Good modern English translations of The Odyssey include:
Fitzgerald, R. (trans.) The Odyssey. (New York: Vintage Classics, 2007)
[ISBN 9780099511687].
Shewring, W. (trans.) The Odyssey. (Oxford: World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199536788].
For general introductions:
Griffin, J. Homer: The Odyssey. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [ISBN 9780521539784].
Rutherford, R. Homer. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
[ISBN 9780199222094].
For a more detailed overview:
Fowler, R. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Homer. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) [ISBN 9780521012461].
Clay, J.S. The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in The Odyssey. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996) [ISBN 9780822630692].
Cohen, B. (ed.) The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press USA, 1995)
[ISBN 9780195086836].
Doherty, L.E. Homer’s Odyssey. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
[ISBN 9780199233335].
Graziosi, B. and E. Greenwood Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) [ISBN 9780199591312].
Katz, M.A. Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in The Odyssey. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780691067964].
Peradotto, J. Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in The Odyssey. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) [ISBN 9780691068305].
Reece, S. The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) [ISBN 9780472103867].
Schein, S.L. (ed.) Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780691044392].
These need to be used with the customary care, but you can be confident of the resources hosted on the Perseus site:
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
You might like to consult Robin Mitchell-Boyask’s site at Temple University:
www.temple.edu/classics/odysseyho/index.html
There are lots of translations available online: see, for example, the Perseus version,
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136
The Samuel Butler version,
http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html
The George Chapman version,
The Perseus site also has a useful overview of archaic Greek history, by Thomas R. Martin:
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=TRM+OV&redirect=true
The Odyssey is an epic poem in 24 books of verse, attributed to Homer, which probably took the form in which we read it circa 750 bce. It appeared prior to the classics of Greek tragedy, philosophy and history, and before many books of the Old Testament. It is a partner to the other Homeric epic, The Iliad, and together these poems were the founding texts of ancient Greek civilisation, as the Bible later was for Christian cultures. Because of the recurring importance of ancient Greece to subsequent cultures, The Odyssey has become one of the most influential texts in world literature. It continues to reverberate in contemporary culture: not only subsequent epics like Vergil’s Aeneid, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Derek Walcott’s Omeros, but also films such as the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou, and novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, acknowledge The Odyssey as part of their cultural inheritance.
As an epic, The Odyssey operates on a grand scale, addressing the most resonant themes, such as love, death and the place of humanity within a cosmos directed by unfathomable, hostile or competing deities. It sets the bar for subsequent epics which also encompass motifs such as the quest, the journey over water, and the descent into the Underworld. It does not deal directly with war, unlike many other epics, because it is set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, tracing the journey home of the Greek hero Odysseus. It thus combines a thrilling tale of survival against the odds – against cannibals, scheming females and dangerous deities – with a story that is essentially domestic, and which longs chiefly to reunite the hero with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. The reunion is threatened, however, by the fact that the palace on Ithaca is overrun by wild young nobles who seek Penelope’s hand in marriage, in order to take over Odysseus’s royal property, and who, at the beginning of the epic, are also plotting to murder his son.
Since the poem thus combines so many different elements within the structure of the journey home, interpretations of it have often approached the cosmic level, and it has been understood as everything from a blueprint for ancient Greek colonisation to a meditation on human identity. This introduction will first discuss some formal elements, and then offer some thematic guidance, centred on the issues of heroism and of gender.
The poem’s appeal has been transhistorical, but there are also some formal aspects that present obstacles to its enjoyment. In particular, certain phrases recur very insistently: ‘dawn’ is almost always ‘rosy-fingered’, the sea is regularly ‘wine-dark’, and whenever there is a feast, those present invariably ‘put forth their hands towards the good things that lay before them’. Even larger blocks of verse, and whole scenes, which describe repeated actions, such as feasting, can be iterated word for word. It was this feature of The Odyssey, which it shares with the The Iliad, which prompted perhaps the most remarkable discovery about the poem in modern times. This discovery, made by the scholar Milman Parry in the 1930s, explains numerous features of the poem, particularly why it is characterised by so much repetition in terms of phrasing and plotting, and explains The Iliad in the same terms. While doing fieldwork in what was then Yugoslavia, Parry recorded oral poems sung in Serbo-Croat by folk bards. What Parry observed was that individual bards often sang the same very long poem but with innumerable minor variations. Extrapolating from these findings, he hypothesised that The Odyssey, and The Iliad, were highly collective productions, which had developed over time and been widely circulated and revised, but that they were also, in the process, the productions of individual bards and their innumerable small acts of improvisation, each of these singers varying the expression of a known plot. Parry’s investigation concentrated on the metre of the two Homeric poems, and plausibly explained how these singing poets could complete the metre of an improvised line of verse by drawing on a whole repertoire of stock words or phrases. Since the repeated elements in the poem are of different lengths, such as the single word ‘brave’ attached to Odysseus or the much longer phrase ‘rosy-fingered’ attached to ‘dawn’, they could be used quickly and readily to fill gaps of just the right size, as the poet, in his singing, groped to complete the metre of a given line.
Parry’s conclusions about the ‘oral transmission’ of the poems have become established as the best overall explanation not only of how The Odyssey, and The Iliad, came into existence, but also why the poem’s texture is studded with these many repetitions. Subsequent analysis has shown how certain lines and even whole scenes are also repeated because they offered convenient building blocks to the oral poet who had to extemporise. Earlier debates had struggled to explain this texture either by the hypothesis of a particular individual genius (the unitarian argument) or by the notion that the poem was the product of some sort of committee (the ‘analytic’). Oral transmission reconciles these ideas by the successive contributions of a series of talented poets over time. If the figure of Homer existed at all, it is likely that he was the scribe who first committed a version of the shifting oral Odyssey to written script.
Activity
Find examples of repeated scenes, such as putting on armour, single combat, sacrifice, feasting, visiting etc. Find three adjectives used with the name ‘Achilles’ and three with the name ‘Agamemnon’. How meaningful do you find these adjectives? Try the same exercise with ‘Odysseus’ and ‘Penelope’.
Another feature of The Odyssey that readers often remark on is the somewhat convoluted plot. While this is structured by the motif of the quest, in other respects it is complex, and again part of its appeal can be understood in the balance and combination of the domestic and the distant. The epic begins with its focus not on the questing hero but rather on his son, who is confined in the toxic atmosphere of the palace at Ithaca. Only at the end of Book II does Telemachus succeed in departing, and there then follow two additional books before Odysseus actually appears in the text, during which Telemachus journeys to visit old friends of his father in order to seek news of him. The action of this ‘Telemachy’ is suspended, as the narrative focus suddenly switches to his father who, like his son at the beginning, is confined, in this case in the palace of the nymph Calypso.
Odysseus too is trying to escape and four books, from V through VIII, narrate his trajectory from Calypso’s island to the court of the Phaeacians and his reception there. There is then an even more noticeable shift in the narrative structure, when the story of Odysseus at the court of Alcinous changes to Odysseus’s first-person narrative about himself. This first-person account runs from Book IX through to XII, and concludes there as Odysseus finishes his story, at the half-way point of the epic, having recounted his adventures up to this very moment of their telling. After the next two books, XIII and XIV, Odysseus’s final return to Ithaca, the narrative at the beginning of Book XV swings back to resume the account of Telemachus’s effort to return home, which was left uncompleted at Book XIV, and to get him home in Book XV. Two separate narratives, focused on son and father in sequence, converge and finally intersect. Hereafter, until the poem ends at Book XXIV, there is a single storyline, which drives forward into the future, rather than looping back into the past. This multilinear, intertwining narrative is not merely an engaging formal feature of the poem, however. It also produces effects, such as suspense and intrigue, and, beyond that, it is pertinent to some of the themes of the poem.
Activity
Draw a linear chart of the narrative, grouping the books of the epic together according to the character on which they focus, and according to whether they feature third-person or first-person narratives (e.g. Books I–IV, Telemachus, third-person narrative).
One such theme is that of heroism, which obviously features largely in the epic. The poem begins with a focus on Telemachus, the boy who is becoming a man, and who therefore needs heroic models. But these are in very short supply, since the male environment surrounding him consists almost entirely of the dissolute suitors. He thus faces not only the debilitation of his family, house and the kingdom, but also the loss and absence of his father, which makes the suitors’ behaviour possible. Telemachus’s response is to try to fill in the vacuum of the absent father by reconstructing that father from the stories about him provided by Nestor, Menelaus and Helen. In this activity and the associated forays into the heroic world of his father’s friends, Telemachus already begins to act like the very role model that he is building.
No matter how much Telemachus approximates his father in himself, however, he cannot replace his father until his father, ironically, returns. As is indicated by the narrative sequencing their returns, Telemachus cannot get back to Ithaca until Odysseus does. Given that Telemachus has gone as far as he possibly can in finding, and making, his father, the narrative switches to Odysseus himself, at the start of Book V, as we finally encounter the great ‘sacker of cities’, the hero of the Trojan Horse, even more fearsome in the lethal power of his mind than in his formidable prowess as a warrior. But how does he first appear in The Odyssey? He is weeping ‘like a woman’, as the patriarchal stereotype of ancient Greek culture has it, and on Calypso’s island he is indeed losing his heroic masculinity because he is captive to a female whom he does not even desire any more. He makes good his escape, but then Poseidon, Greek god of the sea, intervenes, smashing the raft and reducing Odysseus to the status of a castaway. When he meets the beautiful Nausicaa on the Phaeacian beach, he has been reduced to the literal bare minimum of humanity.
How does Odysseus reacquire heroic status after this dramatic fall? In the first instance, Odysseus excels in the competitive games that the Phaeacians stage in Book VIII. More important than this physical prowess, however, is his accomplishment at the ensuing feast, when his host Alcinous asks him who he is. Alcinous is prompted by the tears Odysseus sheds at hearing the story of the Trojan War sung by the court bard, but when Odysseus takes over the storytelling, to recount his own history, he rebuilds his heroic identity, reliving, reinventing and recognising himself in the autobiographical narrative. Frustrated though he is in his quest to return home, he now knows fully who he once was, as well as who he now is, and he can link both these versions of himself in a devastating but ultimately enabling chain of narration. As important as this self-rediscovery is, there is another consequence of Odysseus’s story of himself which is just as important as this one. The Phaeacians are so moved that they bestow on Odysseus not merely as much treasure as he took from Troy, and then lost on the way, but more such treasure. Not only his heroism but also his art is amply compensated.
Odysseus’s first-person narrative arguably also develops a new, post-war version of heroism. It shows him engaging with the various hazards that thronged his route home, such as the cannibal Laestrygonians, the soporific Lotus-Eaters, the sorceress Circe who turns men into pigs, and the monster Cyclops. On the way back from the Trojan War he puts his famous intelligence to the service of guile, deception and disguise, as he develops an identity characterised less by traditional military heroism and more by the flexibility, indeed opportunism, of a survivor. Two moments sum up this development. In the cave of the Cyclops he escapes by using the trick of calling himself ‘Nobody’, but when he then announces to the wounded monster his real heroic name and lineage, he accidentally enables the Cyclops to curse him with Poseidon’s wrath. In the Underworld, the shade of Achilles counsels him in the necessity of survival at any cost by showing that it is preferable to be a poor man alive than a great hero among the dead. Alone, having lost all his men, and in the disguise of a beggar, Odysseus will be that poor man when he successfully takes on the suitors.
Activity
Discuss the ways in which The Odyssey represents heroism. To what extent is Odysseus a conventional warlike hero, and to what extent is he engaged in a redefinition of heroism?
The inset first-person narrative brings Odysseus into contact with a range of figures, and although the focus is on Odysseus’s adventures, commentators remark on the wide sympathies of the poem. When Odysseus gets to Ithaca, several low-status characters still make claims on our attention, such as the shepherd Eumaeus and other ‘faithful retainers’, and Odysseus’s neglected dog. Even the hostile characters like Melanthius and the maids perhaps evoke some pity. More striking still is the prominence of Penelope as the epic nears its end, and the questions that arise about her perception of Odysseus’s identity beneath the beggarly disguise: what does she know and when does she know it? Throughout the poem Odysseus encounters a series of formidable females, such as Circe, Calypso and Nausicaa; interest in the female is such that Samuel Butler conjectured the poem’s author to be a young woman. The female figures, which present various difficulties to Odysseus, including metamorphosis, death and marriage, are ranged between Helen, the faithless wife of Menelaus, who was one cause of the Trojan War, and Penelope, herself under siege on Ithaca. Lurking in the background is the nightmare figure of Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon, supreme commander of the Greek host at Troy. In the Underworld, the ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus how he was murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, on his triumphant return from Troy. How Penelope will receive Odysseus thus becomes a crucial question.
In the event, her recognition of him comes via two tests, which are to distinguish him from the frauds who have plagued her during the last 10 years. First there is the archery contest, which Odysseus passes with flying colours, after which he massacres the suitors. The second test occurs when Penelope implies that his great bed has been moved from its original place. At this, he remonstrates with Penelope, insisting that no man could move it, because it is constructed out of a tree that is still rooted in the ground. This detail about the bed is a secret shared between husband and wife, and since only Odysseus could know it, Penelope accepts him as the authentic article. The additional significance of this secret is that Penelope has tested Odysseus by tricking him, in particular by suggesting her own infidelity, which matches his liaisons with Circe and Calypso. Finally, the trickster has himself been tricked, into revealing himself not on his terms, but on hers.
Activity
Compare and contrast the female figures of The Odyssey with each other and with Odysseus.
The rooted bed is a sign of Odysseus’s organic connection to his wife, house and kingdom, and it is no surprise that he and Penelope retreat to it, in order to share stories as well as to renew their marital acquaintance. But Odysseus also brings danger to his community because he has killed off the young nobles, and their families seek revenge. To prevent this threat of a whole new war, Athena, backed by Zeus, intervenes, and the potentially warring parties are reconciled under a wider settlement. Many readers have found this ending obscurely unsatisfactory – perhaps we crave the romantic fade on the reunited couple rather than protracted negotiations with the entire community. If so, The Odyssey is wiser than such readers in its awareness that the adjustment between war and peace is a constant necessity, and that the stories do not end.
Having read The Odyssey, this introduction and the associated secondary literature, you should be able to: