The Odyssey(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Read online

  On the Sublime was written sometime in the first century A.D., but a different scenario for the relation of the Iliad to the Odyssey had already been proposed in the second century B.C. A number of scholars, known as chorizontes —“separators” —recognized that the Odyssey was composed later than the Iliad but suggested that it had a different author. This is the position taken also by many modern scholars, who find significant differences between the two poems not only in vocabulary and grammatical usage but also in what they consider development from the Iliad to the Odyssey in moral and religious ideas and attitudes. Estimates of the validity of such evidence vary, however, and there are those who find it hard to accept the idea of the emergence of two major epic poets in such a short span of time.

  That the Odyssey was composed later than the Iliad can hardly be doubted. For one thing, though it takes for granted the audience’s knowledge not just of the Trojan War saga but of the particular form it has been given in the Iliad, it carefully avoids duplicating its material. Incidents from the tale of Troy are frequently recalled, sometimes in detail and at length, but they all fall outside the time frame of the Iliad, occurring either before or after the period of forty-one days that began with the wrath of Achilles and ended with the burial of Hector. Demodocus at the Phaeacian court sings of the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles (an incident not mentioned in the Iliad or, for that matter, anywhere else in extant Greek literature) and later of the wooden horse that brought the siege to an end. In the palace at Ithaca, the theme of the minstrel Phemius is the sufferings of the heroes on their way home from the war. Nestor at Pylos tells Telemachus how Agamemnon and Menelaus quarreled after the fall of Troy and took separate routes home. Helen and Menelaus at Sparta tell stories about Odysseus at Troy, neither of them familiar from the Iliad. Even when Odysseus meets the shades of his comrades Agamemnon and Achilles in Hades, Iliadic material is avoided: Agamemnon tells the story of his death at the hands of his wife and her lover, Odysseus tells Achilles about the heroic feats of arms of his son Neoptolemus and later talks to Ajax about the award of the arms of Achilles.

  That the poet of the Odyssey knew the Iliad in its contemporary form is strongly suggested also by the continuity of character delineation from one poem to the other. In the Odyssey they are all older, those of them who are still alive, but they are recognizably the same men. Nestor is still regal, punctilious and long-winded. Menelaus’ generous reaction to Telemachus’ tactful refusal of his gift of chariot and horses recalls his princely response to young Antilochus’ apology for his unsportsmanlike maneuver in the chariot race at the funeral games for Patroclus. Helen is still, at Sparta as she was at Troy, the poised mistress of a difficult situation. And Odysseus is still the spellbinding speaker Antenor remembered in Book 3 of the Iliad, whose “words came piling on like a driving winter blizzard” (3.267); he is still “the man of twists and turns” Helen identified for Priam in the same passage (3.244). And he is still the man “who says one thing but hides another in his heart” (9.379) —Achilles’ description of the kind of man he hates (he is addressing Odysseus, who has come as Agamemnon’s ambassador). Odysseus is still the quick-thinking and resourceful leader who by prompt action stemmed the rush for the ships caused by Agamemnon’s foolish decision to test the morale of the troops by suggesting that they go home.

  But in the Odyssey he is no longer one of many heroes fighting between the beached ships and the walls of Troy. He is on his own, first as admiral of a small fleet, then as captain of an isolated ship, and finally as a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of wreckage. The scenes of his action and suffering widen to include not only the coasts and islands of the Aegean Sea and continental Greece but also, in the false travel tales he spins in his disguise as a beggar, Crete, Cyprus, Phoenicia and Sicily, and, in the stories he tells the Phaeacians at their feast, the unknown world of the western seas, full of marvels and monsters. Those ships that in the Iliad lie beached behind a palisade and, with Achilles out of the fighting, face the fury of Hector’s assault, return in the Odyssey to their natural element, the wine-dark sea.

  THE WESTERN SEAS

  Many centuries after Homer, the Florentine Dante Alighieri, who had not read Homer and whose information about Ulysses (the Latin form of Odysseus’ name) came from Virgil and Ovid, saw in the Greek hero a vision of the restless explorer, the man who, discontented with the mundane life of that home he had longed for, set off again in search of new worlds. “Neither the pleasure I took in my son,” he says in the Inferno, “nor reverence for my aged father, nor the love I owed Penelope that should have made her joyful, could prevail against the passion I felt to win experience of the world, of human vice and worth.” He sets sail for Gibraltar and launches out into the Atlantic, following the sun “to the world where no one lives.” This theme was taken up in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” where the hero announces his purpose “to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars . . .”

  But these visions of Odysseus as the restless explorer, hungry for new worlds, have little to do with Homer’s Odysseus, who wants above all things to find his way home and stay there. It is true that, as Homer tells us in the prologue, he saw “many cities of men . . . and learned their minds” (ref); once afloat in uncharted seas, he has a thoroughly Greek curiosity about the inhabitants of the landfalls he makes, but the voyage was none of his choosing. He was “driven time and again off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy” (ref), and far from seeking “experience of the world,” he was “fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home” (ref).

  Odysseus’ wanderings in the west have inspired many attempts to plot his course and identify his ports of call. This wild-goose chase had begun already in the ancient world, as we know from the brusque dismissal of such identifications by the great Alexandrian geographer Eratosthenes, who said that you would be able to chart the course of Odysseus’ wanderings when you found the cobbler who sewed the bag in which Aeolus confined the winds. This of course has not deterred modern scholars and amateurs from trying; their guesses run from the possible —Charybdis as a mythical personification of whirlpools in the straits between Sicily and the toe of the Italian boot —to the fantastic: Calypso’s island as Iceland. According to one investigator of the subject, “There have been some seventy theories proposed since Homer wrote the Odyssey, with locations bounded only by the North and South Poles and ranging within the inhabited world from Norway to South Africa and from the Canary Islands to the Sea of Azov” (Clarke, p. 251).

  But even identifications that are not obviously ridiculous seem implausible in the light of Homer’s confused geographical notions of areas much nearer home. He knows the Asia Minor coast and the Aegean islands: Nestor on the alternative routes from Troy across the Aegean sounds like an expert seaman. But Homer’s notion of Egypt, where Menelaus was delayed by contrary winds and where Odysseus in his lying tales often lands, is, to put it mildly, vague. Menelaus describes the island of Pharos, which is one mile off the coast, as distant as far as a ship runs in a whole day with the wind behind her. And when Homer’s characters move to mainland Greece and its western offshore islands, confusion reigns. His description of Ithaca is so full of contradictions that many modern scholars have proposed Leucas or Cephallenia as the real home of Odysseus rather than the island that now bears the name. Homer also displays total ignorance of the geography of mainland Greece: his Telemachus and Pisistratus go from Pylos on the west coast to Sparta in a horse-drawn chariot over a formidable mountain barrier that had no through road in ancient times.

  But Homer’s hazy notions of any area outside the Aegean is only one of the objections to the idea of assigning western locations to Circe’s island and the land of the Lotus-eaters. A great many of the incidents in Odysseus’ wanderings are obviously based on a different voyage, the voyage of the Argo, which, with a crew of heroes captained by Jason, sailed not the western but the eastern seas. The Laestrygonians who attack Ody
sseus’ ships with rocks have their counterparts in the Argonauts’ saga; Circe is the sister of Aeetes, keeper of the golden fleece, and Homer himself locates her island not in the west but in the east —where the sun rises. The Clashing Rocks are also a feature of Jason’s voyage, and the poem that celebrates it is specifically mentioned by Homer at this point. And the Sirens appear in Apollonius’ poem the Argonautica, which, though written in the second century B.C., certainly drew on the earlier poem to which Homer refers. What Homer has done is to transfer episodes from a mythical epic journey in eastern waters to the western seas.

  It was of course a geographical imperative that if Odysseus was to be blown off course on his way home, the wind would take him west. But that imperative must have been eagerly welcomed by Homer and his audience, for the early years of the eighth century B.C. saw the beginnings of what was to become a large-scale movement of Greek traders and, later, colonists into the western Mediterranean. Odysseus, when he declines the invitation of a young Phaeacian to compete in an athletic contest, is contemptuously dismissed as no athlete but

  “some skipper of profiteers,

  roving the high seas in his scudding craft,

  reckoning up his freight with a keen eye out

  for home-cargo, grabbing the gold he can!”

  (ref)

  The traders were soon followed by the colonists. The first settlement seems to have been Pithecusae, on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples; it was not a city but a trading station and is dated by archaeological evidence not later than 775 B.C. By 700 there were Greek cities in Italy: Cumae, on the mainland opposite Ischia; Rhegium (Reggio Calabria), on the toe of the Italian boot; and the proverbially wealthy city of Sybaris, on the instep, as well as Taras (Taranto) in the same area. On the neighboring island of Sicily, Syracuse and Zancle (Messina) were founded around 725. Still later were to come settlements on the southern coast of France: Massilia (Marseilles), Antipas (Antibes) and Nicaea (Nice), as well as Cyrene on the coast of what is now Libya.

  Long before the first colonists set out, there must have been many voyages of trader-explorers, who no doubt brought back tales of wonders and dangers that improved in the telling. Charybdis, for example, may possibly be a fantastic version of the currents and whirlpools that are sometimes encountered in the straits between Sicily and the mainland. And though the Cyclops’ gigantic size and one eye mark him as mythical, his pastoral economy and ferocity toward strangers may be a memory of the indigenous populations who opposed the intruders landing on their shores —a demonized vision of the native, like Shakespeare’s Caliban. The Tempest was written in a similar age of exploration, and though Prospero and Ariel have powers that are not of this world, there can be no doubt that the wonders of the play are an imaginative reworking of the tall tales of the sailors and pirates who for half a century had sailed the Central American seas in search of land to settle, Spanish ships to board, Spanish towns to sack, or Spanish buyers for their cargoes of African slaves. We know, in fact, that Shakespeare must have read some of the accounts of the shipwreck of the Sea-Venture, the flagship of a fleet on its way to the Virginia colony, in a “dreadful and hideous storm” off the island of Bermuda, and the company’s survival and eventual arrival at the colony —a series of events that one of the accounts calls “a tragical comedy.”

  And there is one passage in the Odyssey that is a clear reminiscence of Greek voyages of exploration in the west. When Odysseus comes to the land of the Cyclops, he sees a small island offshore, which is fertile and well stocked with wild goats, but uninhabited. The Cyclops, he explains to his Phaeacian audience,

  “have no ships with crimson prows,

  no shipwrights there to build them good trim craft . . .

  Such artisans would have made this island too

  a decent place to live in . . . No mean spot,

  it could bear you any crop you like in season.

  The water-meadows along the low foaming shore

  run soft and moist, and your vines would never flag.

  The land’s clear for plowing. Harvest on harvest,

  a man could reap a healthy stand of grain —

  the subsoil’s dark and rich.”

  (ref)

  It is the authentic voice of the explorer evaluating a site for settlement.

  VOYAGER

  Odysseus’ voyage to the fabulous western seas begins in the everyday world, as he leaves the ruins of Troy homeward bound, his ships loaded with booty from the sack of the city. As if that booty were not enough for him, he attacks the first settlement he comes to on his way, the town of Ismarus on the Thracian coast opposite Troy:

  “. . . I sacked the city,

  killed the men, but as for the wives and plunder,

  that rich haul we dragged away from the place —

  we shared it round . . .”

  (ref)

  It is sheer piracy —Ismarus was not a Trojan ally —but it is obviously an action not unusual in its time and place; one of Odysseus’ epithets is in fact ptoliporthos, “sacker of cities.” Nestor at Pylos politely asks Telemachus and Pisistratus if they are

  “Out on a trading spree or roving the waves like pirates,

  sea-wolves raiding at will, who risk their lives

  to plunder other men?”

  (ref)

  And Polyphemus asks Odysseus the same question (ref). Thucydides, writing in the fifth century B.C., was probably thinking of passages like these when, speaking of the measures taken by Minos to suppress piracy in the Aegean, he pointed out that in ancient times “this occupation was held to be honorable rather than disgraceful. This is proved . . . by the testimony of ancient poets, in whose verses newly arrived visitors are always asked whether they are pirates, a question that implies no disapproval of such an occupation on the part of either those who answer with a disclaimer or those who ask for the information.” Piracy was endemic in the Aegean —a sea of islands large and small, of jagged coastlines full of hidden harbors —whenever there was no central sea power strong enough to suppress it. Long after Minos, in the fifth century, an Athenian fleet under the command of Cimon cleared out a nest of pirates on the island of Scyros. Many centuries later the young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates near the small island of Pharmacusa off the Ionian coast and held for ransom. The seas became so unsafe that in 67 B.C. Cnaeus Pompeius was given the overriding authority to deal with the problem and did so by manning 270 warships and mobilizing 100,000 troops. Whenever there was a power vacuum in the Aegean, piracy reappeared; as late as the 1820s Arab corsairs carried off the inhabitants of the Greek island of Cythera to sell in the slave market at Algiers.

  Cythera is the island off Cape Malea past which Odysseus, trying to turn north toward Ithaca, was blown west for nine days, off the map, into a world of wonders and terrors, of giants and witches, goddesses and cannibals, of dangers and temptations. The tales of his landfalls and the welcomes he received differ widely in content and scope, but they are connected by a common theme, on which they are all variations. It is a theme fundamental for the Odyssey as a whole, pervasive not only in the wandering voyage of the hero but also in the opening books, which deal with Telemachus at home and abroad, and in the last half of the poem, which presents us with Odysseus, disguised as a ragged beggar, home at last in his own house. This theme is, briefly stated, the relation between host and guest, particularly the moral obligation to welcome and protect the stranger, an obligation imposed on civilized mankind by Zeus, one of whose many titles is xeinios, “protector of strangers.” “Zeus of the Strangers,” says Odysseus to the one-eyed giant in his cave, “guards all guests and suppliants” (ref).

  Zeus is invoked as the divine patron and enforcer of a code of conduct that helps to make travel possible in a world of piracy at sea, cattle raiding and local war by land, of anarchic competition between rival families —a world with no firm central authority to impose law and order. In such a world, a man who leaves his home depends on the kindne
ss of strangers. Without a universally recognized code of hospitality, no man would dare travel abroad; its observance is therefore a matter of self-interest. One of its almost ritual components is the parting gift offered by the host. So when Athena, in the shape of Mentes, takes leave of Telemachus, he tells her to go back to her ship “delighted with a gift, . . . something rare and fine . . . The kind of gift / a host will give a stranger, friend to friend” (ref). Athena does not wish to be burdened with the gift now; she asks him to save it for her so that she can take it on her way back. “Choose something rare and fine, and a good reward / that gift is going to bring you” (ref). The reward is not a cash payment; it is the reciprocal hospitality and gift Telemachus will receive when he goes to visit Mentes. So Odysseus, in his false tale to Laertes at the end of the poem, pretends to be a man who entertained Odysseus once on his travels and loaded him with gifts. He has stopped at Ithaca now to visit Odysseus. The old man tells him Odysseus has never returned and must be dead.

  “But if you’d found him alive, here in Ithaca,

  he would have replied in kind, with gift for gift,

  and entertained you warmly . . .

  That’s the old custom, when one has led the way.”

  (ref)

  The host’s gift is so fixed a feature of the relationship that the guest can even ask for something else, if the proffered gift is not suitable. So Telemachus, offered a splendid chariot and team of horses by Menelaus, declines the offer. “Those horses I really cannot take to Ithaca,” where there is “No running-room for mares . . . no meadows.” His island is “Goat, not stallion, land” (ref). Menelaus, far from being taken aback, recognizes his frankness as the mark of aristocratic birth and breeding —“Good blood runs in you, dear boy” —and offers him instead “a mixing-bowl, forged to perfection — / it’s solid silver finished off with a lip of gold” (ref). The bowl, he goes on to explain, was itself a gift from a host, Phaedimus, king of the Phoenician city of Sidon, with whom he stayed on his wandering course home from Troy.