Some critics argue that Odysseus, in maintaining his disguise, is needlessly cruel to the old man; others conclude that he helps to restore his father to dignity. Athena admires Odysseus' craft and guile, saying that even a god would have to be "some champion lying cheat" Deception, illusion, lying and trickery often are thought to be admirable traits in The Odyssey.
Athena enjoys them. It's easy to see why Odysseus is her favorite mortal. One of the questions often asked about a work of literature is whether the principal characters grow or develop as the story progresses. The theme of spiritual growth is central to The Odyssey , especially as it relates to Telemachus and Odysseus. When the epic opens, Telemachus is at a loss as to how to deal with the suitors who have taken over his home and seek the hand of his mother in marriage for primarily political reasons.
His own life is in danger; as a pretender to the crown, he is nothing more than so much excess baggage to the men who would be king. Telemachus needs to grow up fast. He faces various barriers, falters temporarily, but eventually prevails. With Athena's help, Telemachus calls an assembly meeting of Ithaca's leaders and confronts the suitors. Although he speaks well, he finds very little realistic support in the community; nonetheless, he has taken the first step toward maturity.
At the courts of these great men, Telemachus learns more about himself and how a prince should comport himself than he does about Odysseus. Nevertheless, he is given some hope that his father will return. When Odysseus does come back, Telemachus survives the test of battle and earns his father's trust.
Odysseus' growth is less linear. He was already quite a man when he left for the Trojan War 20 years before. His trials have more to do with refinement of spirit; his growth is in the kind of wisdom and judgment that will make him a better king. Early on, Odysseus feels compelled to taunt Polyphemus the Cyclops as he escapes from the one-eyed monster.
Odysseus shouts his real name at the giant, making it possible for Polyphemus to identify his tormentor to Poseidon, the Cyclops' father. This brings Odysseus, and the Phaeacians, serious problems later. When he returns to Ithaca, however, Odysseus behaves more prudently. He enters in disguise in order to obtain information about the enemy as well as knowledge of whom to trust. Even when he is taunted and assaulted by the suitors or his own servants, Odysseus manages to maintain his composure and postpone striking back.
When he does strike, the time is perfect. By the end of the epic, Odysseus seems to be a wiser, more perceptive leader than he might have been had he sailed straight home from Troy. As the epic progresses, Odysseus becomes increasingly capable of judging when it is wise to reveal himself and when it is appropriate to exult in his accomplishments. At Scheria, he prudently waits until late in his visit before declaring his identity to the king and queen. By the time he reaches Ithaca, he can endure the insults of the suitors for the better part of two days.
The ability to hold his passions and pride in check make his swift and total revenge upon the suitors possible. One of the most important cultural values in The Odyssey is that of xenia , a Greek concept encompassing the generosity and courtesy shown to those who are far from home. How is hospitality established as a key value in the epic? Traveling between those settlements involves facing both natural and supernatural perils, as well as logistical problems like shortages in provisions.
The code of hospitality operates as a linchpin that allows individuals such as Odysseus to undertake these kinds of journeys at all. It is a set of reciprocal expectations and obligations that not only mitigate the privations of travel but forge and reinforce bonds of friendship and goodwill. Not surprisingly, The Odyssey doles out harsh punishments to those who do not respect this sacred social code.
Polyphemus, the suitors, and the Achaean soldiers at Ismarus all suffer for violating it. By the same token, individuals such as Eumaeus and the Phaeacian royalty prove their worth to Odysseus by showering him with selfless generosity and kindness. One of the most touching moments in the poem—and there are many such moments, as Odysseus reveals himself to friends and family members—comes when Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachos.
Of course, growing up is never easy, and Telemachos has much to learn. Early in the poem, as he begins to assert himself, he criticizes his mother and tells her, basically, to go back to her room and leave the business of the household to him I. He is not exactly delicate with his mother, and modern readers might well find the way he talks to his mother offensive, so we must be aware of the sexism inherent in the culture we are observing. In order to assert himself in front of the suitors, Telemachos, who is reaching male adulthood, must establish himself as independent of and more powerful than his mother.
In terms of his society, he is correct to say that the household power is his, which Penelope acknowledges by doing what he says, but which she also laments as she weeps for her missing husband. The dynamics of this family are working themselves out in difficult circumstances, and it is vital, as we consider Odysseus, to keep in mind the stories of his wife and of his son.
Perhaps we should approach Odysseus first as a son himself, a role that he plays on two particular occasions in the poem. As a result of this speech, his father pours dust over his own head, a sign of mourning. At this point even Odysseus cannot continue the masquerade and he reveals himself, but we are left wondering why Odysseus would behave in such a way. Why, seeing his father after twenty years, does he play a role, making up a new identity for himself?
The answer is not that he is a cruel man who enjoys tormenting people. In fact, as we see throughout the poem, Odysseus enjoys inventing identities for himself. He tells stories to Eumaios, to Telemachos, to Penelope, to the Cyclopes—to almost everyone he meets.
In other words, she knows that his deviousness and his deceptive tales, which are signs of his intelligence because he employs them so intelligently, are part of his nature. At the same time, she is telling him that though he may be great at inventing identities, he is no match for her. Simultaneously, then, he is being both praised and put in his place. He can adopt any identity that he likes, says Athene, but she will always know who he is.
We might legitimately wonder, however, whether he always really knows who he is, just as we may wonder whether we always really know who we are or whether, like Odysseus, we constantly go through a process of reinventing ourselves.
That question is raised not only by the many stories Odysseus tells and the many disguises he wears some of them the work of Athene but by the well-known adventures that he describes to the Phaiakians. Perhaps his most famous adventure, his encounter with the Cyclopes, illustrates this point best. The Cyclopes are a savage group who have developed no societal structure. Furthermore, their possession of a single eye in the middle of their foreheads indicates a lack of depth perception, a deficiency that is both physical and intellectual.
This may seem to us like a fairly primitive trick, and we may laugh at Polyphemos for falling for it, but it has a deeper meaning for The Odyssey. The point that is made in this episode, and throughout much of the poem, is that identity, selfhood, can be dangerous. It must be understood and controlled. Consequently, Odysseus must even visit the Underworld, where he learns of his future—that his death will come from the sea—and where he meets his mother, who has died from grief during his absence, because he was such a good son and because she loved him so much.
His love for his mother, his identity as a good son, has killed her. In short, everything we do, the good and the bad, has unforeseen consequences. The poet always comments on the ironies of human existence. It should be obvious now that every part of the poem—every character, every episode—contributes to the overall effect of the poem. Nothing is extraneous and nothing is out of place, though we as readers must often exercise our own intelligence to see and understand the connections.
In this sense, this three thousand-year-old poem is interactive, as literature tends to be. It shows us the stories of Penelope, Telemachos, and Odysseus, but we as modern readers must put those stories together, see where they lead us. Usually a writer will help us in this task. A writer may focus on particular words or images to stress a point, or a writer may repeat particular kinds of scenes with significant variations, as we saw in The Iliad.
This story would have been known to the earliest audience of The Odyssey , but we may need to be reminded of it. Many, in fact, died before they could return home, and in the course of The Odyssey we hear about the fates of Nestor, Aias, Menelaos, and others. Some three centuries after The Odyssey was completed, the Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote a trilogy of play, The Oresteaid , based on this story.
Clearly this story stands in sharp contrast to most of The Odyssey. Agamemnon, as we saw in The Iliad is a man of force and brutality, but his physical power counts for little when he returns home. His return itself is without obstacles, and he learns nothing from his experiences, unlike Odysseus, whose return is difficult but provides him a vital education. Of course, unlike Odysseus, Agamemnon came home with a captured woman, Kassandra, whom Klytaimestra also killed.
Agamemnon really is not terribly bright. And Telemachos joins his father in combatting their enemies, while Orestes was forced to seek vengeance on his own.
In fact, the two stories once again return us to the question of identity by focusing our attention on how these characters behave and why they do so. It is revealing that the ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus what he learned from his bloody homecoming, that women are untrustworthy. Still the same old introspective Agamemnon that we saw in The Iliad.
He contrasts sharply with Odysseus, who learns so much from his adventures, including that he absolutely must trust women.
There is one other aspect of The Odyssey that should be covered in this brief introduction, the role of the bards. There are a number of reasons that a reader should pay close attention to these bards.
One is that they give us an idea of how a Homeric poet might have operated. After meals, the bards are brought in to recite in poetic form the exploits of some hero, providing what we would call after-dinner entertainment.
It is especially interesting that Demodokos is blind, since Homer if such a person existed was reputed to be blind. In fact, bards in oral cultures tend not to be blind, but literate cultures assume that only blind people would be able to memorize so much poetry. Of course, as I explained in the chapter on The Iliad , we are not really talking about memorization but oral composition.
Another thing that is important about the bards concerns Odysseus directly. While he is with the hospitable Phaiakians, in disguise, Demodokos tells a story about Odysseus. That is, Odysseus has become a hero, the subject of heroic poetry, in his own lifetime.
Odysseus, who has been cut off from society for so many years, is shocked to realize that he has become the stuff of legend. So moved is he that he weeps again. What Homer has done here is to create a fascinating mirror effect, a meta-narrative: within a poem about Odysseus, we see the creation of a poem about Odysseus.
Odysseus becomes the audience to his own story, just as we become the audience to this story, which, as it relates to human identity, to the vicissitudes of human existence, is also our story. Finally, we see the honor that is paid to the bards. Poets love to write about the importance of poetry, naturally, and the poet might well be exaggerating the role of the bards, but it is clear that Demodokos is a respected member of the court who receives all sorts of special considerations. And Phemios, who is accused of collusion with the suitors back in Ithaka, is given the benefit of the doubt and spared.
Perhaps the poet is simply glorifying poets, but more likely what we see is how important poets were to the society that produced these poems. I have tried to make this discussion of The Odyssey shorter and less detailed than the discussion of The Iliad , partly because reading The Iliad is itself a preparation for reading The Odyssey and partly because The Odyssey presents fewer problems for modern readers, who tend to be more familiar with romance than with epic.
It still has cosmic overtones, but not to the same extent as The Iliad. He just wants to get home, to be with his wife and son and the loyal members of his household. He, like Achilleus, is aware of the dark side of human life, and he knows after his visit to the Underworld that he is fated to go wandering yet again, but we all know that human happiness is fleeting.
What The Odyssey confirms for us is that human happiness is a possibility that can be found in the mundane. Incidentally, for readers who really like The Odyssey , there are two modern works based on it that may be of interest.
That last sentence can be a bit misleading, however. It is easy for us to think of these three poems dating from antiquity as being almost contemporaneous, but we must remember that the Aeneid was written, that is, it was composed with pen and ink, between seven and eight hundred years after the other two were finally written down. Eight hundred years is a relatively long time.
Imagine if someone today wrote a series of laws to accompany the Magna Carta, which was written in So many things about our world have changed that it would seem silly to do so. He has been gone 20 years from his homeland, his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus. Odysseus embodies many of the virtues of ancient Greek civilization and in some ways defines them. He is not, however, without his flaws, which sometimes get him into trouble. Epics usually open with a statement of the subject and an invocation to the Muse or Muses — the nine sister goddesses in Greek mythology, the daughters of the king of gods, Zeus, and Mnemosyne "Memory".
Certain Muses preside over song and poetry, which are joined in epics. Sometimes Muses are assigned to all the liberal arts and sciences. Clio is usually thought of as the Muse of history. Erato takes care of lyrical love poetry. Calliope is the Muse most often associated with epic poetry. Having invoked the Muse, the epic poet then begins in the middle of the tale; teachers sometimes use a Latin term, in medias res "in the middle of things" , to identify this technique.
Beginning in the middle of the action, the poet then fills in significant prior events through flashbacks or narration. The Odyssey also employs most of the literary and poetic devices associated with epics: catalogs, digressions, long speeches, journeys or quests, various trials or tests of the hero, similes, metaphors, and divine intervention.
Although few contemporary authors attempt to compose epics, the influence of the genre and of The Odyssey is extensive. Many critics consider James Joyce's Ulysses , which uses Odysseus' Latin name "Ulysses" for the title and places a very flawed non-hero in Dublin, to be the most important novel of the twentieth century. While it includes recollections of earlier times, most of the action in The Odyssey takes place in the ten years following the Trojan War.
Historically, was there ever such a war? Camps An Introduction to Homer, , "Preliminary" argues impressively that there probably was but that it was much different from Homer's depiction in The Iliad or the recollections of the characters in The Odyssey.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the war may have taken place around bc and that the city Homer calls Troy was destroyed by fire.
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