Odyssey

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Odyssey

by Homer

THE LITERARY WORK

An epic Greek poem set around 1200 b.c. in Greece and surrounding lands; probably written in the eighth century b.c.

SYNOPSIS

The Odyssey recounts the wanderings of the hero Odysseus through the Mediterranean region, where he encounters a fantastic array of Bronze Age monsters and heroes on his journey homeward from the Trojan War.

Events in History at the Time the Poem Takes Place

The Poem in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Poem Was Written

For More Information

Homer is one of the most romantic figures in the history of Western literature. According to popular belief, he was a blind poet who orally composed and recited both the Odyssey and the closely related Greek epic, the Iliad (also covered in Literature and Its Times). Today there is considerable doubt that the same poet wrote both of these poems. Some scholars also think it likely that Homer was not blind and that he had traveled extensively. Scholars also debate whether he wrote down the poem himself or just created the oral version that was later written down by others. It is widely believed, however, that the written poems are polished examples of the type of epic tales that existed in ancient Greece. Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century b.c., claims that Homer was writing around 850 b.c., but modern critics contend that he flourished between 700 and 750 b.c. In view of the poem’s ancient setting some 500 years earlier, only a few details of the tale can be confirmed as historical. Others are either the product of Homer’s imagination or the remnants of epic tradition.

Events in History at the Time the Poem Takes Place

The Bronze Age

The events in the Odyssey occur in the Bronze Age, a period of ancient history from 1900-1150 b.c. The age takes its name from the metal that people of the era used for their weapons and household tools. In Greece and surrounding areas, Bronze Age civilization was highly sophisticated; kings lived in opulent palaces and commissioned artists to produce beautiful ceramics, mosaics, and metalwork. Well-made roads and a highly developed trading system linked Greece with the Near East, northern Africa, and Italy.

Large, partially walled cities dotted the landscape. The kings, whose palaces and citadels towered over these communities, made certain that the region’s food supply was secure and provided a basic framework of law and order. A simple system of writing emerged, but subsequently disappeared when the large cities were destroyed shortly after 1200 b.c. Archaeologists speculate that a series of local disputes as well as climatic changes and possibly earthquakes probably led to the fall of the cities.

Troy’s demolition heralded the end of the brilliant culture of Bronze Age Greece. Legends of a great war in Troy (located in modern-day Turkey) portray it as the most remarkable battle of the Bronze Age, drawing fighting men from all over the eastern Mediterranean region. It is this war to which Homer’s hero Odysseus is called from his native island of Ithaca.

The legendary Trojan War

According to the story, the war in Troy began when Paris, son of Troy’s king, abducted the beautiful Helen, the Queen of Sparta, and took her home to Troy with him. In retaliation, Helen’s husband, Menelaus, assembled a huge fleet that included Odysseus and his followers. The Greeks initiated a ten-year siege against the Trojan stronghold of Troy. They finally won the city through a clever ploy devised by Odysseus himself. The attackers built a huge wooden horse, filled its hollow belly with armed warriors, and then made a show of sailing away, as if defeated. The Trojans did not know what to make of this lone horse outside their walls, but they were eventually persuaded that it was left by the Greeks as a gift. Despite the warnings of a prophet and other signs of doom, the Trojans were reassured by their enemy’s departure and dragged the horse inside the city. Under cover of night, the hidden warriors streamed out of the horse, opened the gates for their fellow Greeks (who had sailed back into the harbor), and sacked Troy.

The Odyssey includes a scene in which a singer relates the story of Troy’s destruction and the slaughter that took place there. Hearing this song on his long journey home, Odysseus breaks down and weeps, but not because the hero feels guilty about the havoc he caused in Troy. Instead, Odysseus laments his long absence from home and his separation from friends. He even mentions that, upon leaving Troy, he sacked yet another city, known as the city of the Ciconians: “I sacked their city and killed their people, / and out of their city taking their wives and possessions / we shared them out” (Homer, Odyssey, 8.40-2). Such events illustrate the day-to-day life of a warrior in the world of Homeric epic.

Mycenaean navigation

The people of Mycenae and other towns on the southern Greek mainland spread their influence throughout much of the area. Their impact on the region was so great that an era in Greek history—the Mycenaean Age (1400-1150 b.c.)—was named after them. Memories of seafaring in the western Mediterranean at this time may provide the background for Odysseus’s wanderings after he leaves Troy. A standard trade route went past Odysseus’s island home of Ithaca, located off the northwest coast of Greece. The route continued toward the “heel” of Italy and then extended to Sicily and Malta.

Greek sailors regularly voyaged more than five hundred miles from home, and Mycenaean artifacts and influences have been traced as far away as Sweden, Italy, and Slovakia. Such findings suggest that the stories of Odysseus’s journeys may not have been merely fables; perhaps they were based in part on reports of actual journeys. When, near the end of the Odyssey, the sorceress Circe tells Odysseus how to return from her enchanted island to his home, her directions are so specific that some historians believe that Homer relied upon an actual sailing manual of sorts. Historians have long battled over the exact geographic location of Odysseus’s wanderings, but no one is really certain about the route that he allegedly took. Homer’s own eighth-century society did not explore or trade nearly to the same extent as the previous society, so much of the geographic material contained in the Odyssey may have been preserved and passed down in legends.

ORAL POETRY AND THE HEROIC ACE

Many of the subjects of Greek oral poetry come from events of the so-called Heroic Age, the legendary age in which Homer’s heroes lived (imagined to be 1250-1150 b.c.). The main function of the oral poet was to preserve the memory of the great deeds of a society’s heroes by composing and transmitting in song a narrative of their exploits. Such songs were usually embellished with the passage of time.

The Poem in Focus

The plot

The epic opens with a dialogue between the gods Zeus and Athena, who discuss the fate of Odysseus, who has been struggling to return home from the Trojan War for ten years. He has been kept from his goal by the wrath of the god Poseidon, whose son (the one-eyed Cyclops) Odysseus had injured. Because of Poseidon’s grudge, Odysseus has been forced to wander the known world, experiencing countless adventures along the way. These include encounters with the sorceress Circe and the beautiful and seductive nymph Calypso. He also visits the Land of the Dead, where he speaks to the spirits of his mother and slain comrades.

While Odysseus sails through these foreign lands in his struggle to return to his beloved family, his wife—the beautiful, clever, and wealthy Penelope—is courted by 108 suitors who are hopeful that Odysseus has died. Each of these men would like nothing more than to seize Odysseus’s power and property for himself. Vague threats are leveled at Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, who is coming of age and will soon be able to assume his father’s place. The suitors all move into Penelope’s palace at the same time and refuse to budge, pressing her for a decision, but she remains faithful (as she has for twenty years) to the hope that Odysseus will one day return.

All along Penelope has manipulated the suitors in an effort to keep her options open and acquire valuable gifts. The suitors, however, caught her at one of her tricks. Penelope had claimed that before she remarries she must finish weaving a funeral shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’s aging father. But although she wove all day, at night she undid her own progress, secretly unraveling the work accomplished in public the previous day. When the Odyssey opens, the suitors have now learned from this episode and are forcing Penelope to make daily progress in her weaving.

Odysseus, whose name in Greek means “man of pain,” finally returns to Ithaca, although he has been stripped of every possession. Odysseus dons a disguise and, with the help of his now-adult son, disposes of the suitors. In a touching recognition scene, Penelope comes to realize that the disguised stranger is her long-lost husband. Odysseus then is finally reunited with the wife he has sought for so long to rejoin.

The gods

In the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus is trapped in the “hollowed caverns” of the nymph Calypso, who wants the warrior to be her husband. She promises to make him immortal should he stay with her. But Odysseus remains adamant in his desire to rejoin his family—and indeed this is the fate that has been decided for him by the immortal gods: “But when in the circling of the years that very year came / in which the gods had spun for him his time of homecoming / to Ithaca, not even then was [Odysseus] free of his trials / nor among his own people” (Odyssey, 1.16-18).

The gods speak to Calypso, who reluctantly allows Odysseus to leave her island. In the Odyssey, gods and goddesses are often involved in events that affect the hero. But Zeus, the father of the gods, insists that the gods themselves are not responsible for what happens to human beings. Instead, humans bring misery on themselves: “Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame upon us / gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather, / who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given” (Odyssey, 1.32-4).

In the Odyssey, the Greek gods are portrayed as “anthropomorphic”—that is, they take the form and attributes of human beings. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, for example, dons different human disguises and takes frequent walks among the mortals. Like human beings, the gods and goddesses have unique personalities and motivations, fighting battles among themselves as well as with human beings. Athena and Zeus, her father, support Odysseus and try to help him reach home. Poseidon, the god of the sea, strives against him, seeking vengeance because Odysseus put out the eye of one of Poseidon’s sons.

The religious aspect of the relationship between the gods and the mortals of the Odyssey remains rather shadowy. Sacrifices to the gods are the strongest element of worship shown in the poem. It is, in fact, because Odysseus has sacrificed more to the gods than any other man has that he wins the support of the father of the gods, Zeus, in his struggles to return to Ithaca.

Sacrifice involved the ritual slaying of an animal, generally a cow or a sheep, in the name of a god or goddess. One of the most detailed descriptions of a sacrifice in the Odyssey occurs when Nestor, to whom Odysseus’s son Telemachus goes for advice, sacrifices a heifer to Athena. The ritual combines painstaking preparations, such as dipping the cow’s horns in gold, with determined blood-letting:

Stratios and the noble Echephron led the cow
by the horns, and Aretos came from the inner
chamber carrying
lustral water in a flowered bowl, and in
the other hand
scattering barley in a basket. Steadfast
Thrasymedes
stood by with the sharp ax in his hand, to
strike down the heifer.
Perseus held the dish for the blood, and the
aged horseman
Nestor began with the water and the barley,
making long prayers,
to Athene [Athena], in dedication, and threw
the head hairs in the fire.
          (Odyssey, 3.439-46)

Hades

In a section of the poem, Odysseus visits the Greek underworld, which is ruled by the Greek god of death, Hades, and his bride Persephone. The hero speaks there to the spirits of his mother and his companion Elpenor, who recently died. He also converses with a variety of Greek heroes of both sexes.

The dead spirits are summoned to Odysseus by a blood sacrifice that seeps into the ground; the spirits flock around the blood in order to drink it, and only then may Odysseus speak to the souls of the dead:

[Now gathered] brides, and young unmarried
men, and long-suffering elders,
virgins, tender and with the sorrows of young
hearts upon them,
and many fighting men killed in battle,
stabbed with brazen
spears, still carrying their bloody armor upon
them
These came swarming around my pit from
every direction
with inhuman clamor, and green fear took
whold of me.

(Odyssey, 11.34-43)

The land of the dead appears to be a place of despair and unhappiness. Even the names of places in Hades are sorrowful, as shown by the names of the mythic rivers in the underworld: Grief Flood, Fireblast River, Wailing Stream, and Loathing Water (Odyssey, 10.513-14). Homer’s grim picture of the afterworld is reinforced by the words of Odysseus’s mother, who has died of grief at the prolonged absence of her son. Her spirit appears and tells Odysseus what happens to human beings after death:

The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the
bones together,
and the spirit has left the white bones, all the
rest
of the body is made subject to the fire’s
strong fury,
but the soul flitters out like a dream, and flies 
away.
                   (Odyssey, 11.219-22)

RELEVANT DATES AND AGES

Bronze Age: 1900-1150 b.c.

Mycenaean culture: 1400-1150 b.c.

Troy is destroyed: c. 1200 b.c. (traditional dates—1184 b.c. or 1250 b.c.

Greek Dark Ages: 1150-800 b.c.

Homer writes the Odyssey: 750-700 b.c.

According to Homer, the spirits of all people, whether good or evil in life, wind up in the same place. The Greek word psuche (psyche), which means “soul,” is used in the Odyssey to refer to the image of a person visible in Hades or in dreams. According to the poem, this visual image, which always goes to Hades, is all that remains after the death of the body.

The land of Hades is a dark world of sorrowful shadows where the spirits of the dead lament forever. Odysseus’s visit reinforces the seriousness of his choice to leave Calypso to rejoin his beloved family. His decision indicates that he prefers the temporary joys and pains of a human life with family and a home on earth, even if it means eventual residence in Hades, to an eternal life of bliss with an immortal nymph.

Family ties

In many respects, the center of the Odyssey is the hero’s wife back in Ithaca, Penelope. Odysseus struggles to be reunited with her, but uncertainty about their relationship runs through the poem. Questions about whether Odysseus will return home in time and whether Penelope will have waited for him are raised throughout the Odyssey. Odysseus’s long absence has put their marriage in jeopardy because he had previously given her permission to do as she pleases regarding future matches should he fail to return:

I do not know if the god will spare me...
there in Troy; here let everything be in your
charge.
You must take thought for my father and
mother here in our palace,
As you do now, or even more, since I shall be
absent.
But when you see our son grown up and
bearded, then you may
marry whatever man you please, forsaking
your household.

(Odyssey, 18. 265-70)

If Penelope had gone ahead and married another man—for example, one of the suitors—without knowing whether Odysseus were dead or alive, that second marriage would have been valid in the eyes of society at that time, even if Odysseus returned at a later date. Marriage was approached from a practical, rather than legal, perspective. If a relationship between a man and a woman had the appearance of marriage, then the partnership was viewed as a marriage by others in the community. A long-absent husband, or one who failed to provide for his wife, called the validity of marriage into question. Penelope’s future, however, was not entirely in her control because of the limits placed on women in her society.

“Homeric” society, the society of the poet’s characters, was organized according to the oikos, or family unit. An oikos consisted of a male, a female, children, and other people or animals that fell under the protection of the male. There was an emphasis on continuing the family unit in the future, and thus it was important for the sons of the family to produce male heirs. The leader of the oikos was always the most prominent male, generally the father/husband, but in the event of his death that responsibility fell on the eldest son. If the sons were too young to assume the family leadership, the wife was permitted to control the possessions and home of the oikos.

Penelope was in just such a situation. If, having concluded that her husband was actually dead, Penelope had decided to leave Odysseus’s house, she was free to return to the house of her father and rejoin his oikos. She was in fact free to do this at any time in their marriage; to do so constituted getting a divorce. When Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus, was old enough to assume the role of leader of the oikos, he could also send his mother back to her father, although he would be obligated to pay for that option. If the death of Odysseus was confirmed, Telemachus would be able to marry his mother off as he liked.

Sources

Homer was part of a mainly oral culture by which people received most of their information not from written sources but from word of mouth. As a member of a migrant people who had been driven out of their sophisticated cities by war and other misfortunes, it is almost inevitable that Homer would have heard tales about heroes of the glorious past such as Odysseus: “In Homer... the oral tradition which went back to Mycenaean times reached its culmination and its end.... Centuries of history have gone into the making of... [the] Odyssey” (Ehrenberg, p. 10).

Reviews

The Odyssey became the first Greek text to be translated for use by Roman schoolboys, and its fame continues unabated. For the Greeks, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey became a primary source for the mythology and legend that dominated much of their artistic culture. At least one Greek, however, remained torn about the value of Homer’s work: some three hundred years after the Odyssey was written, Plato blames Homer for telling unpleasant tales about the gods, heroes, and Greek underworld.

Plato had positive comments about Homer as well. For instance, he praised the poet for presenting images of self-control in Odysseus, particularly when the hero, in a moment of rage, wants to slay all the suitors himself rather than wait for assistance. He wisely waits, saying “Endure, my heart, you have suffered more shameful things than this” (Odyssey, 20.18). This declaration is significant, as throughout Odysseus’s long journey he has been a victim of his own lack of self-control, giving in to emotional reactions without considering the consequences. In contrast, near the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus has finally gained a great degree of self-mastery.

In the fifth century b.c., the Greek historian Herodotus credited Homer with having “made” the great gods and heroes about which he wrote; in fact, the word poet comes from the Greek verb “to make.” Herodotus singled out Homer as the finest transmitter of the Heroic Age that ancient Greece had produced.

PLATO ON HOMER’S HADES

Three centuries after Homer wrote the Odyssey, Plato reacted strongly to the lines in which the hero Achilles claims: “I would rather labor on earth in service to another, / to a man who is landless, with little to live on, / than be king over all the dead” (Odyssey, 11,489-91). Plato responds to this declaration in the Republic (also covered in Literature and Its Times), which features Socrates as the primary speaker:

What if [men] are to be brave? Should not one tell them things that will make them least afraid of death? Or do you think anyone ever becomes brave if this fear possesses him?... Further, can he be without fear of death, and prefer it to defeat in battle and to slavery, if he believes in an underworld full of terrors?... We must then... supervise such tales and those who undertake to tell them, and beg them not to rail at things in the underworld in the unrestrained manner they do, but rather to praise them, as their stories are neither true nor beneficial to future warriors.
(Plato, Republic, 386B-C)

Events in History at the Time the Poem Was Written

Homer’s culture

Homer’s culture emerged out of the Dark Ages, a historical period of obscurity and decline that ended around 800 b.c. It was formed by exiles who migrated away from the Greek mainland toward Asia Minor after the fall of the Mycenaean cities. During this period of destruction, the Greek mainland underwent a devastating decline in population, as well as the almost complete disintegration of urban life. Those who remained tended to huddle together in small hamlets that were probably organized around a tribal system called the ethnos.

People resettled in the general vicinities of the great Mycenaean cities over time, but in an entirely different way from their predecessors. They encircled the entire city, or polis, with a wall; earlier designs featured walls that only enclosed the area where the aristocracy lived. Inside the walls, people were able to remain organized within a tribal system. This polis was the forerunner of the later Greek city-state; “it was in fact, both more and less than a state, rather a human community, often very small indeed, always held together by narrow space, by religion, by pride, by life” (Ehrenberg, p. 7).

In the eighth century b.c., the period when Homer probably composed the Odyssey, the polis underwent a political change. Those people in control of the land surrounding and within the city walls began to concentrate their power. Since kings and royal families were no longer a feature of these societies, powerful landowners emerged as a new aristocracy. The towns in which the landowners lived began to grow in importance. A new type of human community wherein citizens were ruled by a class of noble landowners gradually formed. The emergence of this new noble class may have inspired the reappearance of tales such as the Odyssey, which depicts the exploits and problems of wealthy leaders. In all probability the noble class liked to trace its ancestry to the same legendary heroes that Homer’s tales depict.

The people of Homer’s culture, whose ancestors were almost certainly Mycenaean-era refugees, were largely responsible for reviving the legends of the Heroic Age. This cultural revival took various forms, including the production of lengthy poems that recounted the heroic exploits of earlier days. From Homer’s descriptions of cities in the Odyssey, historians have speculated that he must have lived in one of the walled cities that were sprouting up in this era. Smyrna is often mentioned as a possible home of the poet.

The alphabet

In the eighth century b.c., the Greeks were in regular contact with the Phoenician culture that was based in present-day Syria. Important trading partners with the Greeks, the Phoenicians brought with them what was probably their most significant contribution to Greek culture and ultimately to the history of the world: the alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet, which had characters for consonants only, first appeared in Greece around 850 b.c. Building on this base, the Greeks modified it by adding symbols for vowel sounds and for other sounds that were uniquely Greek. In fact, the word alphabet comes from the first two letters—the vowel alpha (a) and the consonant beta (b)—of the Greek alphabet. In time the system of writing became fairly uniform throughout the land. The writing of Homer’s poem, which occurred sometime in the eighth century b.c., thus dates from shortly after the introduction of the alphabet.