The Odyssey(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Read online

  One obvious weakness of this line of argument is that the story of Telemachus is no fit subject for heroic song; there is nothing heroic about it until Telemachus takes his place, spear in hand, by his father’s side in the palace at Ithaca. As a separate epic poem, the material of Books 1–4 is something hard to imagine in the historical context —a Bildungsroman, the story of a young man from a poor and backward island who asserts himself at home and visits the sophisticated courts of two rich and powerful kingdoms, to return home a grown man. Such a theme is worlds apart from the songs offered by bards in the Odyssey and the Iliad. Demodocus at the Phaeacian court tells the tale of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, and later, at Odysseus’ request, of the wooden horse that brought about Troy’s fall. Phemius in the palace at Ithaca sings of the return of the Achaeans from Troy and the disasters inflicted on them by Athena, and when Penelope asks him to choose some other theme, she speaks of his knowledge of the “works of the gods and men that singers celebrate” (ref). And in the Iliad, when the ambassadors from Agamemnon come to plead with Achilles to rejoin them on the battle line, they find him playing the lyre, “singing the famous deeds of fighting heroes” (9.228). A song celebrating the travels of Telemachus is not easy to imagine in the context of a male audience accustomed to tales of adventure and feats of arms. How would the bard begin? “Sing to me, Muse, of the coming of age of Telemachus . . .”? It seems much more likely that the Telemacheia was a creation of the poet who decided to combine a tale of adventures in fabulous seas —a western voyage modeled on the saga of the Argo’s voyage to the east —with a Nostos, the return home of a hero from Troy, in this case to face a situation as dangerous as that awaiting Agamemnon. For that decision forced on him a radical departure from the traditional narrative procedure of heroic song and confronted him with a problem for which the Telemacheia was a masterly solution.

  Epic narrative characteristically announces the point in the story at which it begins and then proceeds in chronological order to its end. The Iliad opens with the poet’s request to the Muse: “Rage —Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”; he then tells her where to start: “Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, / Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles” (1.1–8). She does, and the story is told in strict chronological order until its end: “And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses” (24.944). In the Odyssey, when Odysseus asks the Phaeacian bard Demodocus to “Sing of the wooden horse / Epeus built with Athena’s help,” the bard “launched out / in a fine blaze of song, starting at just the point / where the main Achaean force, setting their camps afire . . .” (ref), and carries the story on until Troy falls. But the prologue to the Odyssey abandons this traditional request to the Muse or the singer to begin at a certain point. It begins, like the Iliad, with a request to the Muse to sound a theme —the wrath of Achilles, the wanderings of Odysseus —but instead of telling her where to start —“Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed” —it leaves the choice to her. “Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus, / start from where you will” (ref). And she does. She begins, not with Odysseus’ departure from Troy (which is where he begins when he tells his story to the Phaeacians), but in the twentieth year of his absence from home, as Athena starts Telemachus on his journey to Pylos and Sparta and arranges Odysseus’ escape from his seven-year captivity on Calypso’s island.

  The reason for this startling departure from tradition is not far to seek. If the poet had begun at the beginning and observed a strict chronology, he would have been forced to interrupt the flow of his narrative as soon as he got his hero back to Ithaca, in order to explain the extremely complicated situation he would have to deal with in his home. The Telemacheia enables him to set the stage for the hero’s return and to introduce the main participants in the final scenes —Athena, Telemachus, Penelope, Eurycleia, Antinous, Eurymachus —as well as a group of minor players: Medon, the servant who helped rear Telemachus; Dolius, the servant of Laertes; Halitherses and Mentor, two old Ithacans who disapprove of the suitors; the suitor Leocritus; and Phemius, the Ithacan bard. And the accounts of Telemachus’ voyages do more than chart his progress, under Athena’s guidance, from provincial diffidence to princely self-confidence in his dealings with kings; they also offer us two ideal visions of the hero’s return, so different from what awaits Odysseus —Nestor among his sons, Menelaus with his wife and daughter, both of them presiding over rich kingdoms and loyal subjects.

  Division into separate songs by different poets was not the only approach to dissecting the body of the Odyssey. The nineteenth century was the age that saw the birth of the scientific historical spirit. And also of the history of language —the discipline of linguistics. All this had a bearing on the problem. If in fact some sections of the Odyssey were older than others, they should contain linguistic features characteristic of an earlier stage of the language than that to be found in the more recent additions. Similarly, the later parts of the poem should contain allusions to customs, laws, objects and ideas belonging to the later historical period, and vice versa. Toward the end of the century a fresh criterion emerged for gauging the antiquity of different sections of the poem —the archaeological criterion. For with Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy and Mycenae, and those of Sir Arthur Evans at Cnossos, a previously unknown civilization was revealed. If there was any historicity to Homer’s account of the Achaean world that organized the attack on Troy, it must be a reference to this world —a world of gold masks, bronze weapons, palaces and fortifications —not to the archaeologically poverty-stricken Greece of the Dark Age. Now, by finding in Homer descriptions of objects that corresponded to something excavated from a Bronze Age site, the scholar could date a passage, because it was clear that with the destruction of the Mycenaean and Minoan palaces, all memory of that age had disappeared in Greece. Schliemann and Evans had discovered things Herodotus and Thucydides had no idea of.

  Of these three approaches, the linguistic seemed the most promising, the most likely to yield objective criteria. Studies of the origins of Greek in the Indo-European family of languages had progressed along generally agreed and scientific lines: the history of the Greek language and the Greek dialects had become an exact discipline. Surely the linguistic analysis of the text would confirm or refute theories of earlier and later strata in the poems.

  THE LANGUAGE OF HOMER

  The language of Homer is of course a problem in itself. One thing is certain: it is not a language that anyone ever spoke. It is an artificial, poetic language —as the German scholar Witte puts it, “The language of the Homeric poems is a creation of epic verse.” It was also a difficult language. For the Greeks of the great age, that fifth century we inevitably think of when we say “the Greeks,” the idiom of Homer was far from limpid (they had to learn the meaning of long lists of obscure words at school), and it was brimful of archaisms —in vocabulary, syntax and grammar —and of incongruities: words and forms drawn from different dialects and different stages of the growth of the language. In fact, the language of Homer was one nobody, except epic bards, oracular priests or literary parodists would dream of using.

  This does not mean that Homer was a poet known only to scholars and schoolboys; on the contrary, the Homeric epics were familiar as household words in the mouths of ordinary Greeks. They maintained their hold on the tongues and imaginations of the Greeks by their superb literary quality —the simplicity, speed and directness of the narrative technique, the brilliance and excitement of the action, the greatness and imposing humanity of the characters —and by the fact that they presented the Greek people, in memorable form, with the images of their gods and the ethical, political and practical wisdom of their cultural tradition. Homer was thus at once contemporary in content and antique in form. The texture of Homeric epic was for the classic age of Greece like that of the Elgin Marbles for us —weathered by time but speaking to us directly: august, authoritative, inimitable, a vision of life fixed fore
ver in forms that seem to have been molded by gods rather than men.

  The language of Homer is the “creation of epic verse” in a strict sense too: it is created, adapted and shaped to fit the epic meter, the hexameter. This is a line, as its name indicates, of six metrical units, which may, to put it crudely, be either dactyls (a long plus two shorts) or spondees (two longs) in the first four places but must be dactyl and spondee in that order in the last two (rarely spondee and spondee, never spondee followed by dactyl). The syllables are literally long and short; the meter is based on pronunciation time, not, as in our language, on stress. But unlike most English verse, the meter does not allow departures from the basic norms —such phenomena as the Shakespearean variations on the basic blank verse line, still less the subtleties of Eliot’s prosody in The Waste Land.

  Yet though it is always metrically regular, it never becomes monotonous; its internal variety guarantees that. This regularity imposed on variety is Homer’s great metrical secret, the strongest weapon in his poetic arsenal. The long line, which no matter how it varies in the opening and middle always ends in the same way, builds up its hypnotic effect in book after book, imposing on things and men and gods the same pattern, presenting in a rhythmic microcosm the wandering course to a fixed end which is the pattern of the rage of Achilles and the travels of Odysseus, of all natural phenomena and all human destinies.

  The meter itself demands a special vocabulary, for many combinations of long and short syllables that are common in the spoken language cannot be admitted to the line —any word with three consecutive short syllables, for example, any word with one short syllable between two longs. This difficulty was met by choosing freely among the many variations of pronunciation and prosody afforded by Greek dialectal differences; the epic language is a mixture of dialects. Under a light patina of Attic forms (easily removable and clearly due to the preeminence of Athens as a literary center and then of the book trade), there is an indissoluble mixture of two different dialects, Aeolic and Ionic. But the attempts of the linguists to use this criterion for early (Aeolic) and late (Ionic) ran into the dilemma that Aeolic and Ionic forms sometimes appear inextricably tangled in the same line or half-line.

  The attempts to dissect the Odyssey along historical lines were no more satisfactory (except of course to their authors). There are indeed passages that seem to imply different historical backgrounds, but they are not passages that are identifiable as early or late by the criteria of linguistic difference or structural analysis. All through the poem, weapons and armor are made of bronze —spearheads, arrow tips, swords, helmets and breastplates; men are killed by “pitiless bronze.” In superior palaces, like those of the gods or King Alcinous of the Phaeacians, bathtubs and cauldrons and even the threshold of the building are made of bronze. On the other hand, iron is used for axes and adzes; it is so familiar an item that it is constantly in use in metaphor and simile —“heart of iron,” for example. But there is no way to separate Bronze Age from Iron Age layers; the two metals lie cheek by jowl, and even the distinction between bronze for weapons and iron for tools is often ignored —“Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin” is a proverbial phrase twice quoted by Odysseus (ref, ref), and a man who is dipping red-hot iron in water is called a chalkeus, a bronze or copper worker. Early in the poem, Athena, disguised as Mentes, says that she is sailing for Temese with a cargo of iron, which she intends to trade for bronze.

  But archaeological ages are not the only matter to be handled by the Muse with careless abandon. There seem to be two different marriage systems in the world of the Odyssey: in some passages the bride’s family settles a dowry on the bride, but in others the suitor makes valuable gifts to the bride’s family. “It is most probable,” says a recent commentator on the Odyssey (West, Commentary, I, p. 111), “that Homeric marriage-customs represent an amalgam of practices from different historical periods and different places, further complicated, perhaps, by misconception.” They are obviously not much use for dating the passages in which they appear.

  It is not surprising, in view of such frustrating results, that by the beginning of the twentieth century, opinion had begun to swing away from analysis and to concentrate on the qualities of the poem itself, to stress the unity of the main action rather than the digressions and inconsistencies, above all to explore the elaborate correspondences of structure that often link scene to scene. The architecture of the poem is magnificent, and it strongly suggests the hand of one composer, but it is true that there is a certain roughness in the details of the execution. The poem does contain, in an indissoluble amalgam, material that seems linguistically and historically to span many centuries. And it does contain long digressions, and some disconcerting inconsistencies, some weaknesses of construction. What sort of poet composed it, and how did he work?

  The answer was supplied by an American scholar, whose name was Milman Parry. Parry, who came from California and was an assistant professor at Harvard when he was killed in a gun accident at an early age, did his most significant work in Paris; in fact, he wrote it in French and published it in Paris in 1928. It did not appear in English until 1971, when, translated by his son, Adam Parry, it formed part of a collection of all his Homeric studies. His work was not appreciated or even fully understood until long after his death, in 1935, but once understood, it completely changed the terms of the problem.

  Parry’s achievement was to prove that Homer was a master of and heir to a tradition of oral epic poetry that reached back over many generations, perhaps even centuries. Parry drew attention to the so-called ornamental epithets, those long, high-sounding labels that accompany every appearance of a hero, a place, or even a familiar object. Odysseus, for example, is “much-enduring,” “a man of many schemes,” “godlike” and “great-hearted”; the island of Ithaca is “rocky,” “seagirt” and “clear-skied”; ships are “hollow,” “swift” and “well-benched,” to list only some of the often polysyllabic epithets attached to them. These recurring epithets had of course been noticed before Parry, and their usefulness understood. They offer, for each god, hero or object, a choice of epithets, each one with a different metrical shape. In other words, the particular epithet chosen by the poet may have nothing to do with, for example, whether Achilles is “brilliant” or “swift-footed” at this particular point in the poem —the choice depends on which epithet fits the meter.

  Parry pursued this insight of the German analytical scholars to its logical end and demonstrated that in fact there was an intricate system of metrical alternatives for the recurring names of heroes, gods and objects. It was a system that was economical —hardly any unnecessary alternatives were used —but had great scope: there was a way to fit the names into the line in any of the usual grammatical forms they would assume. Parry demonstrated that the system was more extensive and highly organized than anyone had dreamed, and he also realized what it meant. It meant that this system had been developed by and for the use of oral poets who improvised. In Paris he met scholars who had studied such improvising illiterate bards still performing in Yugoslavia. He went there to study their operations himself.

  The Homeric epithets were created to meet the demands of the meter of Greek heroic poetry, the dactylic hexameter. They offer the improvising bard different ways of fitting the name of his god, hero, or object into whatever section of the line is left after he has, so to speak, filled up the first half (that, too, quite possibly, with another formulaic phrase). Odysseus, for example, is often described as “much-enduring, brilliant Odysseus” —pŏlūtlās dīŏs Ŏdūssēus —a line ending. In Book 5 Calypso, who has had Odysseus to herself on her island for seven years, is ordered by the gods to release him and tells him he can go. But he suspects a trap, and shudders. “So she spoke,” says Homer, “and he shuddered” —hōs phătŏ rīgēsēn dĕ —and he ends with the formula “much-enduring, brilliant Odysseus” —pŏlūtlās dīŏs Ŏdūssēus —to form a hexameter line. A little later Calypso asks Odysseus how he can prefer his wif
e at home to her immortal charms, and his diplomatic answer is introduced by the formula: “and in answer he addressed her” —tēn d’ ăpŏmēibŏmĕnōs prŏsĕphē. But the line cannot be completed with “much-enduring, brilliant Odysseus”; that formula is too long for this position. So Odysseus ceases for the moment to be “much-enduring” and “brilliant” and becomes something that conforms to the metrical pattern: “a man of many schemes” —pŏlŭmētĭs Ŏdūssēus. The hero’s name is especially adaptable; Homer uses two different spellings —Odusseus and Oduseus —which give the hero two different metrical identities. Often, however, the poet has to use the name in a different grammatical case from the nominative — the genitive Ŏdŭsēŏs, for example —and when that happens the hero becomes “blameless” —Ŏdŭsēŏs ămūmŏnŏs —or, with the longer spelling of his name, “great-hearted” —Ŏdūssēōs mĕgălētŏrŏs. In the dative case he becomes “godlike” —āntĭthĕō Ŏdūsēĭ —or “quick-minded” —Ŏdŭsēĭ dăīphrŏnĭ. The choice of epithet is dictated by the meter. So also the island of Ithaca is “rocky,” “seagirt,” “clear-skied” or “lying under Mount Neriton,” depending on its grammatical case and position in the line; and under the same imperatives the Phaeacians appear as “great-hearted,” “famous for ships” or “lords of the sea.” As for the ships, objects as essential to the story of Odysseus as spears and swords are to that of Achilles, they are “hollow,” “swift,” “black,” “well-benched,” “well-oared,” “well-worked,” “scooped-out,” “fast-moving,” “scarlet-cheeked” and “black-prowed,” to name only the principal epithets that enable the poet to use them in any grammatical case and metrical position.