supposed again to have been by Arctinus of Miletus. Here more details of the Trojan Horse were given, with variations on other tales. Odysseus kills the child Astyanax, Ajax carries off Cassandra and damages Athena’s statue, so that the Greeks want to stone him to death.

The Trojan War concluded, the Greeks go home and the Nostoi (“The Returns”), attributed to Agias of Troezen, delivers them all to their different fates. After the Nostoi comes the Odyssey, and then, to conclude things with a heartless symmetry, came the two books of the Telegonia by Eugammon of Cyrene. Here we find the tales of Odysseus’ later life, culminating in his death at the hands of Telegonus, his son by Circe, who then marries Penelope while, in a double ceremony, Telemachus marries Circe, his father’s divine ex-mistress. Odysseus may have had a second son with Penelope, called Acusilaus.

Odysseus was the last of the heroes and the cycle ends with his death. It may also have included a full account of the voyage of the Argonauts (later retold in Apollonius’ Argonautica), the hunting of the Calydonian boar and much else. Some of that poetry was already lost by the time the great library at Alexandria was flourishing. Judging from Aristotle’s Poetics, the vanished poetry was diverse and diffuse: the Iliad and Odyssey are marked by formal concentration and, through variety of incident, singleness of purpose.

The stories that the cycles told, whether they are contemporary in composition with the Iliad and Odyssey or were conceived as sequels and prequels to them, with some (unsubtle for the most part) cross-referencing, were widely known. One ancient potter shows, for example, Priam and Achilles, Priam and Penthesileia the Amazon queen, and then Penthesileia and Achilles. Clearly this artist accepted a link between the Iliad and the Aethiopis. Prior to about 600 BC, not a single confirmable allusion or reference to Homer appears in any surviving work; there are references to epic tales, epic values and narratives, but none specifically to Homer.²⁸ In the other arts nothing specifically Homeric is found. In the mid–seventh century there are some Cyclops paintings which may be allusions to the Odyssey but could draw on another, or a shared, source. Taplin affirms that in his view the first “clearly Homer-inspired visual art” is a plate, probably from Rhodes around 600 BC, which portrays Iliad XVII, 106ff.

There is an eastern Greek pitcher²⁹ from around 670–50 which shows two enraged lions, tails up, mouths wide open, frightening a little mountain goat. He stands between them and does his best to make an ugly face. His horns, with their slightly wavy contour at the top, look as if he is wrinkling them in anger. When Ajax has slain the rich-armoured Imbrios (Iliad XIII, 198ff.), there is a struggle for his armour; in the midst of this and other hectic struggles comes the metaphor: “As two lions snatch a goat from the hounds that have it in their fangs, and bear it through thick brushwood high above the ground in their jaws, thus did the Ajaxes bear aloft the body of Imbrios, and strip it of its armour.” It is a handsome pitcher, tawny with pale black painting, with decorations scattered in patterns, four rhombuses, giving the impression of the air around the animals shivering with tension or fear. This seems to indicate (assuming the images on the pitcher have been properly read) that the Iliad, at the deep level of metaphor, was sufficiently known for so specific an allusion to make sense to the original artist and to his ancient customer.

It always strikes me as puzzling that poems as different as the Iliad and the Odyssey are spoken of in the same breath, as though they are unarguably by a single author and are written in a single style. The critic Marghanita Laski used to insist that Flaubert was the bourgeois Homer, and that Madame Bo-vary and the Odyssey were for young readers, A Sentimental Education and the Iliad for grown-ups. The first two are agons, Emma’s and Odysseus’, while the others create a more complex and politically intense world. The first two are about forms of love, the others about conflict and its consequences. In the ancient world, the Iliad was the more valued, if we believe the evidence of bibliography: more than 188 manuscripts of the Iliad survive, less than half that many of the Odyssey.

Parallels and contrasts can be multiplied; a few, however, do illuminate the very different nature of the two poems and help us decide whether both poems emerge from a single stable.

The governing fact of the Iliad, what makes the action happen as it does and finally resolves the poem, is the wrath of Achilles. Odysseus’ homing desire is less intense, and the time-span of the two poems is consequently very different. The poem with the longer time-span is about 12,000 lines, while the poem with the shorter time-span is considerably longer, about 15,000 lines. For recitation, the Iliad might have been divided at the end of Book IX, then XVIII, taking three nights or about twenty hours to perform. The Odyssey would have taken two nights. Despite the differences in focus and extent, the Odyssey seems longer. Constantine A. Trypanis quotes an early critic who compares the poet of the Odyssey to a setting sun “whose greatness remains without violence,” whereas his earlier manifestations were noonlike, full of vigour and urgent engagement. Achilles knows who he is and why he acts. Odysseus’ long home-coming, on the other hand, is a reassertion of his role and identity. Trypanis cannot believe that both poems were composed by one man (as though Shakespeare could not have written The Comedy of Errors and Othello). Butler rejects sunset arguments on artistic grounds: the Odyssey is cruder, more romantic, more diverse, evidence of a poet learning rather than relaxing his craft.

One basic difference between the two poems is the amount of liberty they give the reader to engage and to “make sense.” The Iliad, not least because of the tight time-span and the close focus of the narrative, is a more “complete” poem, a finished artefact. It is in the nature of such works that they seek “to limit the possibilities of interpretation.” There is not much we can do with the information beyond what the poem has done with it: the resonances are contained and powerful for that reason. Any ten people reading the Iliad closely, or hearing it recited, will have a more or less common sense of what the poem is saying and doing. The Odyssey is different, more “open” and susceptible to different readings, at literal, psychological, political, allegorical and other levels. It is a poem that “disrupts its own structural patterns or the conventions of its genre, thereby making room for—even requiring—more interpretative activity.”³⁰

This certainly does not make it a better poem. Plato in the Hippias declares that the Iliad excels the Odyssey as much as Achilles excels Odysseus.³¹ This has something to do with the form the poem takes, something to do with the protagonists. Achilles is willing to die; Odysseus is willing to live, and to live at whatever cost. Achilles dies young, a hero whose fate is woven early; Odysseus is the hero who survives and suffers. Two types of man, then, and two models of action. Already in the Iliad Odysseus has his three epithets: “much-subtle,” “much-enduring,” “much-devising” (polymetis, polytlas, polymechanos).³² To him are entrusted those missions which involve tact and politic action. Achilles is too much himself to dissemble. Odysseus is the anti-type of “fleet-footed Achilles.” Thetis tells her almost-divine child that he can have long life (and obscurity) or early death (and glory). In Book XVIII, line 98, Achilles replies, “then let me die soon.” In this he is less Greek than Odysseus.

The poems are, as a result of their subject matter and their themes, typo-logically distinct. The Iliad concentrates its action in two primary settings: Troy, the Greek camp and the Trojan plain on the one hand, and Olympus on the other. The Odyssey focuses largely on two men, Telemachus and his father, Odysseus. The Iliad builds towards death and destruction, the Odyssey towards the re-establishment of local harmony in the wake of the universal disruption of that war. Whereas in the Iliad things generally keep their shape and the world of cause and effect is brutal but credible, in the Odyssey we are in the realm of metamorphoses, of unstable identities. Aristotle in the Poetics says simplicity is the keynote of the Iliad’s structure, complexity of the Odyssey’s. “Again, Epic poetry must have as many kinds as Tragedy: it must be simple, or complex, or ‘ethical,’ or ‘pathetic.’ The parts also, with the exception of song and spectacle, are the same; for epic requires Reversals of the Situation, Recognitions, and Scenes of Suffering. Moreover, the thoughts and the diction must be artistic. In all these respects Homer is our earliest and sufficient model. Indeed each of his poems has a twofold character. The Iliad is at once simple and ‘pathetic,’ and the Odyssey complex (for recognition scenes run through it), and at the same time ‘ethical.’”

The “unitarian” critics believe that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are “whole” conceptions, marred perhaps by later interpolations but their artistic integrity largely inviolate.³³ This is the line taken by Jacqueline de Romilly, who insists that both poems are wholes with “unity of action.”³⁴ Albin Lesky contrasts the structures of the poems, but he does not suggest that they are unintentional in structure or incomplete.³⁵ The Iliad’s structure, centred insistently upon the wrath of Achilles, brings every element together in a species of continuous integration. The Odyssey is, at its weakest structurally (and narratively most compelling), a sequence of episodes, a gallery of framed stories, and, he concludes, we can be surer in the Odyssey than in the Iliad that there were earlier treatments of the same material.

Those of the analytical persuasion see the poems as assemblages of shorter “runs” of narrative, anthologies built out of prefabricated chunks of (oral) verse. They make more of the inconsistencies and discontinuities in the narrative than the unitarians do, insisting that each rough join proves that the poems were “put together.” “Odysseus’ request to the Phaeacians (VII, 215) to be allowed to have his dinner is very odd, since he had already had it (V, 177). Patroclus kills Palaemenes in Iliad V, 576 who then, Lazarus like, revives to mourn his son in XIII, 658. Zeus predicts that Hector will attack Achilles’ ship; in fact he attacks Protesilaus.”³⁶ There are portions of detached, unfunctional plot, for instance the suggestion of Aeneas’ hostility to Priam (XIII, 460), probably a fossilised piece of information, since Aeneas was ruler of the Dardanians (in Mount Ida’s foothills, above Troy) and of parallel ancestry to Hector.

Is it possible that one of the poems, the Iliad, is “unitary” and the other a rich amalgam of stories assembled around a continually interrupted narrative core? Certainly the sense of difference in kind between the poems runs deep in any reader who holds both of them in mind at the same time. Indeed, the more closely they are observed the more it comes to seem that what makes them seem similar is in fact the way in which the Alexandrian textual critics applied the same template to both, an arbitrary act.

There are twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet. There are twenty-four books in each of the poems, and in the oldest manuscripts each book is chapter-headed with a Greek letter. This division into books was done much later than “Homer’s” day, probably as late as the Alexandrian period. Lesky tells us Zenodotus, who put the “cycles” in chronological order and edited Hesiod’s Theogony, was responsible for dividing the poems. He may have set out to make them handle more easily in terms of book rolls, or to make commentary and cross-referencing easier. There could have been a numerological or mystical motive. The division for the most part makes a kind of sense, corresponding with breaks in the action, changes of perspective or setting. Lesky assumes the breaks may have coincided with the natural breaks in the rhapsodes’ recitation, but the extents in the Iliad vary from 424 lines (XIX) to 909 (V), and it is unlikely that the audience would have accepted a half portion one night, or (if 424 lines is a natural attention span) a double portion another. It is the larger divisions in the action (the Telemachiad, which is the story of Telemachus’ adventures in pursuit of his father; Odysseus’ adventures; and the “return to Troy” in the Odyssey, for example) that are the organic and aesthetic “sections” of the poem, not the mechanical breaks usefully imposed by the first of Homer’s “scientific” editors.

We have unitarians and analysts. We also have the so-called chorizontes, whom some regard as early Homeric heretics. They claim that the two poems are sufficiently different, despite shared epithets and some repeated passages, to have been composed by two different poets, that the distinctive styles, dictions, thematics and morality of each poem prove that the works are of distinct authorship, perhaps even from different periods. To believe in two poets is first to believe there might be one; or as few as two. The chorizontes are unitarians when it comes to each poem, but analysts of the tradition of single authorship. They started long before the “oral tradition” critics but are their remote forebears.

If we are tempted to become chorizontes, we might begin by examining Homeric similes and considering whether they are used differently in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Anyone who reads the Odyssey immediately after finishing the Iliad experiences a sense of poverty: after the metaphorical abundance of the Iliad, the Odyssey is relatively poor. The Iliad has, Taplin tells us, four times as many similes as the Odyssey.

The first significant extended simile in the Odyssey occurs in Book IV, lines 332ff. Telemachus tells Menelaus about the suitors, their threats, and the reason for his journey. In his response, the Trojan hero uses a simile that instantly transports us into the language-world of the Iliad. Butler translates the passage: “Menelaus on hearing this was very much shocked. ‘So,’ he exclaimed, ‘these cowards would usurp a brave man’s bed? A hind might as well lay her new born young in the lair of a lion, and then go off to feed in the forest or in some grassy dell: the lion when he comes back to his lair will make short work with the pair of them—and so will Ulysses with these suitors.’” The next major simile also occurs in Book IV. The scene cuts back to Ithaca, where Penelope is anxious about Telemachus. Butler again: “But Penelope lay in her own room upstairs,” in the marriage bed Menelaus imagined, leading into his simile, “unable to eat or drink, and wondering whether her brave son would escape, or be overpowered by the wicked suitors. Like a lioness caught in the toils with huntsmen hemming her in on every side she thought and thought till she sank into a slumber, and lay on her bed bereft of thought and motion.” Here is the lioness, after the lion; here is the figure of the huntress at bay. The similes work together, complementarily. The reader or listener registers them because they are emphatic and reinforce one another. Since similes are sparser here than in the Iliad, they tend to have a more calculated, even a “literary,” impact. They are not always effective, however. In Book XVI of the Odyssey Athena urges Odysseus to tell Telemachus who he is so that they can start planning the campaign against the suitors. She re-creates him, he ceases to be an old beggar man and speaks in his own person to his son. Odysseus has to persuade him, and when Telemachus accepts who he is, deep and complex emotions are elicited. The poem employs a curious simile: “As he spoke he sat down, and Telemachus threw his arms about his father and wept. They were both so much moved that they cried aloud like eagles or vultures with crooked talons that have been robbed of their half fledged young by peasants. Thus piteously did they weep …” The simile is powerful but dubiously appropriate at this stage in the poem, a point of restoration. Eagles and vultures elsewhere in the poem (like the lion in the Iliad) are violent, destructive or masterful.

Most Homeric similes deploy not specific but characteristic images which are “universal” in impact, that is, not specific to a certain place or time. The Iliad’s abundant sea and weather similes, for example, belong to the whole Mediterranean. Oliver Taplin insists that the language of Homeric similes is “notably non-formulaic and late.”³⁷ As a device they supplement the narrative, doing what, at times, the narrative cannot do. Agamemnon, at the beginning of the Iliad, is an unjust, petty-minded and monstrous leader. It is hard for the poet to make him less repugnant through action because the time-scale is too tight and the story he is telling will not allow him to add incidents in order to alter the initial impression. As a result, the poem uses similes to build him up, to adjust the focus on him. The similes compare his face with Zeus’, his waist with Ares’, his chest with Poseidon’s; in the end he is like a great bull standing among his grazing cows, a simile notable for its complex literal inappropriateness (unlike Priam’s comparison of Odysseus to a ram), however appropriate the figurative sense. In the first place, does the peaceful bull stand well with the three preceding gods, remembering that when Zeus took bull form it was for libidinal purposes? Or are we to assume that the first three similes, which were meant to evoke the physical power and agility of the king, are switched off when the poem switches on the simile which contextualises this large, powerful figure? Is it appropriate to compare the leader of an invading army to a bull and a herd, which imply a settled rural culture such as the one the Greeks are violating? In making Agamemnon bullish among his herd, what are the feminising implications for the army itself? And there is no peace within the army itself. Compared with the lions in the Odyssey, this particular simile appears inappropriate, disconnected, perhaps super-added by an editor or scribe who felt that Agamemnon needed building up after his poor comportment in earlier passages.

Many similes come from one world (“modern”) and do not relate directly to the customs or events of the literal world of the Trojan or Odyssean narrative. There is a distance between the audience’s present and the present of the actions the poem recounts. The poem acknowledges and maintains that distance, yet does so without giving a sense of distancing. One key device is the simile’s “presence” in the audience’s world, even if it is anachronistic in relation to the things or events it is illuminating. These are not anachronisms in the way that iron, or burial customs, are anachronistically presented (a function of mis-remembering or forgetting). Nor is the poem archaising. It is making things that are remote and difficult familiar, drawing them into the realm of the imaginable and comprehensible.

When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar and bedding down in the forecourt, or prodomon, of his house, sees the women servants sneaking out to their amorous assignations with the suitors, two quite astonishing similes are unleashed. In the first (Butler again), “His heart growled within him, and as a bitch with puppies growls and shows her teeth when she sees a stranger, so did his heart growl with anger at the evil deeds that were being done.” His heart crosses gender and is a bitch, but a bitch commanded to obey by a masterful will: “but he beat his breast and said, ‘Heart, be still, you had worse than this to bear on the day when the terrible Cyclops ate your brave companions; yet you bore it in silence till your cunning got you safe out of the cave …’” Powerfully he recalls past events, the effect of patience, the instincts that have drawn him home and the natural protective instincts of any creature. Yet having calmed his bitch-heart, he is nonetheless restless. The simile that follows is domestic and in some curious way libidinal, a blood sausage: “but he tossed about as one who turns a paunch full of blood and fat in front of a hot fire, doing it first on one side and then on the other, that he may get it cooked as soon as possible, even so did he turn himself about from side to side, thinking all the time how, single handed as he was, he should contrive to kill so large a body of men as the wicked suitors.” No wonder that Athena comes and cools him down. “My poor unhappy man,” she says, “why do you lie awake in this way? This is your house: your wife is safe inside it, and so is your son who is just such a young man as any father may be proud of.”

We audiences and readers live in a post-heroic age. The poem concedes that in these latter days men are otherwise than as they were. Their imagination and understanding have altered and diminished. It requires an effort to make sense and enter into the world of big deeds. “Thanks to the repeated phrases and scene-sequences,” says Taplin, “we are in a familiar world where things have their known places. It is a world which is solid and known, and yet at the same time coloured by the special diction with an epic nobility.”³⁸ We grow familiar with the world of the poems through repetitions, which are reassuring and stabilising, and we enter in by means of voices and similes. It is odd to hear the echoes, some of them prolonged, sounding within and between the poems. The Odyssey, Book V opens exactly as the Iliad, Book XI does: Dawn leaves the side of her once mortal lover, Tithonus. The first three lines are identical, the fourth a prosodic echo.

The gods who were worshipped by the Trojans and the Achaeans went by the same names and had the same characteristics as the gods worshipped in “Homer’s” time. They too help to make the space of the poems familiar. We find ourselves on the terraces of Olympus, watching and hearing gods in their remarkably human-seeming confabulations. Their passions, pettinesses and partisanships are like men’s; their deep parental loves, their settled hatreds, and the scheming social world of heaven itself, are reflected in—or from—the human world (“then” and “now”) above which they hover. The organisation of heaven, with a king, assemblies and the like, is familiar not only from Trojan and Achaean structures but from the later world in which the poems took shape. Trojans and Achaeans pray to these gods; they still ruled Olympus when the poems were composed. Just as we get close to the gods in their exalted palaces, so they get close, intimately so, to the human protagonists of the poems, usually appearing in a plausible human disguise but in the end, by a gesture or by the ways in which they vanish, revealing their true nature. They come down to trick men into irrational acts of bravery or treachery; they come to console, to save, or when a great hero has been killed, to make certain the body is not spoiled, even when, as in the case of Hector, the corpse is defiled time after time.

The strangest scene in the Iliad occurs between the gods, in Book XIV. Hera sets out to seduce her husband, Zeus, on Mount Ida, in order to anaesthetise him so that the other gods can exercise their wills on the Trojan scene. Powerful, subversive eroticism is the prelude to hideous human combat. Nestor comes out of his hut (he has been bathing Machaon’s wounds) to see the dreadful state of play with the Greeks. The situation is grave, the rows of ships exposed to possible arson. Agamemnon for the second time urges retreat, either to test the army or because he is a coward. Odysseus feels contempt for his king.

Meanwhile Hera dolls herself up and goes to distract Zeus with erotic exercise. She dresses remarkably (and undresses so). She begs from Aphrodite Longing and Desire (abstractions, not an eau de toilette) to intensify the seduction. With the promise of a golden chair and one of the youngest graces for his bride, she persuades Sleep to come along. Fitzgerald marks the effect of Hera on Zeus: “He gazed at her, and as he gazed desire / veiled his mind like mist …” It is like his first illicit love. He wants her more than all the earlier women he has lain with, and he lists them. The love-making is spectacular and has the desired effect. Zeus falls asleep, and Sleep himself tells Poseidon he is free to urge the Argives on, even to triumph, until Zeus wakes. The battle that resumes is horribly heightened after this powerful romantic interlude. It is as though Hector is pitted as an equal against Poseidon himself. Ajax wounds him with a stone; he is only just rescued from the fray and laid down by the Xanthus, where he recovers. There are deaths, and cries of brutal triumph, in contrast with the divine coition. In the next book Hector kills Patroclus and Troy’s fate is sealed.

Critics fail too to find a religious or theological consistency in the poems. It is as though the gods occupy a parallel universe but not a morally higher or better space, and their judgements are as partisan and partial as human judgements can be. Taplin says, “the gods in Homer do not have a theological existence independent of particular poetic context.”³⁹ It is worth remembering that Taplin is the same critic who regards an inquiry into the identity of Homer as a waste of time, and the geographical particulars in the poem to be largely irrelevant. For him it is a work of imagination, and there is a distance between the kinds of truth imagination tells and those that history or religion disclose. If his take on the absence of anything but an aesthetic theology in the poems is true, we will have to conclude that men exist largely in relation to one another and act extremely when those more or less formal relations are disrupted: the gods exist in the poems merely as emanations from or clarifications of the human impulses and conflicts, their existence no more real than that of the similes. Like any reading which tries to confine the poems to the aesthetic zone of the “poetic,” this deprives them of their place in a real world and makes nonsense of the use to which the Greeks put the poems for centuries. It also makes a political reading of the poems (which Taplin is tempted to undertake)⁴⁰ a little fatuous, rather as though he was attempting a political reading of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” For the Greek audience and readership, the gap between the real and the poetic was not so absolutely marked, but then they had not lived through the European fin de nineteenth siècle.

An understanding of the strange role of the gods is important to an understanding of the dynamic of the poems. Man is constrained by time, by circumstance, but he is also elevated by the interest of the gods. They care for their own in curiously moving and sometimes helplessly human ways. They are parental, they are amorous. Heroes and mere mortals accept the situation, that gods make things happen but are in turn subject to laws. We can agree that impartial and resolving divine justice is hard to come by in the poems. In the end, there are the scales which Zeus holds up, and objective, final judgement is delivered by a power to which even the gods’ wills are subject, the power of moira (destiny or fate). When Hector in the Iliad Book XXII sees Achilles and begins to flee, the poem provides an abundance of physical detail, architectural and geographical contingencies, which make the city rise up real before us one last time. The heroes run three times around the town, as if they competed in the Games. Zeus is moved and asks the other gods if Hector might be saved or must die. Athena reminds Zeus of moira. Not even Zeus can change its course. Hector dies, and when at last in Book XXIV his corpse is recovered, it is laid out and Andromache holds Hector’s head in her lap, as Achilles had held Patroclus’. Her lament centres on their little son and his short future, subject also to moira. Hecuba laments, then Helen. Priam commands preparations for the funeral. The pyre is built and lighted. It burns, is extinguished, and the bones of Hector are duly gathered and placed in an urn.

The sharpest contrast between Olympus on the one hand and Troy, the battlefield, the Greek camp, Ithaca with its host of suitors, on the other, is to be found in the palaces of the gods which Hephaistus made, disposed as if on a giant Acropolis where location and scale symbolise the relative importance and power of each god; everything is beautiful, peaceful, stable; there is always a strictly limited cast of characters, each with clear relations and commitments to the human protagonists. In heaven, conflict is often intense, but motive, action and reaction are always clear.

The gods have a physical reality, they exist in physical terms, they can be seen and touched. In the first place, they have specific, geographical perspectives on the world, they look from and to specific points. They are assigned mountain-tops so that they have a place to alight on brief stopovers when they are travelling and, when human conflict is in progress, the seats with the most theatrically comprehensive views. J. V. Luce takes an interesting instance to demonstrate the virtually cartographic sense we get when a god is positioned in relation to a landscape or view. The poems know the lie of the land, they seem to enjoy aerial perspectives. In Iliad XIII, 3–6, Zeus is sitting atop Mount Ida and looking north. He sees the peoples in sequence, as far north as knowledge could go. In other words, he sees men in context, not an empty landscape. “The scene is accurately envisaged, but its primary function is to provide a theatre for human action.”⁴¹ When Poseidon views Troy from the island of Samothrace, most scholars point out that the islands of Imbros and Tenedos would block the view, being between the Trojan plain and Poseidon’s vantage point. But Luce established by observation that the mountains on Samothrace are high enough for the plain to be visible. In any case, on a very clear day, the peaks of Samothrace are visible from Troy. The poem answers and answers to a geographical reality. Then there is Hera, setting off from Olympus to Ida to seduce and distract her husband, the most important seduction in the poem (Iliad XIV, 153–360). Between her departure and arrival are ten places where the journey “touches down.”⁴² These gods exist not in a parallel geography, but in the very world that men inhabit. For Priam, Zeus rules from Mount Ida, just as he, on a human scale, rules from the city of Troy.

Gods are like men, but they are not men: this is the important fact. They are immortal: when wounded they are promptly healed; they move in space as though there were no rules of space. They speak a subtly different language from men: for instance, they call what men call the river Scamander the river Xanthus. The river has a god and a being which, in due course, Achilles will violate with corpses and, aided by the gods, will dry back to its bed. Like the divine rivers, the gods exist in time and affect even as they are affected by its passing. Zeus expresses his will, but it is a will pre-tuned to the fact of moira. Much as he would like to, he cannot save Sarpedon and is resigned to the fact (Iliad XVI, 458). His resignation is not shared by other gods who fight against fate but are aware that they will lose in the end.

If we are still tempted to be chorizontes, the gods are on our side. In the Odyssey the gods are less volatile and more patently “just” than in the Iliad. They are, quite simply, better behaved. It is not due to a later date of composition. “The decisive factor seems to us,” Albin Lesky suggests, “the following: while in the Iliad we have the reflection of a compact and exclusive noble class, the social range of the Odyssey is much wider. In the later work epic poetry had opened its doors to the wishes and beliefs of classes whom the Iliad excluded.”⁴³ Odysseus and Telemachus meet in the devoted swineherd Eumaeus’ emblematic, rough peasant dwelling. Melanthius, the (“swarthy”) goatherd, mistreats Odysseus (XVII); then Melantho, a serving girl, does the same (XVIII). There is also the faithful oxherd Philoetius (“happy fate”) and Arnaios, nicknamed Iros, the real beggar-man whom Odysseus displaces. In the Odyssey real choices appear to be made, less seems predetermined, perhaps because less hangs upon the outcome of the struggle: it is not the collision of states and ideologies but the story of a family, albeit a great hero’s, re-establishing itself. Is it credible that a single poet could have composed two poems with such radically different earthly and Olympian politics?

The gods enjoy a degree of freedom. They can scheme, they can retard moira even if they cannot prevent or reverse it. Man, on the other hand, is helpless. How then can a narrative of his helplessness be made compelling? We know the end before we have even properly set out; the poems make no secret about Achilles’ or Hector’s fate, about the ultimate destiny of Troy or the eventual success of Odysseus in his return. Indeed they remind us time after time. Yet they do entertain a variety of alternative scenarios, what the critic James Morrison calls “misdirections,” passages where alternative events are unfolded, or where the gods cause an action contrary to what they declare is its purpose.⁴⁴ Such a technique not only contributes to irony, reversal, surprise; it also causes us to reflect on what would have happened if, for example, Achilles had sailed for home, or Menelaus and Paris had completed their single combat. A story line is given, but the poem can play hard against it. Though, like moira, the known plot will triumph because the current of history cannot be dammed or turned, at least the bed through which it flows can be broadened. “Misdirection is Homer’s means of testing the limits of his tradition by exploring possibilities outside the standard myth,” Morrison argues. His reading suggests that the maker of both poems was an exceptionally deliberate artificer with clear aesthetic objectives underpinning the narrative, certainly not an absent or distant narrator or an “oral tradition.” Like so many persuasively argued approaches, this is plausible enough to be satisfying while we consider it. It suggests a jazz analogy: “exposition, exploration [misdirection], recapitulation.” But it depends on a crude sense of audience and it forgets that the effects will not work on second reading or performance.

What is admirable about the Homeric hero is not that he is allowed latitude but that, knowing his fate, he still behaves with courage and honour.

Hector in Iliad XX, 304, is terrifyingly human. Sometimes a god is required to tap an enemy on the shoulder in order to distract him, to deflect the fatal course of an arrow or a spear. But the heroes go into battle and seek to win glory, areté is proved by kleos. That is their nature, that is what the Iliad in particular is about. This human ideal is most clearly explored in the characters of kings, princes, noble warriors. The common soldiers in some way belong to and are extensions of the great warriors. What makes the killing so vivid and painful is the way the poem humanises each victim; they are often better than their victors, only they are less powerful, or less favoured by a god.

The Trojans share a collective take on the war: it started for them when the Greek ships arrived; it will end when they depart or the city is destroyed. The Greeks are more diverse in perspective, each with an individual point and motive of departure, each desiring to return for a different reason, and every one individually motivated in battle, though taking booty seems to be a common pursuit. The objective was to kill a well-heeled warrior, strip him then and there of his fine armour and have a runner carry the clobber back to the ships. Amongst the Trojans and their allies there was much rich armour to be captured, and some of the finest horses in the world, though none so fine as Achilles’ Xanthus, which “white-armed Juno had endowed with human speech.” He bows his head so low the mane touches the earth and foretells his master’s death. “We two can fly as swiftly as Zephyrus who they say is fleetest of all winds; nevertheless it is your doom to fall by the hand of a man and of a god.”

Achilles in Book IX famously speaks of his freedom to leave Troy, and more famously, in Book I, defines his particular objectives in joining the war: “I came not warring here for any ill the Trojans had done me. I have no quarrel with them. They have not raided my cattle nor my horses, nor cut down my harvests on the rich plains of Phthia; for between me and them there is a great space, both mountain and sounding sea. We have followed you, Sir Insolence [Agamemnon]! for your pleasure, not ours—to gain satisfaction from the Trojans for your shameless self and for Menelaus. You forget this, and threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled, and which the sons of the Achaeans have given me.” The candour in speech that we encounter in both poems is remarkable in an age of indirection and irony such as ours: it is no wonder that Odysseus is the most modern-seeming Homeric character: he is the most devious, the most ironic and calculating, and many younger readers find his poem far more comprehensible than Hector’s and Achilles’, which strike them as too predictable and burdened with detail.

In the world of peace, so vividly evoked in the shield which Thetis has Hephaestus make for Achilles (Iliad XVIII), the responsibilities and duties of men are different from those of wartime. In war or in peace, the human scenes generally have a formal, ritualised movement which should be borne in mind when appraising “characters.” These protagonists cannot be read as we would read novel characters: the bourgeois world has not happened to them, their identities have not been made subjective. Like Greek dramatic figures, they wear a kind of mask before their human faces and it is the mask upon which we focus. Even when it slips, there is likely to be another mask behind it, as when Achilles is left alone with the corpse of Patroclus. Major characters are imbued with ethos. Lesky⁴⁵ identifies three such characters in the Iliad: Achilles, Hector and Patroclus. Each suffers (knowingly) a failure of restraint, a kind of forerunner of the tragic hubris Aristotle speaks of, and including tragic anagnorisis, or recognition.

Hospitality, like grief, can be ceremonial, a social given, rather than an expression of individual nature. Odysseus is moved on rapidly when he asks too much and violates conventions of hospitality in his protracted journey home. In Book XXII of the Odyssey, hospitality, after such a long violation of its rules, is inverted: the battle takes place in the very site of hospitality and the first two victims, Antinous and Eurylachus, die into their food, as it were, blood mingling with viands. Positive exceptions to the formalism of custom occur as well, for example when Priam addresses Helen in the Iliad, Book II, or in Book XXIV when Achilles and Priam meet in the most harrowing and powerful engagement in the poem, a battle without weapons where both protagonists prove their heroic stature in an act of mutual self-effacement. Achilles himself lifts the corpse of Hector onto Priam’s wagon, an amazing moment and full of tears. These passages are susceptible to “modern” readings, but it is best not to inflict too much psychology on them.

As modern readers, however, we cannot help entering our own judgements on some of the characters. The most awkward in the Iliad is Agamemnon, the great king. From the first moment he speaks he is aggressive, assertive, shrill, unbrave; he needs to be calmed by venerable Nestor, he is a hot-head without qualities who alienates his chief warrior and puts the whole campaign, in its ninth year, in jeopardy all for the sake of a woman. Achilles makes it clear that Agamemnon is a coward and never leads his men but stays in the centre; he is a heavy drinker and has an insatiable sexual appetite. The poem tries to redeem him by comparing him with the gods. Zeus is the first point of comparison, and Agamemnon is within his army what Zeus is within his palace. Zeus the wife-beater … We have just seen him threatening his wife with violence and her child Hephaistus begging her to obey the brute because it hurts him to see her hurt by him. Agamemnon is beneath respect, contemptible in his appetites and lack of empathy. Thersites attacks him, but because Thersites is such a repulsive and unpopular figure, his (true) accusations rebound upon his own head.

We get to know Agamemnon and most of the other leading characters not through description but by means of their own language. They speak, indeed they talk so much that Plato, in Book III of the Republic, reckons that epic poetry is halfway between narrative and the drama.⁴⁶ In an oral tradition, the medium of speech in which the rhapsode works is also the privileged medium within the narrative, through which the heroes make themselves known. Characters are differentiated by their diction, the length of their syntactical periods, their tones in relation to their peers and their inferiors. When in Iliad IX the three ambassadors, visiting Achilles in his tent, urge him to change his mind, they are carefully individualised; the middle one is fullest and clearest. In the rhetorical world of threes, it is the second that is always fullest (a rhetorical “fact”), Lesky reminds us.⁴⁷ In Book II of the Odyssey the suitors, especially Antinous, make fun of Telemachus and bait him: the sarcasm of the dialogue borders on dramatic form. Greek laughter often relates to mockery. It can be as cruel as the laughter in the Old Testament.

Especially in debate we hear voices, coloured by the prejudice or the wisdom that pertains to them. In the Odyssey speech gives us a sense of intimacy with the characters while, at the same time, keeping us at our distance: we hear the suitors, Telemachus, Menelaus, Helen, Nestor, Odysseus, the gods and many others. Speech is more immediate than reported speech, even when formalised and delivered in a ceremonious way.

We get closest to the characters of the Iliad in Book VI, when we are taken within the walls of Troy and allowed to see, by contrast with the Greek camp in all its functional and insistently male order, another world. At the high tower Andromache and Astyanax meet Hector. She begs her husband not to fight on, recalling the terrible place of Achilles in her own past. He slew her father and seven brothers. But Hector will not rest, though he knows Troy’s eventual doom and what it will mean for her and their son. His helmet frightens the baby, both parents laugh, he removes the helmet and kisses the child. He prays. It is a wonderful moment of human laughter, the more powerful because it is the only point of intimate warmth in the poem, unless we regard the rather strained exchanges between Achilles and Patroclus as warm. Then Hector goes, Andromache returns among her women. Hector meets Paris and they prepare, after this interlude, to return to battle.

The Odyssey is warmer in this respect, with intimate exchanges between many characters. But since the world through which Telemachus moves, outside Ithaca, is at peace, and since Odysseus converses when he returns home with people who love and respect him, the formality which is so pronounced in the Iliad becomes less insistent and we have a sense of actions on a smaller scale, with a more focussed intensity and purpose.

The Iliad, Lesky declares, “does not merely fulfil the demands of epic poetry; it goes far beyond them to the realm of tragedy. Instead of uniform flow and unhurried narration of events, we find an artistic scheme of interconnection and cross-reference, happenings sometimes briefly sketched, sometimes elaborately worked out …” With Aristotle he speaks of the poem’s contrasting styles, one “flowing,” the other “periodic,” more fo-cussed, holding attention on a single incident or scene. The stylistic distinction can be applied to the structure itself, an interplay between speeds and depths of realisation, what the German writer Friedrich Schiller called the “naive and the sentimentive.”

Serious structural problems mar the Iliad, making interpretation hard. For example, in a single day the Greeks build a mighty rampart between the ships and the Trojan plain. Oddnesses and actual faults in the narrative are seized upon by critics to support compositional theories. Analyticals and the unitarians have predetermined responses which are as much to do with their theories as with the poem itself. Of all the theories, the “gradual accretion” theory seems the most commonsensical, which does not mean that it is correct. Gottfried Hermann (1772–1848) proposed it. The “lays” theory suggests the Iliad is sixteen poems joined into one. The compilation theory takes it a step further: they were not lays but epic episodes linked together (this grew out of studies of the Odyssey but was eventually applied to the Iliad as well). As an extension of the compilation theory came the accretion theory. After the First World War there was a reversion to a sense of the general unity of the Iliad. Unitarians who had defended the unity of plot now began to defend the structure in greater detail.

Lesky argues that centuries of epic poetry came before Homer (the un-writing dark ages). Oral elements survived in the written text, especially formulae and epithets and the verbatim repetition of commands and speeches. If we bear in mind the legend of Homer’s blindness and consider how complex in thematic and textural conception Paradise Lost is, and how it was orally delivered to Milton’s long-suffering daughters, we might not think recitation and even dictation quite so remarkable. Literary in source, original in prosody and concept, Paradise Lost was orally (because it could not have been literarily) conceived, structured and recorded. Lesky is persuaded that the Homeric poet could and did write. As evidence he mentions the wide cross-referencing and self-quotation, at points distant from one another in the text. Lesky is also keen to insist that the poems are not all derivation; there is invention and originality, not least in the formal organisation of the Iliad. “The scene in which Priam and Achilles, after all the pangs of battle, all the grief and cruelty of unmeasured vengeance, learn to understand and respect each other as men, is at once the culmination of the Iliad and the starting-point of the western conception of humanity.”⁴⁸

The title of the Iliad (The Poem of Ilium or Troy) could have been the Achil-lead, since his inaction, and then his action, are the mainsprings of the plot. The poem focuses on the few days in the decade of the Trojan War when Troy briefly got the upper hand, the point at which the scales of fate seemed as though they might tip contrary to expectation. They were not necessarily the most dramatic or the most decisive days, though the death of Hector accelerated the end of the war. Three weeks pass in the opening scenes, another three weeks in the closing scenes. Most of what occurs from Book II to Book XXIII, Taplin reminds us, takes place during four days and two nights.⁴⁹ Seven and a half books are devoted to a single day. Time is going fast in the opening books; it slows down and we focus on the intense action, and then at the end there is an acceleration. The opening books provide crucial information, the closing parts of the poem foreshadow Troy’s fate. In terms of theme, the first two lines mention Achilles, the last two Hector, their epithets intact. The poem begins with the attempted ransoming of a child—Chryses and Chryseis—and ends with Priam’s ransoming of his child Hector’s corpse.

Achilles is a powerful man of selective commitments and affinities, far from home, Patroclus’ intimate. Hector, the mainstay of his city, fights before the eyes of his family and his people. He believes it is equal combat until the end, and then (XXII, 304–5) he displays a true heroism which transcends mere strength, endurance and skill: that resignation which keeps him resolute and brave though he knows he is imminently doomed. “Immortal fame” is the wages of the kind of life he lives—and the death he must die.

The Italian writer Italo Calvino seems, in a modern spirit, to prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad on formal grounds. His essay entitled “The Odysseys within the Odyssey”⁵⁰ reflects on the number of odysseys the poem describes, how many ends are known before a traveller reaches home. In Book IV Menelaus recalls how he was caught in the doldrums off Egypt. The local goddess of Pharos urged him to beard Proteus in his den, wrestle with him and squeeze an explanation and a prophecy from him. Within the story, Menelaus tells a story in which he compels the sea god to tell a story.

The danger of forgetting is real all along: Odysseus might lose track of who he is, or forget the urgency of his calling home. There are the lotus eaters, Circe’s drugs, the Sirens’ song and much else to distract him. The danger is less that he will forget the past, more that he will forget his purpose, his identity and future. Where Odysseus has come from is clear and chronicled; he must constantly bear in mind where he is going, like Aeneas en route to Italy. Odysseus loses everything more than once on the way home: his booty, the gifts he is given, all his men, and almost his name when he visits the Cyclops. He finally declares his name, at King Alcinous’ behest (IX, 19–28), in a powerful passage where he regathers his energy in the act of memory. Calvino makes Odysseus’ trial universal, without reducing it to an allegory. His reading touches with a lively accuracy what many scholars overlook in considering the poem’s themes.

In Book XXII the suitors are slain and compared to a harvest of fish, poured out by fishermen onto the sand, twitching still. When the female servants who consorted with the suitors are hanged by Telemachus, their dangling feet are seen to twitch as well. Then at the opening of Book XXIV, which some regard as apocryphal, the suitors’ ghosts are led to Hades by Cyllenian Hermes with his golden, sleep-dispensing wand. Here we encounter one of the most apposite and precise similes in the Odyssey, a simile which makes visible the flight of souls. Butler translates it, “As bats fly squealing in the hollow of some great cave, when one of them has fallen out of the cluster in which they hang, even so did the ghosts whine and squeal as Hermes the healer of sorrow led them down into the dark abode of death.” Other translators make the “cluster” into a “chain” or “cone.” Be that as it may, when one bat is disturbed they all erupt and flock erratically out of the cave mouth. As a simile it corresponds at every point to the elements it helps us to visualise. It suggests, too, a certain kind of geography.

The Odyssey, J. V. Luce points out, has two quite different narrative tones, that of Odysseus’ fantastic travels on the one hand, and that of the Telemachiad and Odysseus’ return to Ithaca on the other. Luce is of course fascinated by the geography of Ithaca and prefers the rocks and paths and caves that he can visit; he likes it when the “fantastic gives way to the realistic.”⁵¹ Certainly the “realistic,” as he calls it, has elements of implausibility metamorphosis, magic, just as the fantastic has very particularised and credible details, however unbelievable the Cyclops, Circe, the Laestrygonians, the Sirens and the other challenges are.

What kinds of detail make the complex narrative of the Odyssey credible and deep in “orchestration,” touching different strings of the story all at once and making those harmonies that affect us on each re-reading? Penelope’s weaving is one such detail. She weaves not just anything, a table-cloth or antimacassar or bed-cover: she is weaving not some mystical cloth like the Lady of Shalott, but in fact a shroud for Odysseus’ father, Laertes. It is a sacred charge laid upon her; hence she cannot be seriously interrupted by the suitors until the task is complete. In Book V, Hermes like a seagull makes his way from Olympus with Zeus’ command to Calypso (whose name means “concealed” or “concealer”). She must release Odysseus from her spells so he can go home. What is Calypso doing? Weaving, which seems to be what women with servants do to pass the time. Certainly at Alcinous’ court all the women are at it.

Odysseus has an awful journey. His foe Poseidon (Poseidon lay with a sea nymph and Polyphemus was the issue) spots him in the little craft he has made, churns up the seas and tries to drown him. The hero swims for two days, lands on rocks which tear his hands, is sucked out to sea again on the undertow, and at last is washed ashore exhausted. He hides in the woods, making a bed among the fallen leaves. Here again is a perfectly chosen simile: “so he laid himself down and heaped the leaves all round him. Then, as one who lives alone in the country, far from any neighbour, hides a brand as fire-seed in the ashes to save himself from having to get a light elsewhere, even so did Odysseus cover himself up with leaves …”

It takes him ten years to return from the ten-year war. His long relationship with Calypso issued in staleness and, for the hero, that saudade that the Portuguese navigators felt, far from home, a deep almost despairing sadness. The poem concentrates on the last leg of his journey and the restoration of his fortunes at home. The time-frame is just under six weeks, and Books XVI to XXIV take only three days. Not only does the Odyssey cover a lot of ground and sea, the whole Aegean and then some; it also evokes every class of person, from mendicants and beggars to kings. Odysseus himself crosses back and forth between classes, now a beggar, now a king. In conversation with Telemachus, Helen remembers how dressed in rags he entered Troy as if a slave to gather information, how she recognised him but kept his counsel and he returned, slaying Trojans as he went.

While in the Iliad women serve as motives for action (Helen, Chryseis, Briseis) but apart from Andromache have little presence, in the Odyssey women play important roles. Penelope, Helen, Calypso, Nausicaa, Arete and others of more humble origin can become involved in the central action of the poem, have motives and complex moral natures. We move away from the barbarities of mere heroism and approach the hard-earned zone of peace and stability, achieved in the end by calculation, deception and scrupulous conspiracy. Despite all the action of the Iliad, it is in the Odyssey that we find adventure.

The basic story is not uncommon: a husband returns after a very long absence to find his son grown up, his wife besieged by suitors. His task is to work his way back into the place he left, so he must test his wife’s fidelity (especially after what happened to his friend Agamemnon upon his return from Troy), get to know his son, and purge his house of the pestilential suitors. To this core are added traveller’s tales, which, Lesky says, “must have been many and varied in the second millennium BC while Crete was a great sea power.” We can see the poem as an early novel of homecoming, a sea adventure, a saga of Troy, and a work which stimulated new Ionian thought and imagination.

We start in Ithaca, an anarchic island. Young Telemachus, whose name means “decisive battle,” Graves tells us, is bullied and kept down in his own house. His father’s long absence means that he and his mother are effectively held hostage by the suitors exploiting the traditions of hospitality. Penelope’s name is variously etymologised. Graves says it means “with a web over her face” or—“striped duck.” Paul Kretschmer derives it from pene, penion, “bobbin-thread, woof,” and elop “as found in olopto,” “unravel.” Kretschmer’s explanation is the more satisfying since the name would describe (as Telemachus’ ultimately does) the key trick action of the poem. Odysseus, Graves says, means “angry.”

Telemachus sets off in quest of his father. If he is dead, Penelope will have to remarry and move on, unencumbering the estate. If he is alive, Telemachus needs him. The Telemachiad, the first four books of the poem, deal with the boy’s coming of age and his education in more stable and less rustic societies. He brings back gifts and a kind of hope which within hours produces a flesh-and-blood father and elicits from him some of the heroic skills we would expect of the son of Odysseus. He is also capable of cruelty as coarse and pointless as that practised on the windy plain of Troy: not only the execution of the female servants, but also collusion in the death of the rebarbative goatherd Melanthius, whose nose and ears are removed, his genitals lopped off for the dogs to eat, and his hands and feet severed.

Wise, wily, scheming, crafty Odysseus: the old fathers of Ithaca, looking at the heap of their dead sons, had a point when they called for revenge. “They took the dead away, buried every man his own, and put the bodies of those who came from elsewhere on board the fishing vessels, for the fishermen to take each of them to his own place.” Then in the meeting place they assembled and Eupeithes, father of the churlish Alcinous, Odysseus’ first victim, recalled how many Ithacans died with Odysseus in the Trojan expedition, and how he had then come home and killed the flower of Ithaca youth all over again. “Let us be up and doing before he can get away to Pylos or to Elis where the Epeans rule, or we shall be ashamed of ourselves for ever afterwards. It will be an everlasting disgrace to us if we do not avenge the murder of our sons and brothers …” The poem tells us that “He wept as he spoke and every one pitied him.” But there was to be no revenge on the returning king; on the contrary, Laertes, Odysseus’ father, would have the pleasure of fighting alongside his son and grandson, backed by Athena in the likeness of Mentor, swooping down and killing more Ithacans, old men for the most part, starting with Eupeithes himself. Odysseus would have slain the lot had Zeus not sent down an insistent thunderbolt and Athena commanded him to desist. Then, “glad at heart,” he obeyed, and the warring factions were compelled by the gods to make peace. Odysseus, one of the worst leaders of all time, having mislaid all his comrades and taken ten years to cover the distance his fellow combatants had covered in a few weeks, settled down to rule Ithaca, though legend has it that he led one further expedition—over the edge of the world.