About the work
- Author
- Homer
- Original title
- Ὀδύσσεια (Odýsseia)
- Publication
- An oral poem, set down in writing around the eighth century BC.
- Genre
- Epic poem, in twenty-four books of Greek hexameters
- Setting
- Ithaca, Pylos and Sparta, the island of Calypso, the land of the Phaeacians and the seas of the journey home
- Period
- A few weeks, twenty years after Odysseus's departure for Troy
- Narrator
- Third person; in Books IX to XII, Odysseus himself recounts his adventures to the Phaeacians
- Protagonist
- Odysseus
About the author
The Story and Its World
The Odyssey tells the homecoming of Odysseus, king of the small island of Ithaca, ten years after the end of the Trojan War. When the poem begins, all the other surviving heroes have already returned, and he is held on the island of the nymph Calypso, who wants him as her husband. What keeps him away is the god Poseidon, enraged because Odysseus blinded his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus. In Ithaca, the nobles of the island and of the neighboring islands court Odysseus's wife, Penelope, occupy the palace and consume the household's herds, while the son, Telemachus, grows up not knowing whether his father is alive.
The world of the poem is organized around one rule: every stranger and every beggar comes from Zeus, and whoever receives a guest must give him table, bed, gifts and an escort home. By this rule the poem measures every people Odysseus meets, from the Phaeacians who welcome him to the Cyclops who devours his guests, and by it it also measures the suitors, who eat every day at the table of an absent man. The gods watch everything closely. Athena protects Odysseus and his son and appears to them in other guises, like that of the old Mentor, friend of the house.
The Argument That Runs Through the Poem
The poem does not begin with the hero. The first four books follow Telemachus, who calls the assembly in Ithaca and travels to Pylos and Sparta in search of news of his father, and only in Book V does Odysseus enter the scene, weeping on Calypso's beach. There he refuses the immortality the nymph offers him, because he wants to return to a harsh island and to a woman who will grow old. From then on the poem strips the hero of everything, ship, companions, clothes and even his name, and has him reconquer each thing: he arrives naked in the land of the Phaeacians, says his name and tells, himself, the adventures of the return, and lands in Ithaca, where Athena disguises him as an old beggar.
In the second half, the problem is reversed. Odysseus is already at home, but he must not be recognized, and each recognition happens in a manner specific to whoever recognizes him: the son hears the revelation in the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, the dog Argos recognizes his master at the door and dies, the nurse Eurycleia finds the scar while washing his feet, and Penelope tests him with the secret of the bed built around an olive tree. The contest of the bow restores to Odysseus his place as master of the house, and the slaughter of the suitors restores to the house the order they had broken.
The question behind everything is what makes a man who he is. For the poem, it is not enough to survive: Odysseus returns when he is again recognized as husband, father, son and king, and the last book ends with Athena establishing peace between him and the families of the dead.
Central Theme
- The Odyssey is the story of a hero taken apart and put back together: the reassembly of an identity.
Odysseus is stripped of everything (fleet, companions, seven years, even his clothes and his own name) and rebuilds himself piece by piece, not by force, but by metis (cunning intelligence), by speech and by alliances. And there is a paired movement: Telemachus must be assembled (to mature) while his father is reassembled (to recover).
Why the thesis holds
- The arc of Books V to VIII is literally a reassembly: the naked castaway on the beach (the ember under the ashes) recovers speech, clothes, strength, allies and identity.
What weighs against it
- Odysseus is already polytropos from the proem: perhaps he does not "reassemble" himself, but only reveals who he has always been when circumstances strip him bare.
Questions that remain
- What is left of a man when everything is taken away? (Homer's answer seems to be: the metis and the will to return.)
- Are the Telemachy (assembling the son) and Odysseus's recovery (reassembling the father) the same process in different phases?
What follows
- If the hero is made through action and speech (not through birth or brute force), heroism is something that is won through experience.
Telemachus: the Telemachy and coming of age
The work begins with the son, not the father. Books I-IV lead Telemachus from the passive young man (who imagines his father arriving from somewhere to drive out the suitors) to the one who acts: Athena, in the guise of Mentes, summons him ("you are no longer of an age for childish things"), and his coming of age begins with awareness of the present and with the journey. It is the "assembling" of the hero, the pair of Odysseus's "reassembling".
The Nostoi (the returns)
The Odyssey is one of the Nostoi, and the others resonate within it: the tragic return of Agamemnon (the paradigm for Orestes), the detour of Menelaus to Egypt, narrated at the court of Sparta, and that of Helen, abducted and later returned.
The hero's name, and why it is a key to the work
The name Odysseus means hatred, and the way the poem uses the word is what turns an etymological curiosity into a key to reading. The reading rests on three observations about Odysseus:
The name Odysseus comes from hatred. The poem itself explains it, in Book XIX: Eurycleia asks the grandfather to find a name for the boy, and Autolycus chooses Odysseus because he arrived there "with the hatred of many" (19.403-409). The verb is odýssomai, and the name would be, roughly, the one of hatred.
Mapping the family of odýssomai across the whole poem, the distribution is revealing: Athena asks Zeus "Why this hatred against him, Zeus?" (1.62); Leucothea says that Poseidon hates him (5.340); he himself acknowledges the earth-shaker's hatred (5.423); and Zeus and the Sun hate him (19.275). In almost all of them, Odysseus is the target, not the subject. Only in the grandfather's speech (19.407) does the hatred not have Odysseus as its target.
In other words: the name marks him above all as the hated one. And that is exactly what the shout at the Cyclops accomplishes. By saying aloud, for no necessary reason, the name that means hatred, he brings upon himself the hatred of a god, and becomes what the name always said. The name fulfills itself in the act of being pronounced. It is a stronger reading than the claim that he shouted out of hatred, and it is the one the text supports: at the moment of the shout the poem speaks of kotos, stored-up resentment, not of hatred (9.501).
Where this can be read in the text: the naming in Book XIX (19.406-409) and the shout to the Cyclops in Book IX (9.500-505).
Identity (name, lineage, land, past)
What constitutes a man, and what Odysseus reconquers.
Metis and the craftsman hero
Excellence is not only martial: it is technical and practical (the raft of Book V). The hero is "good at things".
Words as a weapon
Odysseus wins through persuasion and alliances ("know your audience", with Nausicaa).
Xenia: sacred hospitality
Hospitality to the stranger as a sacred right (and the lubricant of Mediterranean trade).
Double determination versus fatalism
The gods act, but so does the hero: blaming the gods is weakness (Zeus's opening); the hero sees himself as an active cog in destiny (the paradigm of Orestes).
The word that Zeus's opening puts into play is atasthalia, the arrogant blindness that ruins through the sole fault of the one who commits it. Hence the structural consequence: unlike the Iliad, the Odyssey has theodicy, a clear moral order. The companions die because they ate the cattle of the Sun, and the suitors die because they violated xenia: in neither case is fate the sole cause. This is what allows the slaughter of Book XXII to be read as tisis, the restoration of a right, and not as private vengeance.
Pleasure versus duty
Calypso and the seductive "eternal present" against the call of return and of mortal identity. Odysseus refuses the immortality she offers so that he can go back and grow old with Penelope.
Two bridges to today's culture: in The Lord of the Rings, Arwen gives up elven immortality to grow old and die beside Aragorn, the same exchange as Odysseus, only reversed (he trades the eternal for the mortal in order to return, she trades the eternal for the mortal in order to stay). And in the film City of Angels, the angel Seth gives up his own eternity in order to live, feel and love as a human, even knowing that this includes pain and death. In all three cases, the same underlying question: is it worth trading an empty eternity for mortal life, full and true?
Arwen became a mortal woman, yet it was not her destiny to die until she had lost all that she had gained.
The plot in a few lines
The Poetics sums up the whole poem in one sentence, to show that the argument of an epic is short and the rest are episodes: a man far from home for many years, watched over by Poseidon, who returns and makes himself known.
τῆς γὰρ Ὀδυσσείας οὐ μακρὸς ὁ λόγος ἐστίν· ἀποδημοῦντός τινος ἔτη πολλὰ καὶ παραφυλαττομένου ὑπὸ τοῦ Ποσειδῶνος καὶ μόνου ὄντος, ἔτι δὲ τῶν οἴκοι οὕτως ἐχόντων ὥστε τὰ χρήματα ὑπὸ μνηστήρων ἀναλίσκεσθαι καὶ τὸν υἱὸν ἐπιβουλεύεσθαι, αὐτὸς δὲ ἀφικνεῖται χειμασθείς, καὶ ἀναγνωρίσας τινὰς ἐπιθέμενος αὐτὸς μὲν ἐσώθη τοὺς δ’ ἐχθροὺς διέφθειρε(1455b), for the argument of the Odyssey is not long: a man is away from home for many years, watched over by Poseidon and alone, and at home things are so that the suitors consume his goods and plot against the son; he arrives, after passing through the storm, makes himself recognized by some, attacks, and he himself is saved and destroys his enemies.