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The Odyssey

TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES Among the Dead Cities, A. C. Grayling Towards the Light, A. C. Grayling The Oresteia, Aeschylus Aesthetic Theory, Theodor W. Adorno Being and Event, Alain Badiou On Religion, Karl Barth The Language of Fashion, Roland Barthes The Intelligence of Evil, Jean Baudrillard Key Writings, Henri Bergson I and Thou, Martin Buber Never Give In!, Winston Churchill The Boer War, Winston Churchill The Second World War, Winston Churchill In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda Cinema I, Gilles Deleuze Cinema II, Gilles Deleuze A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Michael Dummett Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin Discourse on Free Will, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther Education for Critical Consciousness, Paulo Freire

Pedagogy of Hope, Paulo Freire Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm To Have or To Be?, Erich Fromm Truth and Method, Hans Georg Gadamer All Men Are Brothers, Mohandas K. Gandhi Violence and the Sacred, René Girard The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari The Essence of Truth, Martin Heidegger The Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière On Late Style, Edward Said Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure An Actor Prepares, Constantin Stanislavski Building A Character, Constantin Stanislavski Creating A Role, Constantin Stanislavski Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek Some titles are not available in North America.

The Odyssey

Homer Translated by Martin Hammond With an Introduction by Jasper GrifďŹ n

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This edition first published in 2000 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. © Martin Hammond, 2000 Introduction © Jasper Griffin, 2000 This Bloomsbury Revelations edition first published in 2014

by Bloomsbury Academic All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN: 978-1-4725-3104-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Homer, author.

[Odyssey. English] The odyssey / Homer ; translated by Martin Hammond. pages cm Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4725-3248-0 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-4725-3104-9 (epdf) – ISBN 978-1-4725-2763-9 (epub) I. Hammond, Martin, 1944– II. Title.

PA4025.A5H36 2014 883’.01–dc23 2013049795 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

To ANDREW CRAWSHAW ἐξ ἐµεῦ, oἷα φίλοι ξεîνοι ξείνοισι διδοῦσι (Odyssey 1.313)

Contents Maps Preface Acknowledgement Introduction by Jasper Griffin Select Bibliography A Note on the Greek Text

xi xv xix xxi xxxv xxxix

THE ODYSSEY Book 1 Book 2 Book 3 Book 4 Book 5 Book 6 Book 7 Book 8 Book 9 Book 10 Book 11 Book 12 Book 13 Book 14 Book 15 Book 16 Book 17 Book 18 Book 19 Book 20

The Gods, Athene and Telemachos Telemachos and the Suitors Telemachos in Pylos Telemachos in Sparta Odysseus and Kalypso Nausika채 Odysseus in Phaiacia Phaiacian Games and Song The Cyclops Kirke The Underworld Skylla and Charybdis Return to Ithaka Odysseus and Eumaios Telemachos Returns Odysseus and Telemachos Odysseus Comes to his House Odysseus as Beggar Eurykleia Recognises Odysseus Insults and Omens

1 11 21 33 51 61 69 77 89 101 113 127 137 147 159 171 181 195 205 219

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Contents

Book 21 The Trial of the Bow Book 22 The Suitors Killed Book 23 Odysseus and Penelope Book 24 The Underworld, Laertes, Peace

229

Index

271

239 251 259

Maps

100 km 100 m

Map 1 Mainland Greece

100 km

THRACE

100 m

Ismaros

LEMNOS

Hellespont

Troy (Ilios)

TENEDOS

SKYROS

EU

LESBOS

PSYRA

BO

IA

C. Mimas

CHIOS

Geraistos

SYROS (Syrie?)

DELOS

R.Ia

rdan

os

RHODES

CRETE

DIA Amnisos Knossos Gortyn Phaistos

Map 2 The Aegean and Asia Minor

SICILY

CYPRUS CRETE

Paphos

200 km

LIBYA

200 m

Map 3 The Eastern Mediterranean

EGYPT Thebes (2)↓

R.Nile

Pharos

Sidon

PHOINICIA

Troy (Ilios)

Temese

Preface Traditore traduttore. All translation of literature (as opposed to, say, an instruction manual) is, if not quite treason, at least an inevitable compromise.

The compromise may seem closer to treason when the original is poetry and the translation is prose. Matthew Arnold, whose influential lectures ‘On Translating Homer’ include his own wholly unsuccessful rendering of a passage of Homer into English hexameter verse, wrote in his essay on Milton: ‘The verse of the poets of Greece and Rome no translation can adequately reproduce. Prose cannot have the power of verse; verse translation may give whatever of charm is in the soul and talent of the translator himself, but never the specific charm of the verse and poet translated.’ The history of verse translation of Homer, including Pope (‘It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope,’ said Richard Bentley, ‘but you must not call it Homer’), largely bears out this judgement. Arnold suggested that Greekless readers (at the time estimating their numbers only in thousands!) would gain a sense of the ‘power and charm of the great poets of antiquity’ through the original poetry of Milton.

A closer analogue in English poetry to the manner of Homer – though it is over-distilled – lies in Arnold’s own mini-epics, Balder Dead and, most particularly, Sohrab and Rustum.

Poetry translated into poetry requires not much less a poet: and it is partly a matter of scale. Epigram needs translation into epigram (but beware Simonides). Lyric likewise demands lyric, though the literary world is white with the bones of those who attempted verse translations of Alkaios, Catullus, or Horace. Drama and epic are in a different category, in that in this age verse drama and very long narrative poems (the Odyssey has over 12,000 lines, the Iliad over 15,000) are cultural oddities, without a natural audience. The most widely used modern verse translations of Homer, those of Richmond Lattimore, have a craggy integrity and a distinctive ‘voice’, but they are not an easy read. Prose is now the natural medium for narrative, if it is to be read: and prose can have both power and charm.

Translation of literature is, or should be, a labour of love. Any translator wishes to convey his or her pleasure in the work translated to as wide an audience as possible, and that has been my main aim in this translation: in the hope, that is, that my own response to Homer is not wholly different from that of others, I have written the sort of translation that I would like to read.

Cardinal to this is fidelity, as far as I can manage it, to both matter and manner.

I have tried to reproduce, as accurately as the English language will allow, all that Homer actually says: and also to convey something of the feel of the

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Odyssey, its style and manner. Part of the power of the Homeric epics (Iliad and Odyssey) lies in the fact that their voices are both immediate and alien.

The immediate strikes through with immediate force, but that which is alien to our literary culture (especially the modes of speech – dense and twisty –, the insistent narrative sequencing, and the wealth of formulaic repetition) is also an essential part of the matter of the Odyssey and a component in its manner. Modern translations of Homer, especially the prose translations, have tended to pasteurise the enlivening germ of these alien elements, and soften the edge of difference between Homer’s world (and Homer’s modes of expression) and ours: perhaps the greatest ‘treason’ is to make the Odyssey sound as if it was written by an Anglophone novelist (or poet) of the late twentieth century.

Manner is more elusive than matter, and a greater challenge to the translator. At times Homer reaches, in J.D. Denniston’s memorable phrase, a ‘hushed intensity’ of narrative: and then Homeric speech often crackles with what Virginia Woolf well described (in her essay ‘On not knowing Greek’) as the ‘sneering, out-of-doors manner’ of Greek exchanges – the Greeks took great delight in subtle, hard-hitting speech, and over a third of the Iliad and Odyssey is direct speech. An immediately noticeable ‘alien’ feature of the Homeric epics, the legacy of highly-skilled oral composition and inherent in the very fabric and texture of the poems, is the pervasive use of formulaic phrases, lines, or passages – recurrent combinations of noun and epithet for gods, people, and things (‘the bright-eyed goddess Athene’, ‘much-enduring godlike Odysseus’, ‘long-shadowed spear’); standard lines introducing speech or answer; repeated actions or situations, repeated descriptions of important, ritual, or semi-ritual processes (setting sail, sacrifice, preparation of food). I have retained in translation the full range and incidence of these ‘formulas’.

They are essential to the manner and force of the Odyssey, and, I have no doubt, to our understanding and enjoyment of the poem. Their general effect is to shed a rich dignity over the Homeric world, investing the elements of that world with universal significance, and expressive of an order and stability in which all things have their proper excellence and beauty. As in the Iliad, this stands in moving contrast with the narrative action for much of the poem, until at last Odysseus regains and restores the stable and domestic world he had sought for twenty years.

The text of the Odyssey is very far from unsophisticated, and where there is, or seems to be, a particular effect intended – word-play, for example, assonance, or, most often, striking alliteration – I have attempted to find an equivalent in English (e.g. 2.276, ‘Few follow father’s form’; 9.71, ‘the roaring wind ripped their rigging to rags’). Above all, I have borne in mind throughout, and tried to reflect as best I can, the obvious but essential fact

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that the Odyssey was composed to be recited and heard aloud. Much flows from this: the relatively short sentences, the lack of complex subordination, the direct and rapid narrative connections (‘and then . . . and then . . .’), the composition throughout in breath-sized units.

‘Men always praise most the song which comes freshest to their ears’ (1.351f.). It is the astonishing achievement of the Homeric epics, the earliest works of European literature, that they still speak freshly in the third millennium. * The question of names. In the ‘Note on Names’ introductory to my translation of the Iliad (Penguin, 1987) I wrote: The representation of Greek names in English poses a familiar problem.

There is no universally accepted ‘system’, and practice has varied over the centuries with prevailing fashion and personal predilection, from the wholly Latin or latinising to ruthless transliteration. Few would now be happy with Jove, Minerva, Ulysses, or Ajax as means of referring to Greek gods and heroes whose names are Zeus, Athene, Odysseus, and Aias: and few can systematically stomach the printed barbarity of Thoukudides or Aiskhulos, or the unexpectedness of Platon. No practice is maintained with complete consistency, and that is just as well: those who rightly reject Ulysses and Ajax are unwilling to accept the ‘purist’ Priamos and Helene in place of the familiar Priam and Helen. In the end the question is an aesthetic one, depending on the balance struck between the proper desire to assert the Greekness of the Greek characters, and proper respect for the long tradition of English literature and literary reference.

In this translation too I have preferred to keep the majority of the Greek names unlatinised (so Eumaios, Kalypso, Achilleus, for example, rather than Eumaeus, Calypso, Achilles), making exceptions where the retention of the Greek form or the Greek spelling would involve a disturbing wrench – so Helen, Crete, Penelope rather than Helene, Krete, Penelopeia. I am conscious though, that the mysterious goddess Kirke will be yet more mysterious to those familiar with her as Circe. * I owe several debts of deep gratitude. First, to Joanna Marchant and Angela Drage, who translated a scruffy and much-travelled manuscript into computer disc with practised and professional ease.

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Then to Jasper Griffin, Professor of Classical Literature at Oxford, who generously wrote the Introduction to this book. Jasper Griffin taught me at Oxford, and much of what I know about Homer has been learnt from him, either directly from his teaching those many years ago, or indirectly from his published books and articles.

This translation is dedicated to Andrew Crawshaw, who gave us for six successive summers the use of his delightful house in the island of Andros.

There much of this translation was written, amid the pleasant distractions of an Odyssean landscape of olives, oleanders, goats, and the sparkling sea.

Martin Hammond

Acknowledgement I am grateful to Penguin Books for permission to use in this Preface a paragraph (on names) and a few other sentences from the Introduction to my translation of the Iliad published by Penguin in 1987.

Introduction The most important fact about the whole history of Western literature is its beginning. At the start there are the two very long poems, both traditionally ascribed to a poet called Homer, concerned with the great expedition of the Achaians (Greeks) against the city of Troy. The Homeric epics are an extraordinary phenomenon, in their scale, their quality, and their influence.

Most peoples produce, in the early stages of their history, songs and poems about the great heroes of their past. In later generations taste changes, and readers turn away from these archaic works, condemning them to neglect and eventual disappearance. In the case of Rome, the Romans themselves could only deplore the loss of the early poetry that must have existed before the overwhelming impact of Greek poetry on Roman taste and Roman education. In our own literature, Shakespeare had never heard of Beowulf; the Song of Roland, in French, and the Song of the Nibelungen, in German, were equally lost to view, until eventually, in the romantic period, they were rediscovered by scholars.

In momentous contrast, the Homeric epics have never ceased to be read and admired. Since the sixth century bc they have always been prescribed, somewhere, on the syllabus of schools. In classical Greece, and then in Rome, they were the most universally admired works of literature, and they were also widely taken as guides to human behaviour and to the interpretation of the gods and the world. After the fall of Rome they were fundamental to the education and the literature of Byzantium; and when the Renaissance stirred in Italy, the return of Homer to the West was one of its great ambitions and its chief achievements. Ever since, the two great epics have been literary and also moral presences, illustrating a possible world in which gods and men interacted, and high rank went with tragic stature and human dignity.

Discussion of the Odyssey must start with its elder sister, the Iliad. The literature which we call ‘Western’ opens with a bang. The Iliad is a poem of enormous size (over 15,000 lines) and of supreme literary quality. It is also astonishingly sophisticated in conception. The poet of the Iliad decided to compose a poem which would tell of the events of only a few days in the tenth year of the siege of Troy, but which would include indirectly – by flash-backs, by predictions, and above all by implication – all the important events of the Troy story.

The splendidly vivid incidents of the Judgment of Paris and the abduction of Helen, so frequently represented in later poetry and painting, are not

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narrated in the Iliad, but we find hints of them, especially in the Third and Fifth Books. The single combat between Paris and Menelaos, to settle which of them should have Helen, is presented in Book 3 in a way that suggests that this is their first encounter, despite the fact that we are supposedly in the tenth year of the war. We are to see in it the first confrontation of Trojan and Achaian, strongly contrasting human types; and in Book 4 we see the Trojans, who started the whole war by an offence against the god of hospitality, become guilty again, when the Trojan Pandaros breaks the truce and tries to shoot Menelaos in breach of it.

At the end of the poem the doom of Troy has been pronounced and is known to be imminent, but the city is still standing. Even the hero Achilleus, whose death in battle has been predicted with increasing detail and accepted by the hero himself, is at the end of the Iliad under the shadow of death but still alive. The sack of Troy is twice predicted, by Hektor in Book 6 and by Priam in Book 22, but the poet denies himself the pleasure of describing the famous scenes that went with the sack of Troy: the Wooden Horse; the killing of the old king Priam at the altar; the sacrilegious dragging of the princess Kassandra away from the statue of Athene, and the anger of the goddess with the Achaians.

In this way the Iliad is made to contain the whole story of the Trojan War, but by a method much more self-conscious and oblique than we might have expected in an archaic epic poem. The Iliad is also highly sophisticated in such matters as the depiction of characters and the handling of direct speech: the poem is very rich in speeches, and indeed in conversations. The handling of the gods, too, in their relations with men and with each other, is smooth and masterly, and certainly not without humour. We relish it when Zeus’ wife Hera sets out to seduce him, in Book 14, or when the lame craftsman god Hephaistos restores good humour on Olympos, at the end of Book 1, by bustling about pouring out the drink; a role normally reserved for young and glamorous servants such as Ganymedes and Hebe.

The existence of the Iliad, with its distinction as poetry and its sophistication of conception and construction, was crucial for the next great poem, the Odyssey. Like the Iliad, it is a long epic poem (over 12,000 lines) dealing with events that form part of the Trojan cycle. It too is highly sophisticated in manner, handling gods and men and their dealings in a rather different spirit and atmosphere, but with an equally sure touch, and with a wealth of conversations and of direct speech. The Greeks accounted for these resemblances by saying that both great epics were the work of a single poet, Homer.

They have painfully little to tell us about him. They could not even agree on such basic matters as his home town or his dates. He was generally imagined

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as a wandering minstrel who sang his marvellous songs for a living, and a passage in another early poem was taken to mean that he was blind. It was sometimes imagined that he composed the Iliad in his youth, so that it had the youthful qualities of being fiery and warlike, and the Odyssey at a more advanced age, whence its interest in moral questions of right and wrong, and in story-telling for its own sake. ‘But if we are speaking of old age,’ says one of the most perceptive of later Greek critics, ‘it is still the old age of a Homer!’

Most scholars nowadays incline to the view that the main authors of the two poems are two different people, but it is still possible to believe that there was only one.

Modern scholarship regards Homer as a mythical figure, not a historical one. Nature abhors a vacuum; so does the human mind, especially in something dear to its heart, and it was intolerable to know nothing of the creator of the crown jewels of Greek literature. As the English poet Coleridge remarks, it is impossible to say anything about the man Homer, as distinct from the poems themselves: he is simply a figure of speech. What is true in the legend about him is that the poems represent the end of a tradition of sung verse, the work of illiterate travelling performers, who delighted their audiences with tales of heroic doings and sufferings in a heroic period long ago.

In the British Isles we have something of the kind in the Border Ballads, which tell of fighting and cattle rustling between the Scots and the English, and the battles of the Percy and the Douglas; but they always remained on a much smaller scale and a much less sophisticated literary level than that attained by the Greek epic. In the 1930s oral epic of this kind still flourished in Yugoslavia, where it was studied by Milman Parry with benefit for the understanding of the genesis of the Homeric poems.

A question which cannot be conclusively answered by such researches, or by any others, is whether the composer of our Iliad and our Odyssey was himself illiterate, dictating his poem to a scribe, or whether he used the new art of writing in the composition of his poems. Certain features of the Homeric style, most obviously the regular ‘formulaic’ epithets – the harvestless sea; royal son of Laertes, resourceful Odysseus; the bright-eyed goddess Athene; Zeus the high-thunderer, whose power is greatest of all – have part of their function in easing for the singer his task of improvising his verses within a strict tradition. They are also important for the stylistic level, and for the pace of the poem.

We can infer that the Iliad in its present form came into existence by about 700 bc, and that the Odyssey came into existence shortly afterwards.

Episodes from it begin to appear on painted pottery in the seventh century, notably the blinding of the Cyclops, and Odysseus tied to the mast, listening

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to the Sirens. There can be no doubt that the poet of the Odyssey was familiar with the Iliad, and that he started his own poem by taking it as given.

That can be seen very clearly in the way the Odyssey continues the Trojan story from the precise point at which the Iliad stops. We find the Wooden Horse and the activities of Helen at the time of the Horse and the Sack of Troy (Book 4); the violent behaviour of some of the Achaians after the capture of the city, and the anger of the goddess Athene which brought many of them to grief on their way home (Book 3). We hear of the quarrel over the armour of Achilleus, and how Aias killed himself when it was not awarded to him (Book 11); of the death and funeral of Achilleus (Books 11 and 24); and of the tragic home-coming of king Agamemnon, lord of men, the conqueror of Troy, and his murder by his wife and her lover (Books 3, 4, 11, 24). All the gaps are carefully filled in, between the end of the Iliad and the starting point of the Odyssey.

It is also clear that the Odyssey wants to satisfy the desire of its audience to meet again the great characters who had delighted them in the earlier epic.

Odysseus’ son Telemachos is sent off to meet some of them. He visits the garrulous old man Nestor (Book 3), teller of wonderful stories, a person for whom the Iliad had a special affection, and he is entertained in Sparta by the greatest and most glamorous of those who survived among the central persons of the story: Menelaos and Helen herself, now recaptured and living in conjugal happiness with her husband (Books 4 and 15). The young man is enchanted. The goddess Athene has to come and give him a push, to get him moving from ‘Sparta where the women are handsome’; and when he tells his mother of his travels, he adds, ‘There I saw Argive Helen . . .’ (17.118). But some of the most magical Iliadic characters are now dead, and we cannot hope to see them again on earth. That is surely one reason why the poet sends Odysseus to the world of the dead. Only there can we meet again Agamemnon and Aias and Achilleus (Book 11; with a second glimpse of the dead heroes in Book 23).

It is tempting to see the influence of the Iliad again in the absence of the hero from the opening books; Achilleus is kept off stage from the Second to the Ninth Book of the Iliad. But the poet of the Odyssey has chosen to complicate the structure of his poem. It starts in two separate places, with Telemachos on Ithaka and Odysseus on the island of Kalypso. Both need to be set in motion, and in the second half of the poem the two strands will need to be united. That is managed with great panache in Books 15 and 16.

The Greeks had a number of cycles of myth, besides that of the Trojan War. There was the grim story of the Theban dynasty: Oidipous, who was fated to kill his father and to marry his mother; his sons, who fought for the crown and slew each other in single combat; his daughter Antigone,

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who defied the tyrant’s prohibition, buried her brother’s body, and died for her defiance. There was the story of Iason and the Argonauts, and their adventurous quest for the Golden Fleece. There was the tale of the monstrous Boar of Kalydon, and how Meleagros killed it, and how he slew his mother’s brothers and was cursed by her to his death. There were the heroic labours and fearful sufferings of Herakles (in Latin, Hercules), son of Zeus. All these stories left their traces in the Homeric epics, but the supreme story was that of the siege of Troy and its eventual destruction by the forces of the whole of Greece, commanded by king Agamemnon. In the fifth century bc it still dominates Attic tragedy.

The Trojan story told of the great national victory over the Asiatic foreigner, and in the Homeric poems it was to be decisive in forming the Greeks’ view of themselves and of the world, down to the conquests of Alexander and long after. But it was by no means an unambiguous tale of triumph. The Iliad forced on the attention of its audience the women and children of Troy. We meet there Hektor’s mother, his wife, and his baby son: as a result of the Greek victory, they all face slavery or death. There is no question of the only good Trojan being a dead Trojan. We are far from the simplified world of the patriotic war movie, and equally far from that of The Lord of the Rings: works in which the enemy have no wives, no mothers, and no children, and in which, consequently, their destruction is morally unambiguous, and victory and domination need pay no moral price. Homer makes it clear that the enemy is just like us, and his death is terrible. That knowledge has often been denied or pushed out of sight, but it has never really been possible, in the West, to lose it completely. That is an important part of the legacy of Homer.

The Odyssey, in its turn, sees the Trojan War from the point of the survivors and of the dead: sees it, in fact, as a round of disasters. ‘There all the greatest men were killed,’ says old Nestor to Telemachos in Book 3; ‘There lies Aias the warrior, there Achilleus, there Patroklos, and there lies my own dear son, so strong and fearless, Antilochos’ (3.108ff.). When Telemachos compliments king Menelaos on his wealth, the disillusioned hero replies, ‘But while I was wandering in those parts [Egypt] amassing much substance, a man killed my brother . . . through the treachery of his accursed wife. So I take no joy in being master of this wealth . . . I would gladly live on in my house with only a third of the wealth I now have, if only they were still alive, the men who then died in the broad land of Troy, far from the horse-pasture of Argos’ (4.90ff.). Tears are the response to this speech: the tears, tragic but also enjoyable, which pervade the Odyssey. Not least they are the nightly fare of the Queen of Ithaka, Odysseus’ lonely wife Penelope, who weeps for her lost husband and curses the name of Troy (‘that unspeakable name’).

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After the losses at Troy, and the dread anger of Achilleus which doomed so many brave men to lie unburied, the prey of dogs and birds; after the sack of Troy, when not all the Achaians had shown ‘proper sense or scruple’ (Nestor, 3.133), and some did not get home at all: after all that, some came home to a bad reception. That was the fate of king Agamemnon, cut down without mercy by his wife and her lover. We are reminded of that story repeatedly. The fighting man, away on campaign, is naturally anxious about events back home, and the stories of Agamemnon and Odysseus give shape to that anxiety in double form. Is his wife like Penelope, faithful but beset by intrusive lovers, shirkers who did not go to the war, so that she is driven to her wits’ end? Is she like Agamemnon’s wife Klytaimnestra, actually seduced by some dastardly non-combatant, and planning her husband’s murder, if he gets home alive? ‘I had thought that my homecoming would be a joy to my children and my household,’ says the ghost of Agamemnon to Odysseus, touchingly; ‘but she with the utter evil of her plans cast shame on herself and on all women to come, all of the female sex, even the virtuous’ (11.431ff.).

That is what might have happened to Odysseus, too, at the end of the longest and most adventurous of all the Return stories. Both he and his son are well aware of the risk that Penelope may throw in her lot with one of the Suitors – perhaps the plausible Antinoös. Telemachos is repeatedly reminded of the duty to avenge a father, as Agamemnon’s son Orestes avenged him.

The goddess Athene says to the callow prince, ‘You know what the heart of a woman is like: she no longer cares at all for her first husband and his children; she is interested only in her new man’ (paraphrase of 15.20ff.). Hackneyed words, expressing the misogyny which was always present in Greece. We feel that the goddess is articulating the young man’s own thoughts, but here they are given the lie by Penelope’s tenacious loyalty.

The Odyssey contains much less of straightforward heroics than the Iliad. There is comparatively little fighting. It concentrates much more on psychology, on women, on the details of something close to ordinary life, and – at the opposite extreme – on tales of the wonderful and the supernatural. Aristotle pointed out that the poet prefers not to vouch himself for the truth of his one-eyed giants and enchantresses who can turn men into pigs. Such stories are put into the mouth of Odysseus; and if you don’t believe them, you must at least agree that sailors do tell such tales. And Odysseus, the hero who starts so many stories by saying ‘Now I’ll tell you the truth’, is repeatedly shown as lying. In his false tales, he is usually a Cretan; now, there was a proverb that said ‘Cretans are always liars’. The poet plays a little game with us here.

Odysseus even, in Book 13, tries to tell false tales to Athene herself, who responds with amusement and affection (13.291ff.). We look to see what

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he will say to his faithful wife, as he recites his adventures to her, about his dalliance with Kalypso and Kirke (23.310ff.). The prudent hero omits Kirke altogether, and of Kalypso he says that ‘She never won my heart’ (23.337); not quite what we heard at the time, which was that he had ‘lost his pleasure’ in her (5.153). Not all stories are suitable for all hearers. Odysseus tells many lies; and when he goes through the story of his adventures for the hospitable Phaiacians, their king praises him in striking terms: ‘You have told your story like a professional singer, skilfully and according to the rules. If anyone else had told us such things, we should not have believed him …’ (paraphrase of 11.362ff.). An ambiguous compliment! And a sophisticated touch: we see the singer who is performing for us the tale of Odysseus, impersonating the hero himself as he performs for a grand mythical audience, and in that role being complimented for his resemblance to a singer. Again we surely have a game with layers of reference and self-allusion.

The Odyssey is interested in singers, and it has a lot to tell us about them, and about the circumstances of their performances. Often the performer is interrupted: ‘No, not everybody is enjoying that song! Give us something else!’ (8.83ff., 8.521ff.). But when he succeeds, then the hearers are ‘held by the spell of his words in the shadowy hall’, long unable to speak even when the voice of the singer has fallen silent. That was the effect at which the singer aimed.

We find an interest, too, in other comparatively humble people. The Iliad, by contrast, is much more exclusive. In the Odyssey there are good and bad servants, who must be rewarded and punished, in accordance with the overriding conception in the poem of poetic justice. The loyal swineherd Eumaios is lovingly depicted; the disloyal herdsman Melanthios and his insolent sister Melantho are shown in hateful colours. The poet is interested in beggars and their contrasting types (Book 18); he lets a character give advice as to the best places to beg – in the town, not in the country (17.18). The Iliad shows a world at war, the Odyssey a world at peace, and some of its tastes and interests look forward to pastoral poetry and to the novel, rather than back to the Berserker age of delight in battle.

Among Odysseus’ sailors we meet and sympathise with the hapless Elpenor, ‘not over-brave in battle nor well equipped with brains’ (10.552), who drinks too much, climbs up to the roof to sleep in the cool, forgets where he is, falls off the roof and breaks his neck. In the next world his ghost meets the hero and begs for a simple memorial, a burial mound, and stuck into it ‘the oar which was mine when I was alive and rowing with my companions’ (11.75f.). Even the hero’s old dog, thrown out as useless in his master’s absence and dying on the dung-hill, is given a moment of touching pathos (17.290ff.); all the more so because Odysseus must conceal his feelings at the sight.

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The theme of loyalty versus disloyalty runs all through the Odyssey.

The Suitors who want to marry Penelope have their eye on his inheritance, too. Odysseus, we are several times assured, was ‘as gentle as a father’ to his people, so that their refusal to help his son is shameful (2.40ff.); and specifically it was Odysseus who rescued the father of the wicked Antinoös from the justified anger of the community and saved his life – and yet the son plots the murder of his benefactor’s son Telemachos (16.424ff.). Odysseus’ sailors are disobedient (Book 10) and mutinous, their ring-leader being his own kinsman (10.423ff.). His maid-servants rouse his anger by sleeping with the Suitors (20.1–30). Even when the wicked Suitors are dead, their relatives try to make war on the hero and his son to avenge them, and it needs the intervention of Athene herself to establish peace (Book 24).

In Odysseus’ wanderings, some of the most alarming adventures begin when the wanderers trust a promising first impression. Among the Laistrygonians, the sailors meet a nice girl drawing water at the well; she invites them home; but when her parents appear, they are cannibal giants, who kill most of the party and smash up their ships. Exploring in a wood, they find a charming lady working at her loom; she gives them refreshments, then suddenly taps them with her wand, transforms them into pigs, and herds them into the pig-sties (Book 10).

Even in the stories Odysseus invents about himself, usually introduced ‘Now I’ll tell you all the truth’, the same themes of subordination and rebellion recur. He may be an illegitimate son of a wealthy man, protected by his father while he lived, but driven out by his legitimate half-brothers at the old man’s death, to live by piracy (14.199ff.); or he may be an assertive fellow (a Cretan, as usual) who refused to serve under the local king, insisted on leading his own contingent, and was victimised by the king; so he ambushed the king’s brother and killed him, and had to get out (13.256ff.). These stories are vignettes of life in a disturbed and violent world, in which pirates and slavers abound, and it is not a rude question to ask unexpected visitors, ‘Are you pirates, who risk your lives to bring ruin on other people?’ (3.69–74). As for the good servant Eumaios, he was by birth a prince, but his nurse-maid was treacherous, and she stole him away into slavery; and that was the life of Eumaios, ruined by misplaced trust (15.413ff.).

In a world so full of betrayal, trust is the hardest thing. Both Telemachos and Odysseus have their suspicions of Penelope; Odysseus insists on ‘testing’ his aged father Laertes, when the Suitors are dead, and tells him one last false tale, which has the effect of almost killing the old man (24.302ff.). The habit of falsehood was so hard to break. And by a masterly invention, Penelope herself shows distrust, plays a trick on Odysseus, and proves herself to be a real character and the right wife for the guileful hero (Book 23).

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It is also central to the poem that the immediate family can be a focus of trust and affection. The family of Odysseus is a very close one. When he meets the ghost of his mother, he asks her, ‘How did you die? Was it an illness?’ ‘No,’ she replies, ‘It was no illness . . . It was longing for you, glorious Odysseus, for your wisdom and your gentle-hearted way, which took the sweetness of life from me’ (11.198ff.). As for Odysseus’ father, Eumaios tells Odysseus: ‘Laertes is alive still, but he prays constantly to Zeus for the life to be extinguished from his body there and then in his house. He mourns deeply for his lost son and for the wise wife of his marriage: her death was the greatest blow to him and made him an old man before his time. She died of grief for her glorious son – it was a wretched death, which I would not wish on any of my friends or kindly neighbours here’ (15.351ff.). The reunion of Odysseus with his son, his wife, and his father re-establishes the nuclear family, whose closeness is all the more vital in a world full of risk and betrayal.

The Iliad contains women with speaking parts, and they are convincing: we do not detect the squeaky note of the female impersonator in Andromache, Hektor’s wife, or Hekabe, his mother. But these women are seen very much in just that role: as the wife and mother of the hero. The Odyssey goes a lot further. We meet a whole gallery of female types. There is Nausikaä, the young girl whose thoughts are first turning to the question of marriage, and who is touchingly shown trying to conceal that interest: ‘So she spoke: she was too shy to speak openly to her dear father of her own fruitful marriage, but he understood all’ (6.66f.). She drops a hint to Odysseus, too (6.273ff.), but the experienced hero knows how to side-step it, and her last moment with the glamorous stranger is charming with its unfulfilled erotic potential (8.454ff.).

Next comes the nymph Kalypso, loving and unhappy, who wants to keep the hero forever, and who offers him immortality on her enchanted island.

It is right to remember what a sacrifice Odysseus makes, in order to get back to his home and his old wife. The hero contrives to leave Kalypso without slighting her charms, always a difficult trick (Book 5); as with Nausikaä, the scene with her contains a lot of social comedy, with tact and courtesy high among the qualities need by the hero. They are in fact constantly stressed in the poem, which is among other things a guide to good manners. Kirke is again different, a femme fatale who knows all about men, and who is happy to spend a year of sensual pleasure with the hero, though his men are terrified of her, and whose response, when he announces his wish to leave, is a cool ‘Don’t stay in my house against your will . . .’ (10.489).

Older yet is the bossy queen of the Phaiacians, who notoriously wears the trousers (6.303ff.); while at home there is the faithful wife Penelope, still beautiful after twenty years, preserving her chastity by tricks and

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schemes, and showing herself a worthy mate for the wily Odysseus. The story pattern was that she has been (as it were) checked in at the left luggage by her husband, and she must wait till he comes back to reclaim her. He duly reappears; Penelope is told by her faithful maid servant ‘Come and see! Odysseus has come home and killed the Suitors!’ (23.5ff.) She comes and sits opposite the hero, still spattered with gore from the killing: and – she refuses to recognise him. Telemachus is outraged. What more (we feel like asking) can Odysseus do? He has presented the ticket, and it has not worked.

Then she plays her trump card: ‘Pull out the bed,’ she says to her maid.

Odysseus, master of so many deceptions, is caught out by this one. ‘What!

Who has moved that bed – which I toiled to make and carve and inlay, and which I made immovable!’ (paraphrase of 23.181ff.) The imperturbable conqueror of the Suitors breaks out into indignant emotion. And so Penelope recognises him at last: not just a great killer, or a plausible impostor, but the man who shares with her the most intimate secrets of the bedroom, and who knows that the moving of the marriage bed would be a symbol of change in the marriage itself. The scene allows her to impose her own shape on events, breaking out of the passivity to which the story pattern seemed to condemn her.

In the Odyssey we are constantly aware of very basic themes. There were other Return stories; there was in fact a whole poem (now lost) with the title Returns; the return of Odysseus came to be the return, as the Trojan story came to be the story of war, siege, and heroic doing and suffering. That was achieved in part by attaching to him the widespread motif of the Warrior’s Return, at the last minute, to prevent his wife from marrying another man and his kingdom being lost.

That story demanded that the hero come back alone; we cannot have him arrive with ship-loads of men at his back. So the hero, the commander of a regular contingent at Troy, must lose all his men; and that creates a problem.

When the commander of an expedition is the sole survivor, it looks very bad, as the kinsmen of the Suitors angrily point out (24.425ff.); and as the poet himself shows himself to be nervously aware, insisting emphatically that the death of the sailors was all their own fault (1.5ff., etc.).

It is not really true, if we track him down. All the ships but one are smashed up, and the men killed, by the Laistrygonians, in Book 10. As for Odysseus, he tells us that all the other ships were moored inside the harbour, which had a very narrow entrance, ‘but I alone moored my ship outside’ (10.95).

Not, perhaps, the conduct of a responsible commander; it might not sound well at a court martial or a commission of enquiry; but it has to happen.

The plot has doomed these sailors. There are adventures ahead for which we

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need our hero to have only one ship, not an Iliadic flotilla. We cannot have a whole line of ships sailing past the Rock of the Sirens, or threading Skylla and Charybdis: the effect would be an unbearable bathos. Sinbad-like, Odysseus goes on with his one ship.

But in the end even that one must go. The men, those misguided mariners, first let Odysseus down by opening the leather bag that contained the winds, all except those he needed for his home-coming, and so blew him and themselves away from Ithaka, when they were so nearly home (10.38ff.).

Their motive was envy: ‘He has got more treasure in there, while we have got nothing!’, but we note that Odysseus did not tell them what was in the bag.

Once more the motifs of insubordination and distrust. The sailors finally seal their death warrant by slaughtering and eating the forbidden cattle of the Sun, not before being reduced to desperation by starvation.

The ship is lost, and shipwrecked Odysseus struggles on alone. For the poet needs him to be alone with Kalypso, and to reach the land of the Phaiacians, who will finally deliver him home, not only alone, but naked, nameless, cold, half drowned, and reduced to keeping himself alive overnight by crawling into a pile of fallen leaves. The poet gazes at him with affection as he lies there asleep, and compares him to a brand which an isolated farmer keeps in overnight, deeply buried in the ashes, to preserve the seed of fire (5.488ff.).

From that low point, the very verge of extinction, Odysseus must establish himself successively as a gentleman, a hero, and (finally) a king.

The comparison of the hero to a spark recalls the tone of the striking description, at the heart of the Odyssey, of the hero when he finally gets onto the Phaiacian ship which will carry him home. Recalling the opening of the poem, the poet describes the ship sailing on, swift as a hawk, cleaving the waves: bearing a man like the gods in intelligence, who had suffered much as he made his way through the perils of war and sea; but who now was peacefully asleep, unmindful of his sufferings (13.79ff.). The echo of the opening lines of the poem clearly marks that the second half of the Odyssey is beginning. It is an indication of conscious structuring of the poem.

The Odyssey has had the excellent idea of giving the returning hero a son, just grown up, who has hitherto been oppressed and intimidated in his own house by the Suitors. As long as he passively accepted their misdeeds, (‘Up to now I have been a child’), they tolerated him; but now he is aroused into action by Athene, and the Suitors immediately draw the conclusion: he must die. The return of Odysseus thus becomes even more urgent. We watch the young man mature, from the foot-squashed pessimist of Book 1 to the young warrior who is fit to stand beside his father in battle (Book 22). His growing up is speeded by his travels. He must learn to mix with his equals, his father’s old friends. At the first sight of Nestor, he is too shy to approach him and

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needs to be pushed by Athene (3.21ff.), but he is notably more confident with Menelaos (Books 4, 15), and on the return journey he has acquired the aplomb to avoid a second evening of reminiscences from old Nestor (15.193ff.). Manners and morals go very closely together, and as he learns polished behaviour Telemachos becomes a man.

Odysseus is a hero, but a hero of a very different kind from the Achilleus of the earlier epic. He is not the hero of reckless dash, sacrificing everything in quest of honour, causing the death of his dearest friend through his stubbornness, and eventually accepting death as the price of vengeance.

Odysseus is the hero of calculation, the survivor, the man who must accept humiliation in his own house, and tell his son to accept it, while he bides his time to act (16.274ff.); as he had to grit his teeth in the cave of the Cyclops, watch his companions being killed and eaten, and wait for his chance of revenge (9.299ff.). Achilleus is unthinkable in such situations. You simply cannot be Achilleus in the cave of a man-eating giant.

At a moment of high significance for the whole poem, Odysseus and Achilleus meet in the lower world. ‘No man has been more blessed than you,’ says Odysseus to him; ‘in life you received extraordinary honour, and now you are a lord among the dead.’ ‘Don’t try to console me for death,’ comes the dark response. ‘I had rather be the lowest of the low on earth, than be king of all the dead’ (paraphrase of 11.478ff.). We hear the dusty answer of the Odyssey to the Iliad: so much for glory! The effect of intertextuality is surely intended.

There is perhaps an answer to the Iliad, too, in the carefully explicit view of the gods and the working of the world. In the Iliad the gods opposed and indeed fought each other with energy and determination: gods are knocked flat on the battle field, and divine assemblies are often lively and sometimes rowdy. The doom of Troy is, in the long run and the final analysis, just: Troy started it. But that is not much comfort for the misery it means for Hektor’s wife, or the death of his baby son. The justice is of a kind we might call rough, like that of the real world; and the gods we see in action do not look altogether like convincing agents of justice, either. They are a set of splendid superhuman persons, each with ideas, passions, and commitments of a largely personal kind. The best we can say is that Zeus has both blessings and sufferings in jars in his house, and that he sees to it that no mortal gets only good things; we should think ourselves lucky if we do not get nothing but evils (Iliad 24.522ff.).

In the Odyssey the first thing we see is Zeus explaining that mortals are very unjust in their criticism of the gods. ‘They say evils come from us, but really they are responsible themselves for sufferings beyond what they are allotted! Look at Aigisthos, who seduced Agamemnon’s wife and murdered

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him. We sent a divine messenger to tell him not to do it, but he went ahead; now he has had to pay for it with his death’ (paraphrase of 1.28ff.). Such a speech is not at all in the manner of the Iliad. There Zeus is far from caring what men think of his way of ruling the world. We have already heard (1.5ff.) that the destruction of Odysseus’ men was their fault, and in the rest of the poem it will be repeatedly emphasised that sinners are first warned, and then get their deserts. The sailors are heavily warned not to touch the cattle of the Sun (12.127ff.), and the Suitors are given several warnings, from the omen interpreted in Book 2 (2.161ff.), to the second sight of the uncanny seer Theoklymenos, who has a vision of the Suitors slain and the house splashed with blood, and who is laughed at for his pains (20.345ff.).

The events of the Odyssey begin, we saw, in two separate places: Telemachos at home on Ithaka, and Odysseus on the island of Kalypso. First we deal with the arousing of Telemachos from passivity, his confrontations with the Suitors and the people of Ithaka, and his trip to the great heroes Nestor and Menelaos.

The keynote here is realism. The personal intervention of Athene is of course exceptional, but generally events are not far from the level of actual life. Then we shift to Odysseus. He is living with a minor goddess, and he is offered immortality, but the psychology of the scene is very human. He reaches the land of the Phaiacians, an exotic people, who are closer than we to the gods, and whose ships are the stuff of a mariner’s fantasies. The hero shows his skill in dealing with the princess and with her father, and he carries off with panache the problem presented by an ill-bred young Phaiacian nobleman.

Again, these are scenes close to the comedy of manners, with little about them that is specifically heroic. These Phaiacians are not, apparently, very different from us – except that their lives are easier and more decorative.

At last, one third of the way through, Odysseus launches into the famous narrative of his adventures (Books 9 to 12). Here we are in a very different world. Ogres, witches, cannibals, six-headed monsters, Lotus-eaters with their consciousness-changing drug: these are typical of the population, and every kind of peril menaces the traveller. He actually has to visit the underworld, where he has moving and memorable encounters with the dead, but where the atmosphere is strikingly unspooky, and we are spared the sight of horrors and grislies.

The second half of the poem is spent back on Ithaka, and father and son, united at last, plan with Athene the destruction of the Suitors. Undeniably, the pace slows. We grow used to the house of Odysseus, the good and bad servants, the appearances of Penelope, and the bad behaviour of the Suitors, who are greedy and aggressive but never offensive to Penelope: the poet will not permit scenes of violence to ladies, though things are different with the disloyal servant-women (22.430–73). Gradually tension mounts, as the

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contest of the Bow is mooted and set up; and at last the hero strikes. ‘You dogs! You thought I’d never come home . . .’ (22.35). At last the Bow is in action, and the Suitors bite the dust. The reunion with Penelope has already been described.

The Odyssey can thus be described as though it fell into separate sections, but the poet has contrived his transitions with great deftness, and the poem certainly does not lack unity. Less intense than the Iliad, it is more allembracing, wider in its sympathies, fuller of interesting episodes. We feel for the hero as he struggles through his difficult existence, his eyes fixed on the yearned-for moment when he can stop being a hero and settle down to a ‘rich old age’, and to a painless, gentle death, ‘which will come away from the sea’, to an Odysseus ‘with his people prospering around him’ (11.134ff.).

Jasper Griffin

Select Bibliography Text and commentaries The most widely-used text is that edited by T.W. Allen in the Oxford Classical Texts series, 2 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1917–19).

A full-scale commentary on the whole poem, by A. Heubeck, A. Hoekstra, S.R. West, J.B. Hainsworth and J. Russo, is A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, published in three volumes by Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1988, 1990, 1992).

The two-volume text and commentary by W.B. Stanford (London, Macmillan; 2nd edition, 1959) gives good value on a smaller scale.

There are excellent editions (introduction, text and commentary) of individual Books in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series (Cambridge University Press): Books 6–8 (A.F. Garvie, 1994); Books 17–18 (D. Steiner, 2010); Books 19–20 (R.B. Rutherford, 1992).

A useful single-volume commentary is Homer’s Odyssey: A Commentary based on the English Translation of Richmond Lattimore by Peter Jones (London, Bristol Classical Press, 1988), which can quite easily be used with any other translation.

‘Companions’ Finkelberg, M. (ed.), The Homer Encyclopaedia. 3 vols. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Foley, J.M. (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.

Fowler, R.L. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Morris, I. and Powell, B. (eds), A New Companion to Homer. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1997.

Nelson, C. (ed.), Homer’s Odyssey: a critical handbook. Belmont, Wadsworth, 1969.

Wace, A.J.B. and Stubbings, F.H. (eds), A Companion to Homer. London, Macmillan, 1962.

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General introductions Beye, C.R., The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Epic Tradition. London, Macmillan, 1966.

Camps, W.A., An Introduction to Homer. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Graziosi, B. and Haubold, J., Homer. The Resonance of Epic. London, Duckworth, 2005.

Griffin, J., Homer. The Odyssey. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Powell, B.B., Homer. Oxford, Blackwell, 2004.

Rutherford, R., Homer. Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics 41.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Saïd, S., Homer and the Odyssey. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Trypanis, C.A., The Homeric Epics. Warminster, Aris and Phillips, 1977.

Background Carpenter, R., Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1946.

Chadwick, J., The Mycenaean World. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Clarke, H.W., Homer’s Readers. A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1981.

Finley, M.I., The World of Odysseus. 2nd edition. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979.

Fränkel, H., Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1975.

Luce, J.V., Homer and the Heroic Age. London, Thames and Hudson, 1975.

Page, D.L., Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1973.

Composition and language Hainsworth, J.B., The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968.

Kirk, G.S., The Songs of Homer. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962 (abridged as Homer and the Epic, 1965).

Kirk, G.S. (ed.), The Language and Background of Homer. Cambridge, Heffer; New York, Barnes and Noble, 1964.

Kirk, G.S., Homer and the Oral Tradition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Lord, A.B., The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1960.

Page, D.L., The Homeric Odyssey. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955.

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xxxvii

Parry, A., The Language of Achilles and Other Papers. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989.

Parry, M., The Making of Homeric Verse. The Collected Papers of Milman Parry.

Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971.

Geography of the Odyssey Bittlestone, R., with Diggle, J. and Underhill, J., Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Bradford, E., Ulysses Found. London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.

Stanford, W.B. and Luce, J.V., The Quest for Ulysses. London, Phaidon Press, 1974.

General Auerbach, E., ‘Odysseus’ Scar’, in Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1953.

Austin, N., Archery at the Dark of the Moon. Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey.

Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975.

Bowra, C.M., Heroic Poetry. 2nd edition. London, Macmillan, 1961.

Clarke, H.W., The Art of the Odyssey. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1967; reprinted with additions, London, Bristol Classical Press, 1989.

Cohen, B., The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Doherty, L.E. (ed.), Homer’s Odyssey. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies.

Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Emlyn-Jones, C., Hardwick, L., and Purkis, J. (eds), Homer. Readings and Images.

London, Duckworth, 1992.

Fenik, B., Studies in the Odyssey. Hermes Einzelschriften 30. Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1974.

Griffin, J., Homer on Life and Death. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Lane Fox, R., Travelling Heroes. Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer.

London, Allen Lane, 2008.

Lloyd-Jones, H., The Justice of Zeus. 2nd edition. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983.

McAuslan, I. and Walcot, P. (eds), Homer. Greece and Rome Studies 4. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Schein, S.L. (ed.), Reading the Odyssey. Selected Interpretative Essays. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996. (Especially the essays by Reinhardt and Hölscher.)

Segal, C., Singers, Heroes and Gods in the Odyssey. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1995.

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Snell, B., The Discovery of the Mind. The Greek Origins of European Thought.

Oxford, Blackwell, 1953.

Thornton, A., People and Themes in Homer’s Odyssey. London, Methuen, 1970.

Wright, G.M. and Jones, P. (eds), Homer: German Scholarship in Translation.

Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997. (Especially the essays by Strasburger, Klingner and Burkert.)

Reception Graziosi, B., Inventing Homer. The Early Reception of Epic. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Hall, E., The Return of Ulysses. A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. London, I.B. Tauris, 2008.

Stanford, W.B., The Ulysses Theme. 2nd edition. Oxford, Blackwell, 1963.

On translation Arnold, M., On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (1861).

Printed in Super, R.H. (ed.), On the Classical Tradition. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1960; available online at: www.victorianprose.org.

Hardwick, L., Translating Words, Translating Cultures. London, Duckworth, 2000.

Lloyd-Jones, H., Greek in a Cold Climate, pp. 1–17. London, Duckworth, 1991.

Mason, H.A., To Homer through Pope. London, Chatto and Windus, 1972.

Steiner, G. (ed.), Homer in English. London, Penguin, 1996.

A Note on the Greek Text For this translation I have used the text of T.W. Allen in the Oxford Classical Texts series (2nd edition, 1917 and 1919). In a small number of places I have followed a variant reading, or taken a different view of the status of a line or pair of lines. I list here these few divergencies from the OCT text, in each case giving first the reading adopted for this translation.

1.320

ἀν’ ὀπαȋα, not ἀνοπαȋα

2.11

δύω κύνες ἀργοὶ, not κύνες πόδας ἀργοὶ

2.191

omitted

6.289

ὧδ’, not ὦκ’

8.299

ὅτ’, not ὅ τ’

9.326

ἀποξῦσαι, not ἀποξῦναι

9.483

omitted

11.498

εἰ γὰρ, not οὐ γὰρ

13.347–8

omitted

15.345

omitted

16.236

ὄφρ’ εἰδέω, not ὄφρα ἰδέω

16.463

αὖθ’[ι], not αὖτ’[ε]

17.429

νῆας, not νῆα

20.289

πατρὸς ἑοȋο, not θεσπεσίοισι

21.276

omitted

23.320

omitted

24.254

ἔοικεν, not ἔοικας

B O OK 1

The Gods, Athene and Telemachos

Muse, tell me of a man: a man of much resource, who was made to wander far and long, after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy. Many were the men whose lands he saw and came to know their thinking: many too the miseries at sea which he suffered in his heart, as he sought to win his own life and the safe return of his companions. But even so, for all his efforts, he could not save his companions. They perished through their own arrant folly – the fools, they ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun, and he took away the day of their return.

Start the story where you will, goddess, daughter of Zeus, and share it now with us.

At that time all the others, all those who had escaped stark destruction, were in their homes, safe from war and sea. He alone was still yearning for his return to home and wife. The great nymph Kalypso, queen among goddesses, was keeping him in her hollow cave, eager to make him her husband. But when, as the years revolved, the time came which the gods had fated for his return home to Ithaka, even there he was not free from trials, even among his own people. And now all the gods felt pity for him, except Poseidon: he was ceaseless in his anger at godlike Odysseus before he reached his own land.

But Poseidon had gone to visit the Ethiopians far away – the Ethiopians who are split in two divisions, remote from other men: some live by the setting sun, and others where it rises. There he had gone to receive a full sacrifice of bulls and rams and was seated at the feast taking his pleasure. But the other gods were gathered together in the house of Olympian Zeus, and the father of men and gods began to speak to them. His thought had turned to noble Aigisthos, killed by the son of Agamemnon, famous Orestes. With him in his mind he spoke to the immortals: ‘Oh, look how men are always blaming the gods! They say their troubles come from us. But it is they themselves, through their own arrant folly, who bring further misery on themselves beyond what we destine for them. So

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now it was beyond his destiny that Aigisthos took the wife of Agamemnon’s marriage, and killed the son of Atreus on his return. He knew it was his own stark destruction. We had told him before. We had sent Hermes the sharp-sighted, the slayer of Argos, telling him not to kill the man or woo his wife: there would be vengeance from Orestes for the son of Atreus, when Orestes reached manhood and felt the desire for his own country. That is what Hermes said, but his good advice did not sway Aigisthos’ mind. And now Aigisthos has paid it all in full.’

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene answered him: ‘Son of Kronos, our father, highest of the mighty – yes, there lies a man whose death was well deserved. So may others die who do such things! But it is the good Odysseus who grieves my heart – forlorn and far from friends, for long now he has been suffering misery on an island ringed by water, the very navel of the sea. It is a wooded island, and a goddess has her home there, the daughter of Atlas, that grim god who knows the depths of all the sea and holds the huge pillars which keep earth and sky apart. It is his daughter who keeps the poor man pining there, and always with her soft insidious words she tries to charm him, to make him forget Ithaka – but Odysseus is ready to die if only he could see the mere smoke of his country rising up from his own land. So does your heart, Olympian, even so have no concern for him? So did not Odysseus do your liking with the sacrifice he made you beside the Argives’ ships, in the broad land of Troy? So why, Zeus, are you so at odds and issue with Odysseus?’1 Then Zeus the cloud-gatherer answered her: ‘My child, what is this you have let slip the guard of your teeth? How for all this could I forget godlike Odysseus, the man who is beyond all other mortal men in power of mind, and beyond all others has offered sacrifices to the immortal gods who hold the wide heaven? But Poseidon the encircler of the earth is stubborn in his anger for the Cyclops, whose eye Odysseus blinded – godlike Polyphemos, strongest of all the Cyclopes: he was born to the nymph Thoösa, daughter of Phorkys, lord of the harvestless sea, after she lay with Poseidon in her hollow cave. From that time on Poseidon the earthshaker has harried Odysseus: he will not kill him, but keeps him far away from his native land. But come, all of us here should think of a way to bring him home. Poseidon will drop his anger: he will not be able to fight alone against the will of the immortal gods.’

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene answered him: ‘Son of Kronos, our father, highest of the mighty – if this is now indeed the pleasure of the blessed

1 Word-play on the supposed etymology of the name Odysseus, as again in 19.407–9.

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gods, that resourceful Odysseus should return to his own home, then let us send Hermes the guide, the slayer of Argos, to go to the island of Ogygia and tell the lovely-haired nymph without delay of our infallible decree, that enduring Odysseus must start on his journey home. And I myself shall go to Ithaka, to urge on his son, and put courage in his heart to call the longhaired Achaians to assembly, and speak out to all the suitors, who every day are slaughtering his crowded sheep and shambling twist-horned cattle. And I shall send him to Sparta and to sandy Pylos, to ask for any news he may hear of his dear father’s return, and to win good repute among men.’

So speaking she bound under her feet the beautiful sandals, immortal and golden, which carried her over water and limitless earth alike, fast as the wind’s blowing. She took up her strong spear, sharp-edged with pointed bronze, the huge, heavy, massive spear with which she brings low the ranks of men, the heroes who stir the mighty-fathered goddess into anger. She went darting down from the peaks of Olympos and alighted in the land of Ithaka, in the gateway of Odysseus’ house, at the entrance to the courtyard. She held the bronze spear in her hand, and had taken the form of a stranger, Mentes, the leader of the Taphians. She found the proud suitors there. They were in front of the doors delighting their hearts with games of backgammon, sitting on the skins of cattle which they had slaughtered for themselves. Heralds and servants were busy for them: some mixed wine and water in the bowls, some wiped the tables with porous sponges and set them out, and others carved great quantities of meat.

Godlike Telemachos was far the first to see her. He was sitting among the suitors with pain in his heart, thinking thoughts of his noble father, how he might come from somewhere and send those suitors scattering up and down the house, take back his royal honour, and be lord of his own property. Such were his thoughts as he sat with the suitors: and then he saw Athene. He went straight to the gateway, his heart indignant that a stranger should stand long at the doors. He came up to her, and held her right hand, and took the bronze spear from her, and spoke to her with winged words: ‘Welcome, stranger: you will be be well received at our house. And then when you have had food you can tell us what your need is.’

So speaking he led her in, and Pallas Athene followed. Then when they were inside the high house, he carried her spear and stood it against a tall pillar, in a polished spear-stand, where there already stood many spears that belonged to enduring Odysseus. Then he led her to her seat in a chair, spreading a cloth for her to sit on – a beautiful, finely-worked chair, with a footstool underneath. For himself he drew up a decorated bench beside her, well away from the suitors, so that his guest should not be disturbed by the rumpus of this insolent company, and so lose her pleasure in the feast: and

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also he wanted to question her about his absent father. A maid brought water in a beautiful golden jug and poured it out over a silver basin, for them to wash their hands: and she set a polished table beside them. The honoured housekeeper brought bread and placed it before them, and served them many kinds of food, generous with her store. And the carver carried plates of various meats to place before them, and put golden cups beside them: and a herald went constantly to and fro to serve them wine.

Then the proud suitors came in, and took their seats in order on the chairs and benches. The heralds poured water over their hands, the servingwomen piled bread in baskets beside them, and the young men filled the mixing-bowls to the brim with wine. Then the suitors put their hands to the food set prepared beside them. When they had put away their desire for eating and drinking, their thoughts turned to other concerns, to song and dancing: such are the ornaments of a feast. A herald placed his beautiful lyre in the hands of Phemios, who used to sing for the suitors because they made him sing. He then struck up on his lyre to sing a fine song, but Telemachos spoke to bright-eyed Athene, holding his head close to her, so the others should not hear: ‘Dear guest, will you perhaps take offence at what I say? These men here have the concerns you see, the lyre and song – easy enough for them, since they are consuming another man’s substance with no redress: a man whose white bones may now be rotting in the rain where they lie in some land or tossed in the waves of the sea. If only they were to see that man returned to Ithaka – then they would all be praying for speed of foot rather than more wealth in gold and clothing. But now, as I say, he has died a miserable death, and there is no comfort for us, even if some man from somewhere on earth does tell us that he will come home: the day of his return is gone. But come, tell me this and tell me in clear truth. Who are you and where are you from?

Where is your town and your parents? What sort of ship did you come on?

How did the sailors bring you to Ithaka, and who did they say they were? – since I imagine you did not come here on foot! And tell me this truly too – I want to know. Is this your first time here, or are you rather a guest-friend from my father’s time? There were many before who used to come to our house, as he himself travelled much among men.’

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene said to him: ‘So then I will tell you all that you ask in clear truth. I am Mentes, proud to claim wise Anchialos as my father, and I am king of the Taphians, skilled oarsmen. And so, as you see, I have come here now with my ship and my companions, on a voyage over the sparkling sea to foreign peoples. I am bound for Temese in search of copper, and I carry a cargo of gleaming iron. My ship is here, but outside the town, moored by the open country, in the harbour of Rheithron under wooded

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Neïon. We can claim ourselves family guest-friends from of old – you can go and ask the old man, the hero Laertes. They say he does not come to the town now, but leads a hard life out there on his farm, with an old woman as maid, who serves him his food and drink when weariness comes over his limbs with dragging his steps along the crown of his garden vineyard.

So now I have come. They said that he was here at home – your father. But the gods must be blighting his journey. Because godlike Odysseus is not yet dead on the earth – no, he is alive still, and kept somewhere in the wide sea, on some island ringed by water where cruel men have him captive, wild men who must be keeping him there against his will. And now I will make you a prophecy, the way the immortal gods have put it in my mind and the way I think it will be, though I am no prophet or skilled augur. I tell you he will not now be long away from his native land, even if they are iron chains that keep him. He will work out a way of return, because he is a man of much resource.

But come, tell me this and tell me in clear truth – grown boy that you are, are you Odysseus’ own son? Certainly your head and fine eyes are wonderfully like him – we saw ever so much of each other before he embarked for Troy, where the other leading Argives went too in their hollow ships. Since that time I have not seen Odysseus nor he me.’

Then Telemachos, good man of sense, answered her: ‘Friend, I will tell you what you ask in clear truth. Yes, my mother says that I am his son, but I do not know for myself – nobody yet knew his own birth. So now I wish I were the son of some fortunate man, reaching old age in enjoyment of his property. But as it is, the most ill-fated of mortal men is the man they say is my father – since that is what you ask me.’

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene said to him: ‘Well, I tell you yours is a line the gods have not made inglorious for the future, seeing that Penelope gave birth to such a fine son as you. But come, tell me this and tell me in clear truth. What sort of feast is this, what is this gathering here? What is your part in it? Banquet or wedding? This is no club meal for sure – they seem an insolent unmannered lot dining in your house. Any sensible man joining them would be angry to see all this gross behaviour.’

Then Telemachos, good man of sense, answered her: ‘Friend, since you ask me these things now and enquire closely – once I am sure this house was rich and strong, when that man was still at home. But now the gods have willed otherwise in their mischief. They have made him vanish from sight like no other man. If he had simply died I would not feel such grief – if he had been brought down among his companions in the land of Troy, or died in the arms of his family once the thread of war was spun. Then all the Achaians together would have made him a funeral mound, and he would have won great glory for his son as well thereafter. But now the storm-winds have

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snatched him away in obscurity. He is gone beyond sight, beyond knowledge: and my legacy is pain and tears. And now it is not only him I have to grieve and weep for, because now the gods have created other hateful troubles for me. All the leading men who have power in the islands, in Doulichion and Same and wooded Zakynthos, and all who are princes in rocky Ithaka, all these are suitors for my mother’s hand, and they are wasting our house. She can neither refuse the marriage she hates, nor bring it to an issue: and they are wasting away my substance with their eating. Soon enough they will tear me apart myself.’

Pallas Athene answered him in indignation: ‘Oh, you surely have a great need for the absent Odysseus, to lay his hands on these shameless suitors!

If only he were to come now and take his stand at the entrance door of his house, with helmet and shield and pair of spears, the man he was when I first saw him in our house, drinking wine and at his ease. He was coming back from Ephyre, from visiting Ilos son of Mermeros. Odysseus had gone there in his fast ship in search of a lethal poison, for smearing on his bronzetipped arrows. Ilos did not give it him, for fear of the ever-living gods: but my own father did give it to him – he had an abounding love for him. If only Odysseus, the man he was then, could meet these suitors! They would all find a grim marriage and a quick death. But these things lie in the lap of the gods, whether he will return, or not, and take his vengeance in his own house. But I urge you to think of a way of driving the suitors out from the house. So come now, listen and heed well what I say. Tomorrow you should call the Achaian leaders to assembly, and make your statement to them all, with the gods your witnesses. Tell the suitors to disperse to their own property. For your mother, if her heart is set on marriage, let her go back to the house of her father, a man of great power: and her family will prepare the wedding and get ready all the many gifts that should go with a loved daughter.

As for yourself, I shall give you sound advice for you to follow. Fit out the best ship you have with twenty oars, and set off to enquire about your longabsent father. Some mortal man may tell you of him, or you may hear some rumour sent by Zeus – and rumour brings most of the news that men hear.

Go first to Pylos and question godlike Nestor, and then go on to Sparta, to fair-haired Menelaos – he was the last of the bronze-clad Achaians to come home. Now if you hear that your father is alive and will return, then you could bear your present troubles for another year. But if you hear that he has died and is no more, then travel back to your own dear native land, and pile a mound for him and pay him all the many funeral honours that are due, and give your mother to another husband.

When you have completed this journey and done as I say, then you must consider in your mind and heart a way to kill the suitors in your house,

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whether by cunning or in open fight. You should not keep on with the ways of a child – you are past that age now. Or have you not heard of the glory that godlike Orestes won among all men, when he killed his father’s killer, treacherous Aigisthos, the man who murdered his famous father? So you too, my friend – and I can see that you are so fine and tall – you must be brave too, so that people will speak well of you, even in generations yet to be born. Well, I shall go back now to my fast ship and my companions, who must be restless with waiting for me. All this is your own task: heed well what I say.’

Then Telemachos, good man of sense, answered her: ‘Friend, all that you say is said in kindness, like a father to his son, and I shall never forget your words. But come now, stay longer, eager though you are to be on your way – so you can first bathe and enjoy your heart’s ease, and then go back to your ship with a gift to delight your heart. It will be something precious and beautiful, a treasure from me for you to store – such are the gifts of friendship which hosts and guests exchange.’

Then the bright-eyed goddess Athene answered him: ‘Do not keep me any longer now, as I am keen to be on my way. As for the gift which your heart urges you to give me, give it on my way back here, for me to take home with me. Do indeed choose something beautiful – it will win you a return.’

So speaking bright-eyed Athene left him, and in the shape of a bird flew up through the roof-vent. And she put strength and courage in his heart, and brought him in mind yet more than ever of his father. He felt it in his heart and was full of wonder – he recognised that this was a god. And then straightaway he went to join the suitors, a man like the gods.

There the famous bard was singing for them, and they sat in silence, listening. He sang of the homecoming of the Achaians, the painful return which Pallas Athene had laid on them from Troy.

Now from upstairs the daughter of Ikarios, good Penelope, had heard his divine song. And she came down by the high staircase from her room – not alone, but two maids went with her. When Penelope, queen among women, had reached the suitors, she stood by the pillar that held the strong-built roof, holding her shining veil across her cheeks, and a loyal maid stood on either side of her. Then she broke in tears and spoke to the divine bard: ‘Phemios, you know many other ways to charm men’s ears – deeds of men and gods that poets celebrate. Sing one of these to the suitors here, and they can drink their wine in silence as they listen. But stop this painful song, which always grieves the heart in my breast, because I more than any have been touched by lasting sorrow. Such is the husband I have lost and long for, whose dear head is always in my memory – a man whose fame has spread wide throughout Hellas and the heart of Argos.’

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Then Telemachos, good man of sense, answered her: ‘Mother, why is it that you grudge the loyal bard his pleasing us as the mind takes him? The blame is not with bards: the blame must be with Zeus, who gives their fortune to all men who eat bread on earth, to each of them as he will. No cause for anger, then, if this man sings of the Danaans’ miserable fate. Men always praise most the song which comes freshest to their ears. So your heart and mind must bear to listen. Odysseus was not the only one to lose the day of his return in Troy: many other men died there also. No, go back to your room and see to your own work, the loom and the distaff, and tell your maids to set about their tasks. Talk will be the men’s concern, all of them, but mine above all: mine is the power in this house.’

She then turned back towards her room, full of wonder: she had laid to heart these words of authority from her son. She climbed with her maids to the upper floor, and then began weeping for Odysseus, her dear husband, until bright-eyed Athene cast sweet sleep over her eyelids.

Meanwhile the suitors broke out in clamour throughout the shadowy hall, all voicing at once their hopes to lie beside Penelope in her bed. Then Telemachos, good man of sense, began to speak to them: ‘You, my mother’s suitors, so full of outrage and insolence, listen! For now let us enjoy the feast, and no more shouting, since it is a fine thing to hear a bard such as this one is, with a voice like the gods. But in the morning let us all go and sit in the assembly-place, so I can give you my message outright and tell you bluntly to leave my house – find your meals elsewhere, eat your own possessions, take turns from house to house. But if this seems to you a better and a finer thing, to destroy one man’s substance with no redress, then eat away. And I shall call on the ever-living gods, in the hope that Zeus may grant that you are done by as you do – then you would be destroyed in this house, and no redress.’

So he spoke, and they all bit hard on their lips, amazed at Telemachos and his bold speech.

Then Antinoös, son of Eupeithes, answered him: ‘Telemachos, the gods themselves must be teaching you now to talk big and make bold speeches.

I hope the son of Kronos never makes you our king in sea-ringed Ithaka, though it is yours by birth from your father.’

Then Telemachos, good man of sense, answered him: ‘Antinoös, you may think what I say presumptuous, but if Zeus grants it, yes, I would gladly take up that right. Do you think this is the worst thing there is among men? No, it is no bad thing to be a king: wealth comes quickly for the house and greater honour for the man. But there are many other Achaian princes in sea-ringed Ithaka, young and old, and one of them is welcome to succeed, now that godlike Odysseus is dead. But I myself will be lord over my own house and the servants whom godlike Odysseus won for me in war.’

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Then Eurymachos, son of Polybos, answered him: ‘Telemachos, these things lie in the lap of the gods – which of the Achaians it is who will be king in sea-ringed Ithaka. But you I hope will certainly keep your own possessions and be lord in your house – may there never come the man to force his will against yours and dash you out of your possessions, as long as Ithaka has people in her. But now, my friend, I want to ask you about your guest. Where is this man from, what country does he claim his own, where is his family and his fathers’ land? Does he bring some news of your father on his way home, or is he come here pursuing some business of his own? Strange how he leapt up and was suddenly gone, and did not wait to be known – he was certainly no commoner, to judge by his looks.’

Then Telemachos, good man of sense, answered him: ‘Eurymachos, there is no home-coming for my father – that is gone. I no longer believe any news that comes in: I pay no attention to any prophecy, when my mother calls a prophet to the house and questions him. No, this man is a guest-friend from my father’s time. He is Mentes from Taphos, proud to claim wise Anchialos as his father, and he is king of the Taphians, skilled oarsmen.’

So spoke Telemachos, though in his heart he knew it was the immortal goddess. The suitors now turned to pleasure in dancing and delightful song, and waited for the evening to come on. And they were still taking their pleasure when the dark evening came: then they went home to sleep, each to his own house. Telemachos went to where his own high room was built in the fine courtyard, in a sheltered spot. There he went to his bed, turning over many thoughts in his mind. With him, carrying burning torches to light his way, there went the loyal-hearted Eurykleia, the daughter of Ops, son of Peisenor. Laertes had bought her long ago with his own possessions, when she was still in her first youth, and he had given the worth of twenty oxen for her: he honoured her in his house as much as his own loved wife, but he never slept with her, to avoid his wife’s anger. It was she then who carried the burning torches for Telemachos. Of all the serving-women she loved him the most, and had been his nurse when he was small. He opened the doors of the strong-built bedroom, and sat down on the bed and took off his soft tunic, and put it in the hands of the wise old woman. She folded the tunic and smoothed it, and hung it on a hook beside the fretted bed. Then she went out of the bedroom, pulled the door shut by the silver handle, and drew the bolt home by its strap. And there all night long, wrapped in woollen blankets, Telemachos pondered in his mind the journey advised by Athene.

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