Lecture
on the Odyssey
[The following lecture,
prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College (now Vancouver Island
University), is in the public domain and may be used by anyone, in whole or in
part, without permission and without charge, provided the source is
acknowledged. The document below (prepared in August 2004) is a revised version
of a lecture prepared in 1996]
For comments or questions,
please contact Ian Johnston
Introduction
In
any discussion of the Odyssey, we might begin by acknowledging that this
is an extraordinarily influential book, not simply for the ancient Greeks but
throughout Western culture. It has for centuries been one of the most
perennially popular classics, both for general readers and for aspiring artists
in all sorts of genres from lyric poetry to the visual arts. It has influenced
the literature of the entire world and continues to do so to a remarkable
extent—both in the high culture and in popular culture (from James Joyce’s Ulysses
to television’s Xena the Warrior Princess or Hercules). In this
lecture today, I hope to offer a few possible reasons for that extraordinary and
continuing popularity and influence.
However,
apart from discussing the Odyssey directly, I would also like to consider
two related matters: first, some introductory remarks about the epic nature of
this narrative and about its celebrated author and then, as we proceed, some
comparisons between the world we encounter in this fiction and the one you have
just finished dealing with in the Book of Genesis.
A
Brief Historical Note: Homer
Before
attending to such a lofty goal, however, let me say a very few introductory
words about Homer himself or herself or themselves. I'm not a great fan of
historical introductions, but a few words might be in order before we move into
the poem.
Homer
is the name of the person traditionally credited with the authorship of two
major epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, each consisting of
twenty-four book of hexameter verse in an ancient Greek dialect. The first deals
with some very famous incidents in the tenth year of the Trojan War, with
special attention to the greatest warrior in the Greek forces, Achilles, and the
second deals with the ten-year return from that war of a prominent leader of the
Greek force, Odysseus, King of Ithaca. In addition to these two works, to Homer
are attributed a number of short poems addressed to the gods, the so-called
Homeric hymns.
There
has been a very long debate about the identity of Homer. From the material in
the poems, we estimate that the works which bear his name were composed in the
middle of the eighth century BC, around 750 BC. The stories that he tells are
about a time well before that, probably around 1100 BC (about the time of the
historical events narrated in Exodus). Particular details of Homer's life, his
identity, and his times are all totally obscure, except what we can glean from
the poems themselves or from archaeological clues. There are virtually no other
reliable sources of information.
The
Greeks themselves believed that Homer was a single person, by tradition a blind
poet, who composed and sang his songs to entertain the nobles. Many believed and
still believe that the bard Demodocus in the Odyssey is a self-portrait.
A number of cities, particularly ones on the coast of Asia Minor, claimed him as
a native of their communities.
It
seems clear that these poems were composed before the introduction of writing
into Greece (one of the major differences you should notice between the Old
Testament and the Odyssey is the total absence of writing in the latter
and the extreme importance of it in the former). Hence, Homer, whoever he was,
composed the works orally, committed them to memory, and recited them on demand,
perhaps with a certain amount of improvisation to take into account the
particular preferences of his audience. The poems were not written down in
anything like the form we know about them until the sixth century BC, when the
Athenian tyrant Pisistratus, as part of his attempt to boost Athenian culture,
committed the poems to writing.
For
the past two hundred years at least, since the rise of modern Homer scholarship,
there has been considerable argument whether this traditional account of Homer
is correct. Some have held that no single poet could have written two such
different poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey, that the latter poem
has such a feminine sensibility, especially by contrast to the very tough
warrior ethic of the Iliad, that it might well have been written by a
woman. At any rate, it seems a much later composition by a very different
sensibility. Others have claimed that the term Homer refers to a family of bards
entrusted with memorizing, embellishing, performing, and passing on these
ancient poems over a period of many centuries. Still others have maintained that
the name Homer refers to the person or persons who put together a number of
different traditional poems to create these two epics (hence, the author was
more an editor or compiler than the original source of both poems). And so on.
Since there is no strong independent evidence (i.e., material outside the texts
themselves) to support or refute any of these conflicting ideas, no consensus
has emerged about the author's identity.
The
ancient Greeks certainly had no doubts about the historical events of the Trojan
War, which they dated at roughly 1200 BC. Early modern scholarship tended to
write off any historical basis for the two poems, claiming that the Trojan War
was simply a marvellous fiction invented by Homer. That view was challenged very
abruptly by the excavations by a rich German merchant Heinrich Schliemann of
Hissarlik in Turkey (1870-1890). Schliemann based his search for the site
on the geographical details provided in the Iliad. There he uncovered the
remains of a settlement which had clearly suffered violent destruction at
approximately the traditional dates of the Trojan expedition (i.e., c. 1200 BC).
One should note, however, that the site also raised a number of questions about
the validity of identifying the unearthed city with Troy, so the old controversy
has not entirely disappeared, but the number of those prepared to concede a
historical basis for the Trojan War has substantially increased. On the basis of
various astronomical clues in the poem, the most recent contribution to the
scholarly debate offers a specific date for Odysseus’ triumph over the
suitors: April 16, 1178 BC (for details click here)
What
is indisputable is that these two poems acquired in ancient Greece, and
especially in Athens, an extraordinary authority, forming the closest thing to a
sacred text which the Greeks shared. Homer's poetry became not simply a treasury
of ancient history but also a vital source of moral instruction, and Achilles
and Odysseus, the two heroes, become the great role models in traditional Greek
thinking about how one should live one's life. It is the closest thing the
Ancient Greeks had to a bible (although one should not push this comparison too
hard, for among the Greeks there were many stringent critics of Homer).
You
will be encountering a significant indication of the importance of Homer in
traditional Greek thinking and education in Plato's Republic. For Plato
is very conscious that, in challenging Greek traditions so radically, the great
presence he has to confront and answer is Homer himself, the single most
important cultural authority for a traditional view of life which Plato wishes
to challenge. That is the reason why so much of his discussion of what is most
appropriate in poetry and fiction generally involves a critical assessment of
Homer's poetry in a series of arguments that would have shocked many members of
his audience, for whom the authority of Homer was paramount.
There
is not time here to trace the extraordinarily complicated transmission of the
stories in these poems and of the texts themselves into our culture. They have
certainly had a profound influence, but it is often difficult to account for
direct influence of Homer’s text until fairly modern times, because the
stories and characters of the poems were often filtered through other people's
adaptations of Homer or other writer's versions of events which Homer first
delivers, so that over time many additional details were added to Homer's
stories and characters were often reinterpreted (e.g., for the Middle Ages
Achilles is famous as a lover, Odysseus becomes a great villain, the great
deceiver and liar). Homer’s text was not available in Western Europe until the
fifteenth century, so that the countless versions of the Trojan War during the
Middle Ages were all derived from other sources (e.g., in Dante’s Inferno).
The
Odyssey as an Epic Poem
The
Odyssey and the Iliad are commonly called epic poems, a term
derived from one of the Greek words for poetry, and this phrase is applied to a
certain style of writing based, in large part, on the models and criteria
established by Homer's work, an extremely important form in the history of
Western literature, since composing an epic work was for a long time considered
the highest achievement a writer could attain. So we might spend a few
moments considering what this term means.
An
epic poem, following the example of Homer, is a long narrative poem organized in
a series of books (usually twelve or twenty four). The story
characteristically begins in the middle of the action and fills in the details
of past events in various ways as the narrative proceeds. What gives the
long work its epic character, however, is its scope. These works
present the reader with what amounts to a comprehensive vision of experience at
a particular cultural moment. So the poem is not merely a long story about
particular people in particular places; it is also a detailed cultural and
spiritual map, delineating an entire belief system, the very basis of a
civilization. This map will include, among other things, what certain
groups of people believe about themselves, about their relationship with the
divine, about their sense of the past and future, about nature, both civilized
and wild, and about what is most important in life. In other words, the
epic quality of an epic poem emerges from the way in which it holds up for our
inspection an entire way of life. For that reason, a really useful way to
come to an understanding of a particular historical culture is to explore it
famous epic poetry (if there is any), and you will be doing that when you read
this poem and other works later in Liberal Studies and in English courses if you
are taking any (particularly Dante's Inferno and Milton's
Paradise Lost).
One
of the most curious historical facts about epic poems is that they tend to get
written when the civilization they are celebrating is clearly passing away or
has disappeared completely. Homer's poems are about a culture which no
longer exists in quite the same manner in his day. And Dante's Inferno and
Malory's Morte D'Arthur, two famous epics of the Middle Ages, were
written at a time when that cultural moment was changing forever or had largely
disappeared. And Milton's great religious epic, Paradise Lost, was
created after the defeat of the Protestant experiment with Cromwell's
Commonwealth.
The
epic character of the Odyssey is readily apparent. The poem takes
us on a long journey to various centres of civilization, explores many different
aspects of the wilderness, subjects a civilization's values, as these manifest
themselves in the hero and heroine and the minor characters, to a series of
tests, and illuminates for us the relationship between the gods and mortals, the
present and the past, visions of this life and the next. It thus offers us
a valuable and detailed picture of a particular culture's sense of what it means
to be a civilized, moral, and excellent human being.
In
recent times, epic narratives have tended to be written in prose (for example, War
and Peace or Moby Dick), and the epic novel has largely replaced the
traditional epic poem as the highest summit of the creative writer's art.
Some
Comments on the Structure and Style of the Odyssey
Before
getting to what I really want to discuss in detail—that is the vision of life
in the Odyssey and the character of the hero, I must first, however
cursorily, acknowledge one great source of the pleasure we derive from reading
this poem: its structure, that is, the way in which the narrative is organized.
One
of the first things that strikes many readers about the Odyssey,
especially in contrast to, say, the Iliad or even much of the Old
Testament, is that we are clearly here in the presence of a very sophisticated
story teller who is manipulating certain conventions of fiction in remarkable
ways. For instance the narrative line of the Odyssey lays down two
stories initially—the first one focusing on Telemachus and Penelope and events
in Ithaca, and the second, which does not begin until Book V, focusing on the
hero Odysseus. And when we begin to follow Odysseus's adventures, we have to
keep close track of where we are, because the narrative uses a number of
flashbacks, interruptions, and time shifts. The two narrative lines come
together when the father and son are reunited in Book XVI, and the two stories
march together to their common conclusion, although even here there are repeated
shifts from one part of the action to another and back again (e.g. from Odysseus
and Eumaeus out on the estates to the suitors in the palace to Penelope in her
rooms and back again).
I
don't propose today to explore the importance of this structure in detail, but I
would like to call attention to one or two contributions it makes. When we think
of the Odyssey, we tend to concentrate much of our focus on Odysseus
himself, and certainly most of the really famous incidents from this poem
concern the adventures of the main hero. But if we read the poem carefully, we
should note just how much emphasis the structure gives to Odysseus's family,
especially to his wife and son. In a way, the narrative emphasis in the
structure puts pressure on us to see in this story more than just the memorable
events in the hero's life, reminding us that this story is also about a family
and about how each of the principal members of that family plays an important
role in the successful reunion and the restoration of a traditional ruling
household.
What's
remarkable about this (and also very frustrating) is that such an obviously
sophisticated narrative skill cannot just arise from nothing. For it
presupposes, not just an artist educated to use conventions in this way, but
also an audience familiar enough with such matters to follow what is going on.
So we are very safe in assuming that the Odyssey could not have been sui
generis—produced in a cultural vacuum all of a sudden. It presupposes a
tradition of some sort and an audience familiar enough with that tradition to
follow narrative complexities. And yet we have no trace of that tradition (other
than the sibling epic, the Iliad, in which the structure is very
different). So here we have what is obviously the product of a long tradition of
story telling, a work so remarkable that even today the Odyssey can serve
as really useful instruction manual for writers wishing to study the ways in
which plot construction and chronological variety can serve all sorts of vital
artistic purposes, and yet we have no details whatsoever of the tradition out of
which it arose, any of the other works on whose shoulders Homer, whoever he or
she or they were, built.
This
structure, in which different stories are going on at the same time and we are
shifting back and forth between them, creates a very different effect than the
narrative style of the Old Testament, where there is an apparently much simpler
narrative line which is always dynamically thrusting ahead into new events. Here
there is what I like to call an almost spatial organization of incidents, as if
at one moment we are seeing one corner of a grand picture, then shifting to
another, and then moving to another, and then going back to the first, and so
on—with everything, in a sense, simultaneously present (including events from
the past). This helps to create something I’ll have more to say about before I
finish—a very different sense of time than we see in the Genesis narrative,
for instance.
Reinforcing
this sense of a spatial emphasis is the distinctive style in which Homer tells
his story. There is not time to go into this in detail, but I would like briefly
to mention a very famous essay on this subject which I recommend highly, the
essay "Odysseus’ Scar," the first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s
remarkable book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
In this essay Auerbach discusses how Homeric story telling is leisurely and
digressive, with everything fully illuminated in long descriptions of past
events or beautiful places and leisurely conversations at length. There is no
attempt to move quickly or to generate suspense (Auerbch's well-known example of
this technique, from which the essay takes its title, is the long digression
right in the middle of the significant moment when the nurse is about to
recognize Odysseus). What matters here is external description rather than
psychological depth, historical development, or narrative suspense. The style
celebrates the rich and fully detailed spatial surfaces of life. One of the
great pleasures of reading the Odyssey comes from this vividly
interesting and yet apparently relaxed way in which the story is told.
Auerbach
contrasts this with the style of the Old Testament, focusing in particular on
the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. If you can
remember that story, the differences in the styles becomes immediately apparent.
In that Genesis story, there is no emphasis on external description. We don’t
know what Abraham and Isaac look like, nor do we have any clearly detailed
picture of the location. And there is virtually no conversation. What we
do have is a very compressed, terse, suspenseful story in which the overriding
concern is the psychology of Abraham. Will he carry out God’s wishes and
sacrifice his son? This crucial moment in Abraham’s life takes only a few
lines (it’s much shorter than the description of how Odysseus got his scar),
and the effect depends upon compression and upon what is left out. One can
imagine how Homer might have told this story—it would have taken him a full
book, and the effect would have been very different.
The
Vision of Life
Now,
however, I would like to direct our attention onto the world we confront in this
epic. What are we to make of it? A good place to start might be to ask the
following question: What is about this ancient poem, composed more than 2500
years ago, that makes it such a lasting pleasure for readers, more immediately
accessible to modern students, for example, than almost any other ancient text?
What
I'd like to suggest, first of all, is that this poem is a wonderful celebration
of things which human beings have always particularly cherished, even today in
these very different times. When we read this work we find in its value system
and vision of the world a confirmation of many things we would most like to
celebrate as well.
And
what are those things? Well, briefly put, they are the peaceful joys available
in a world in which the main concerns of human beings are family, friends, works
of art, good food, conversation, hospitality, leisure, entertainment—a life
dedicated to human warmth, security, and pleasure in good company, especially in
our own families and communities. Again and again in the Odyssey we
witness scenes where these qualities are celebrated and endorsed. The world may
often be dangerous, the main characters may be growing older, and we are
certainly conscious of evil lurking here and there; nevertheless life is full of
joys, and it is entirely right and proper that we should find in them the
guiding purposes of life.
I've
made a large claim in a short space, and I hope to expand on this claim in more
detail in this lecture. But it should be clear enough, I think, that we
understand a vision of life like this easily enough. The idea that hearth and
home can and should be the centres of our lives, that we find our proper
justification in the everyday qualities that an appropriately respected and
protected home life provides—this idea is still, I would argue, one of our
most cherished visions. Indeed, many of us spend much of our lives trying to
create and sustain just such a life (with entertainment centres instead of blind
harpers, six packs instead of mixing bowls of wine, and so on). Certainly most
of us would prefer to strive for that than to wander for forty years in the arid
wilderness eating nothing but manna hoping for the promised land or risking
death every day in an endless siege all for the sake of an enduring military
glory.
I'm
going to have a lot more to say about this later on. But think for a moment just
how much of this poem is taken up with the pleasures of domestic
hospitality—the eating, drinking, story telling, music, intimate
conversations, warm beds, perfumed baths, dancing, beautiful architecture and
silverware—all that "cozy eroticism" that transforms everyday events
into something joyful and worthwhile. Coleridge called the Odyssey that
"eating poem," and one sees what he means—at every stage people are
sitting down together and stuffing themselves, taking part in what must be the
oldest and most frequent communal social ritual, a shared meal at which
anonymous guests who show up unexpectedly at the door are welcome.
Moreover,
let us consider for a moment the most obvious organizing principle of this
story—it focuses on the return home by the head of the family and the
continuing attempts of those left behind to sustain the home until such a
return. Throughout the story the preservation and the strengthening of the
traditional home is the overriding value before which others must give way.
We
learn early in the poem from the gods themselves that this universe has a single
coherent and binding moral principle, that the home must be respected. There are
many references (about ten or more) throughout the poem to the famous story of
Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition against Troy, who was murdered by
his wife, Clytaemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, and of his son, Orestes, who
avenged the murder by killing Aegisthus. This story—along with the unequivocal
approval of the gods for the actions of Orestes—acts as a repetitive reminder
of the single overriding moral principle of this universe, as important in this
world as the commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses are in the
world of the Old Testament.
In
other words, central to the vision of the Odyssey is the upholding of the
major moral principle of the universe: the value of the home. This is, if you
like, the ethical norm established in the poem both in the commandments of the
gods and the actions of the principal characters. And Homer in the early books
makes sure we see just what that home life really means, in the courts of Nestor
and Menelaus. This enables us to understand clearly enough what is going wrong
with all the suitors messing things up in Ithaca and why Odysseus, when we meet
him, so values his home.
This
particular point comes out here and throughout the poem on the special emphasis
given to women. In the underworld Odysseus has a long conversation with his
mother, and he and Agamemnon talk about wives—faithful and unfaithful. It
seems that what is of most concern here is the family and the preservations of
what it stands for and particularly for those women who are in charge of
maintaining the home. In
marked contrast to the Iliad and to the Old Testament, the Odyssey
gives special value to those women who successfully nurture their homes: Helen,
Arete, and, above all, Penelope. These women concern themselves a great deal
with the proper forms of hospitality, with making sure everyone is comfortable,
getting enough to eat, easing their daily cares in the communal rituals of the
home. Whereas in the Iliad, women in general have a very inferior value
(in the chariot races the first prize for the winner is a cauldron, while the
second prize is a woman skilled in crafts), here women stand at the very centre
of what makes life most worthwhile, and thus it is not surprising that the
reunion with Penelope and the various tests which Odysseus must undergo before
she is prepared to accept him are a decisive part of the climactic movement of
the poem. And it is also clear that the home is still there for Odysseus to come
back to because of the intelligence, courage, and love of Penelope. It is thus
fitting that the final test Odysseus must undergo is controlled by his wife
(who, one might very well sense, has already recognized him, but who is going to
insist that, in this instance, he answers to her).
There
is, of course, another group of women—the temptresses, the wild women, those
who lure the adventurer into the wilderness so that he will never return: the
Sirens, Circe, Calypso. These women are divine and surpassingly beautiful, with
magical powers and eternal life. They surely tempt Odysseus. But they are not
his home. That for Odysseus is defined by Penelope—and he prefers human life
in a civilized home to eternal life on an enchanted island.
The
Gods
as Visual Manifestations of the Divine
The
mention of the gods in connection with the overriding moral principle I have
referred to brings us to what Homer is particularly famous for: his creation of
the gods and goddesses. No one who reads the Odyssey can fail to
appreciate that these divinities are important. But we might well wonder how we
are supposed to deal with them, especially given our very different Christian,
Jewish, or Muslim traditions. Just what do they represent?
For
a long time, a number of interpreters neutralized any challenge this vision of
the divine might have for us by insisting that these gods and goddesses were not
intended seriously, that they are simply a delightful poetic creation and have
little to do with serious religious belief. That
view of the matter is surely inadequate, for at least two important reasons.
The first is that characters in the poem certainly take their gods and goddesses
very seriously: they are the central issue in their beliefs about the world.
To dismiss them as merely poetical delights overlooks (and is perhaps meant to
overlook) the important and serious religious vision at work in this poem.
The second reason is that we know that the classical Greeks took their gods very
seriously and organized their religious life around worshipping them. And
Homer's depiction of the gods was a vitally important shaping influence in
developing that religion. So it seems clear we need to treat them as
significant, too.
On
a very obvious level, any depiction of gods and goddesses which we are inclined
to take seriously is a very clear indication of how people who believe in those
gods conceive of their world and themselves. One of the most immediate ways to
understand why particular people behave the way they do is to examine carefully
the nature of the gods they believe in, particularly in the relationship between
the divine and the human which that belief endorses. Hence, to get an
intelligent grasp on the world of the Odyssey, we must see how a faith in
such divine presences shapes a very particular understanding of the world, an
understanding that is extraordinarily different from what we see in the
Israelites in the Old Testament.
Homer's
divine universe is plural and made up of innumerable creatures who are
recognizably like human beings. In many ways they are indistinguishable from
human beings except for three things: their immortality, their power, and their
beauty. The world of the Odyssey, like that of the Iliad,
conceives of these gods in very sharp relief, in very particular visual detail.
This, of course, is in marked contrast to the single God of the Old Testament
who has no clear physical shape and who manifests Himself above all through his
power and His voice, but never in a detailed physical form.
The
world of the Odyssey is one which thus sees the ruling powers of the
world, the forces which control everything which goes on in nature and human
life, as huge beautiful humanlike beings. These divinities, we should note,
exist everywhere in nature. Poseidon, for example, is god of the sea, and the
sea is the place where he resides. But in a complex sense Poseidon, along with a
host of minor deities, also is the sea. In the same way, a eagle flying up in
the sky may be a messenger from Zeus, an omen of Zeus, or even Zeus himself. The
entire world of nature is permeated by divinities, major and minor, and one
cannot easily draw a line between nature and the divinities which shape and
control it.
This,
too, is in marked contrast to the Old Testament, and marks one of the greatest
differences between the Hebrew and the Greek ways of conceiving the world. In
the Old Testament and in the religions derived from it (including Christianity)
there is a sharp line between a single God and His created nature. We recognize
in the nature the work of God, manifestations of His glory, excellence, and
benevolence, but we do not worship nature as divine—that is one of the oldest
heresies, and religions derived from the Old Testament have waged a constant war
against it.
Hence
the curious difference: in Greek religion the only truly holy things are places,
usually natural environments (groves, mountains, valleys) and the gods who live
there or who are themselves manifest in the natural environment; in religions
derived from the Old Testament, especially Christianity, by contrast, only
people are holy. There may be some special places (like Mount Sinai), but they
derive their sacred character from a holy person associated with them (some
miracle or martyrdom or magnificent service to God), not because they are
divine. And when Christianity turned against the pagan world in the fourth
century AD, its agents attacked the holy places with a vengeance (there is even
a Christian saint whose holiness derives from the zeal with which he chopped
down trees).
The
intimate union between the gods and nature throughout the poem also presents us
with a particular vision of the wilderness. In the Old Testament there is a good
deal of wilderness, but it serves as a test of the Israelites; there is little
sense that it has a beauty and an allure of its own. It is, by contrast,
harsh and almost entirely sterile. The great danger for the
Israelites is not that they will succumb to the temptations of a lush and
seductive nature; it is that they will give up their faith that beyond the
wilderness lies a land of milk and honey which they will soon reach.
In
the Odyssey much of nature is beautiful, mysterious, and fecund—food
grows on Polyphemus' island without any cultivation, and Calypso's place is like
a natural paradise. But the wilderness is also dangerous for two reasons: brute
monsters live there (and we know they are brute monsters because, like
Polyphemus, they have no clothes, lots of hair, strange physiognomy, one eye,
for example, and they eat people). The vision here is ambiguous—the wilderness
is magical, divine, a source of inspiration, seductive song, even health; on the
other hand, it is dangerous, a place where people get killed or transformed or
go mad or lose their will to seek out civilization. This particular attitude,
typical of a great deal of classical literature, has proved to be very
influential throughout our history, especially during those periods when people
generally knew very little about the real wilderness except what they heard
about in old stories.
If
you want to know why, for example, for decades after the voyages of Columbus the
reports and illustrations of the natives of North America pictures them as naked
giants covered with hair, with huge clubs, cannibalistic habits, and often
deformed or abnormal faces, one factor that you will have to take into account
is that this was the way Europe had for hundreds and hundreds of years
understood the wilderness, drawing on Greek legends, the Odyssey, and
various adaptations of it to fit the new world into what they knew from their
traditions the wilderness must look like.
The
detailed physical sense of the Homeric gods is important to note, too,
especially in comparison with the God of the Old Testament, who forbids any
graven images, who wants obedience to His words not to his image. In the Odyssey
generally you will notice that there an enormous amount of visual detail, of the
sort generally absent from the Old Testament. How the gods look is important,
just as it is important how beautiful places look (like the palace of Menelaus
or the paradisal gardens of Calypso). By contrast, in the Old Testament we are
almost never given any sense of the appearance of anything, and no one ever
stops, like Odysseus or Telemachus, lost in amazement at the sheer aesthetic
beauty of a particular place or person.
What
does matter in the Old Testament is the process of building something,
especially something ordered by God, just as what matters about people and
events is not what they look like but what they contribute to the unfolding
story of the Israelites. The God of the Old Testament speaks, and things
happen—in fact, the Hebrew word for speak is linked etymologically with
the verb to act. So in that vision of life there is a very dynamic world
controlled by a single divine force which is driving things forward all the
time—what matters is the event, not a detailed description of how it happened
or even of who participated in it.
In
the Odyssey, by contrast, the gods are conceived spatially—with
particular human shapes in a world which is celebrated for its appearance. There
is no sense in the Odyssey, as there is in the Old Testament, of an
unfolding history. There is rather a sense of a eternally beautiful and divinely
infused spatial organization—often very dynamically active, but not in the
process of changing the basic conditions of life or going anywhere different.
After all, Odysseus is in a sense going back to what he had before sailing to
Troy. He is not forging a new society for himself or his people; he is, by
contrast, re-establishing what his father had. In this vision of life, the
future is going to be much the same as the present, for there is no driving
historical force of change leading to something new. In that sense, there
is little of what we might call the historical sense in the Odyssey, of
the sort which is central to the experience of the Israelites in the Old
Testament, where their very understanding of themselves is permeated by a
historical awareness that they are on the move to forging a new identity for
themselves, something entirely different from what they have been.
Now
this is a large topic, but it might be worth reflecting briefly on this issue.
Let me, for example, make a very large claim which you will be exploring
throughout the rest of Liberal Studies, namely that some of our most important
Western traditions, the things which have decisively shaped what we have become,
stem from the divided inheritance we have received from the Greeks and the
Hebrews. The former stresses an understanding of the world which is
predominantly spatial, celebrating the visual qualities of nature and the
presence in it of divine anthropomorphic unchanging eternal personalities. From
this we derive a number of our major concerns, ranging from the fine and plastic
arts to geometry and our attempts to understand the world as operating by
eternally unchanging mathematical laws. From the latter, the Hebrew inheritance,
we derive a historical sense of our civilization as in process, in a progressive
march towards the promised land, under the divine guidance of God Himself, who
takes a special interest in us. When, in the early modern age, these two world
views come together, so that we put a geometrical or mathematical understanding
of the world in the service of a sense of unfolding historical destiny, we have
the essence of a belief system that has, more than anything else, made the
Western enterprise so dominant (the astonishingly powerful and rapid expansion
of Western Civilization is not merely due to the technology made possible by the
new science and the development of capitalism but, more importantly, from the
moral imperative, derived from Hebrew scripture, that we serve God by seeking to
advance our historical destiny through applying that technology to the conquest
of other people and of nature itself).
[Let
me insert a parenthetic observation here of something I find particularly
interesting. It’s not strictly germane to understanding the Odyssey,
but it is something you might want to think about in the next few semesters. A
number of writers have drawn on the difference I have briefly sketched out above
(and others) to claim that in our Western culture we have two basic ways of
thinking about things: we can think like a Greek or we can thing like a Jew. To
think like a Greek means understanding phenomena spatially—as a formal pattern
of characteristics which determine what that phenomena is, without any reference
to how it got that way. To think like a Jew means to understand things
historically, that is, to explain them by telling their story, by indicating
that what they are now is the result of a process coming from somewhere and
going to a destination.
Let
me offer you a couple of examples. In Liberal Studies, you are almost all of the
time asked to think like a Greek. You read a book and discuss it in seminar or
in an essay on the basis of what you find in it, the specific formal features
which make it what it is (characters, plot, structure of the argument, and so
on). We pay virtually no attention to the historical context of the book or the
author and do not encourage students to think about books historically, that is,
as products of some process which has made them what they are. If you go onto
graduate school, however, in a great many cases, you will be asked to think like
a Jew, that is, to explore in great detail some aspects of a book’s history
(either in the biography of the author or the literary tradition to which it
belongs or both).
This
duality of thinking affects also the way we think about ourselves. You can think
of yourself in a Greek manner, as someone who is made up in a certain way, with
certain permanent characteristics, created, if you like, by fate. I am what I am
because of the way I was made, and life is thus a matter of playing the cards I
have been dealt. Or you can think of yourself like a Jew, that is, historically.
I am the product of a certain story. I am what I am because of what’s happened
to me in the past, the way I was treated as a child, the decisions I have made,
the sins I have committed, and so on, which have developed my character (for
better or worse) and changed the person I was into what I am now. (When I first
visited a psychiatrist to be treated for depression, she asked me whether I
wanted the chemical explanation or the behavioural explanation. I observed that
that was a choice between the Greek notion of fate or the Hebrew idea of sin.
She smiled and agreed. I settled for the chemical explanation).]
The
Odyssey also presents these divine personalities as a huge interconnected
family—ranging from the senior and most important members, the Olympian
deities, down to innumerable nymphs and minor deities. What this does is make
the universe and everything that happens in it emotionally intelligible as
effects of divine actions, since we all have some familiarity with families and
their idiosyncrasies. We may not understand why angry fathers or rebellious
daughters or quarrelsome siblings behave the way they do, but we all acknowledge
that they do, in fact, behave that way. To conceive the universe and everything
in it as guided by the interactions of the huge divine family is to place us
immediately in direct emotional contact with everything we see around us. When
we hear thunder and lightning, we may be afraid, but we can emotionally grasp
what is going on when we call these the tools of Zeus and signs that he is
angry. And we can readily understand bad things that happen: they are the result
of the emotional ups and downs of the gods. That system is much easier to grasp
in some ways than a world order which is the product of an all-powerful, single,
all-knowing, and good God. It also means that a great deal of the faith in the
gods in the Odyssey is something we might call a belief in the irrational
feelings of divine powers. For, unlike some aspects of Old Testament belief,
these Greeks do not demand or always expect a particular god to behave in a
rational or moral manner (the notion that a god is always good—i.e., always
meets human criteria for morally appropriate behaviour—would be very puzzling
to them). The gods get angry for all sorts of reasons (as in most families), and
they can act on that anger. Hence, this faith does not require that the gods
always appear benevolent or kind towards those who believe in them (you are
going to be reading the supreme work of literature which displays this
characteristic when you deal with Oedipus the King in a few weeks). There
is no permanent covenant between the gods and people, so I have no right to
expect that the gods will be on my side, even if I believe in them and carry out
all the appropriate rituals. And those who expect gods to act with a
proper regard for sexual propriety have always been shocked by what Homer
depicts here, particularly the adultery between Ares and Aphrodite and the rapes
committed by Poseidon.
What
this means, of course, is that the Greek view of their gods is very different
from the view of the ancient Israelites (and later the Christians) of their God.
And this difference has been summed up in a very fertile way by Friedrich
Nietzsche’s brief exploration (in his first published work, The Birth of
Tragedy) of the difference between the myth of the fall (a story central to
the faith of the Semitic peoples, including the Jews) and the myth of Prometheus
(a story central to the faith of the Aryans, including the Greeks).
For the myth of the fall defines the relationship between human beings
and God as a matter of total obedience, which will lead to great future rewards,
and disobedience which will lead to severe punishment.
The myth of Prometheus, however, defines the basic relationship as one of
defiance, for in that myth, Prometheus, the friend of human beings, regards Zeus
as a tyrant who must, in the interests of justice (i.e., a better arrangement)
be challenged. There is no time to
explore this contrast further, except to note again how it highlights the
different moral evaluations of the divine and leads to very different human
estimations of those who stand up to the divine.
[One
might note here, in passing, that very interesting section of Odysseus’ trip
to the underworld where we meet figures who are suffering eternal divine
punishment for "sins" they committed—the Danaids, Tantalus,
Sisyphus, and Ixion. This is, I think, the first example of what is to emerge as
an extraordinarily important image in Western thought—the picture of an
afterlife in which we are punished or rewarded for what we have done in this
life. There does not seem to be in the living characters themselves a very
strong sense of this feature of the afterlife (at least to the extent that it
affects what they do), and such a moral sense is entirely missing from the Iliad,
but the presence of this image of punishment after death is, as I say, an early
example of what is to emerge in Socrates and in later Christian thinkers as an
extraordinarily powerful idea].
But
the gods of the Odyssey are not entirely irrational; they are not like
the gods of the Iliad, who seem to agree on nothing and to spend much of
their time fighting each other and killing human beings to satisfy their own
feelings at the time. In the Odyssey, as I have mentioned, they all
acknowledge the principle of the sanctity of the home. Thus, there is at least
one basic cosmic moral operating principle in this world. We have a divine
sanction for making basic moral judgments: to do what the suitors are doing in
Ithaca is wrong, just as what Aegisthus did to Agamemnon is wrong; to avenge
such a wrong, as Orestes does and as Odysseus does at the end of the book, is a
morally correct act (in spite of the savagery of his killing). We may disagree
with that, but if so, we have to come to terms with the divine principle which
endorsees it.
These
gods can and frequently do interact very personally with particular human
beings. They appear to them (often in the form of some other person) talk to
them, often address them as particular friends of theirs, give advice and
assistance in critical moments. Such appearances are, however, unpredictable and
cannot be relied upon. But the very fact that they do occur suggests throughout
that particular gods can have the interests of the particular human beings at
heart now and then and can act decisively to help them (or hurt them). All this,
of course, is very far removed from God of the Old Testament who does not
visibly appear to anyone and who speaks directly very rarely and then only to
those prophets who are extraordinarily privileged because of their faith (e.g.,
to Abraham and Moses).
The
most significant of these direct interventions of the divine into human affairs
in the Odyssey occurs at the very end of the poem, where Athena (in the
guise of Mentor) succeeds in ending the rapidly escalating warfare which
threatens the entire society. To some readers, this looks like a rather
unconvincing and quick way of resolving a serious conflict. Perhaps.
But it also provides us with a final emphatic indication that, so far as the
gods are concerned, the important priority in the human community must be
preserving the home, rather than engaging in repetitive and aggressive acts of
blood revenge which threaten the survival of Ithaca.
Odyssey:
The Character of the Hero
To
establish the point more clearly about this being a world governed by a moral
principle endorsing the traditional home and family and community, I want to
consider now the adventures of Odysseus chronologically, that is, in the order
in which they occur (not in the order in which they are told). I want offer the
suggestion that one really important issue in this book is the importance of
learning how to value one’s home, particularly with respect to other
priorities.
When
we first meet Odysseus in Book V, on the island of Calypso, he is yearning for
home—something he prefers to immortality and life with a beautiful goddess in
a wonderful natural paradise. The initial thing we learn about him is that his
major motivation in life is an overwhelming desire to get home, back to a
traditional human life on Ithaca. But this point, of course, is late in his
adventures. When we consider the story of Odysseus in the chronological sequence
of events, we can see that he was not always like this in his attitude to life.
And I would suggest for your consideration an important theme in this story of
Odysseus's adventures—namely, that his journey is, in large part, a process
which educates him into the values of his home and his life as a peaceful head
of a family and community. In a sense, the story insists that he has to be
prepared for a suitable return.
At
the start of his adventures Odysseus is a warrior king, committed to the world
of the Iliad, a world in which the predominant value in life is military
fame acquired in battle. That is the reason the warriors, including Odysseus,
left their homes and went to Troy all those years before and are prepared to die
for glory rather than leave the battle and go back. And when he first leaves
Troy for home, Odysseus acts very much like a traditional warrior, setting out
with boatloads of warrior followers to raid neighbouring cities for booty and
fame. Going home may be important, but more important is to make sure that one's
warrior reputation and wealth are augmented in the process. That first adventure
with the Cicones, a standard act of military aggression, might come right out of
the pages of the Iliad (the Cicones are mentioned in the Iliad as
allies of the Trojans). The fact that it brings about a major and
unnecessary loss of men without any commensurate glory indicates that what he is
doing here may well be a mistake.
And
for the next events in the series we follow Odysseus very much as the
self-assertive, aggressive, always curious warrior-adventurer, taking himself
and his men through a series of events in which he has to confront the unknown:
the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclops, the King of the Winds, the Laestrygonians, Circe,
the Underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Islands of the Sun. You
might have noticed how as these adventures progress Odysseus loses more and more
of his men, more and more of his ships, so that those things which make up his
warrior identity are inexorably stripped away, until he is tossed up on
Calypso's island. From there he goes to Phaeacia, where he arrives naked, alone,
and without any sign of his status or warrior fame. He is anonymous—he has
lost the identity he had at the start of his adventures.
In
Phaeacia, he begins to put his identity back together again. But he does it in a
curious way. The memory of the Trojan War, the subject matter of the dinner
entertainment, fills him with sadness for a life that is over. While he has fond
memories of it, he acknowledges that it is behind him now. He declares who
he is and begins to reconstruct himself in the Phaeacian games, part of the
domestic celebrations, part of the most important social virtue, hospitality.
The fame and the riches he now begins to reacquire he wins in a different form
of competition (it’s important to notice, of course, that, for all the change
in the nature of the competition, he has lost none of his self-assertiveness and
egotistical striving—more about that in a moment).
Back
in Ithaca, he is no longer a proud warrior leader. He is anonymous, disguised,
and alone. Bit by bit he reconstructs his social identity—revealing himself to
his son, to the nurse, to the swineherd and goat-keeper, to his wife, and
finally to his father. In the process of re-establishing himself as a community
leader, rather than as a warrior leader, he has to pass a number of
tests—tests of endurance, strength, courage, wit, and so on. In this
testing, Odysseus has to disguise who he is and use something no noble warrior
would ever resort to, duplicity and deceit.
I
would like to suggest that in this sequence of events, Odysseus learns and
demonstrates a range of qualities which are very much at odds with the earlier
warrior ethic he displays in the Iliad and in the very first adventures
on his return home. First and foremost he displays an ability to endure, to do
whatever is required to get through a particular situation. He is
certainly not driven by a death-before-dishonour ethic which has no room for
dissimulation and which scorns mere survival as an important priority.
The
difficulties he faces are of two sorts. First, there are the direct threats and
obstacles. These he must confront and overcome, often not directly (at least,
not at first) but rather by using his ability to improvise and pretend, his wit,
resourcefulness, and, most important, the delayed emotional response (repressing
his true feelings in order to manipulate the situation). Odysseus has an
incurable capacity for getting himself into difficult situations, generally
because he has an insatiable desire for self-assertion, for spreading throughout
the world the knowledge of himself and his reputation, and these situations call
from him a wide range of resources: forethought, courage, imaginative planning,
deceit, invention, an ability to manipulate language to his advantage. His
curiosity is an important attribute—he wants to experience new places and new
people (like the Cyclops and the Sirens), not so much from a desire to learn
about them, but in order to augment and publicize his own reputation as a great
man who has confronted and overcome all that experience has to afford.
The
second group of difficulties are the temptations to give up—the recurring
desire to stop and surrender to the seductive allure of the Lotus Eaters, the
offers of Circe or Calypso, the song of the Sirens, the pleasures of Nausicaa.
To survive these temptations, Odysseus has to discover and hang onto his desire
to return home. Many times he claims he’d like to give up, but his appetite
for food and his desire to get home keep driving him on.
One
of the best examples of what I am talking about is the famous incident with the
Cyclops. There's not time to go into this in detail, but the incident repays
very careful study as an example of many of the qualities of the hero. The
adventure itself is a direct result of Odysseus's insatiable curiosity and his
desire to make himself known—that quality which we most associate with the
classical Greeks, his desire for energetic self-assertion. Once he gets himself
and his men into difficulties, he has to use all his resources to escape (both
ingenuity and cruelty), and then at the end, his desire heroically to assert his
identity almost costs him and his men their lives. What matters most is not
getting away but making sure the blind Cyclops knows the name of the hero who
has defeated him. We see the same characteristic rhythm of an Odyssean adventure
repeated at other times, for example, in the Circe episode or with the Sirens.
What
I'd like to suggest here is that in the development of Odysseus's character,
this poem celebrates a certain quality of human experience: our ability to
survive and to endure in order to get back home to the centre of the domestic
community and to do so in such a way that we demonstrate and assert our own
excellence. And this necessarily involves exploring a view of heroism
significant different from the warrior ethic of Homer's earlier epic poem.
If
you are still with me, let us consider for a moment what I take it we all
recognize as a decisive moment in the poem, the visit to the underworld, in Book
XI. At this point, Odysseus confronts his old way of life and bids farewell to
it, as he meets the great heroes from the Iliad, those people who defined
the Greek warrior ethic, Agamemnon, the leader of expedition, and Achilles, the
greatest warrior of them all.
A
particularly important moment in this incident comes when Odysseus meets
Achilles and the latter states: "Better, I say, to break sod as a farm
hand/ for some poor country man, on iron rations,/than lord it over all the
exhausted dead" (XI. 579-581in the Fitzgerald translation). Here, in death,
Achilles is, in effect, saying that the warrior life is not worth it. To put
death before dishonour, living only for the personal fame that comes when you
die gloriously in battle, is an empty dream. Death itself offers no reward
commensurate to the loss of life on earth, not even for the greatest warrior of
them all, the one who achieved the greatest fame.
To
put this speech into the mouth of the greatest example of the traditional
warrior is to underline in the most dramatic way possible the difference between
this poem and its Homeric predecessor, the Iliad, and to place a
particular emphasis on the way in which this poem sees the justification of life
in the joys that are possible rather than in an enduring fame based on one’s
heroic conduct in battles away from home.
One
feature of the poem which underscores this point is the way in which Odysseus
repeatedly has to confront the memory of his earlier identity as a mighty and
famous warrior, something of which he is obviously very proud and fond. In
his trip to the underworld in Book 11, he meets some of the major figures from
that period in his life and reflects at times on how much better it would have
been to die a hero than alone at sea. Significantly, the seductive
temptation of the Sirens begins by addressing him with language from the Iliad
and goes on to promise songs about the life he experienced in Troy, a song
Odysseus finds irresistible (but fortunately he has taken the precaution of
having himself lashed to the mast). Later, in the Phaeacian court, he
finds the songs about Troy too hard to listen to without weeping. Such
reminders of his earlier life suggest that Odysseus does not undertake the
transition consciously or quickly. It comes as an earned insight into what
now truly matters in a different stage of his life.
It’s
important to note, as I’ve already briefly mentioned, that while the Odyssey
is establishing a set of living priorities different from that earlier poem,
there is still an enormous emphasis on the characteristic we most commonly
associate with the classical Greek vision of life, namely the importance of
heroic self-assertion. For Odysseus, like Achilles in the Iliad, is
always striving, not only to be the best, but also to make sure that his
demonstrated excellence is publicly known and acknowledged. While he may adopt a
humble role in order to deceive others temporarily, that is only a strategy in
an ethos which insists that the important priority of life is to establish how
much better you are than others in all sorts of ways (in the qualities of mind
and body, in your achievements, in battle, athletic competition, archery, and so
on). I recently saw a bumper sticker on a car with Alaska plates which
summed up this ethic admirably: "If you're not the lead dog, the view never
changes." It is to this sense of the value of human life that we in
the West owe the fascination we have with demonstrations of excellence acquired
through competition (whether in athletics, good looks, or in business).
This feeling is so deeply rooted in Odysseus' character that he risks everything
in order to make sure that Polyphemus knows and proclaims the name of the person
who blinded him. And, of course, it is a driving motive in his restless
desire to meet people and be acknowledged.
That's
the main reason why Telemachus has to make a trip away from home as a rite of
passage from his childhood into his adult life. Only on such expeditions
can one make oneself known in the world and, in the process, acquire the
recognition and the wealth which sustain the home. Such expeditions are
risky, of course, because they often expose one to serious perils and leave the
home more vulnerable. There are many people in the Odyssey whose
trip away from home brought about their deaths. And even those who do make
it safely back sometimes express regret over what their voyages cost them in
terms of what they might have experienced back home.
This
ethic of self-assertion won by individual achievement stands in marked contrast
to what you have read in the Old Testament, where the emphasis is much more
clearly on equality and cooperation under a set of divine commandments and laws
equally binding on all. There are "great" men there, like Abraham or
Moses, but their quality stems, not from any personal achievement uniquely their
own, let alone from their physical prowess, intelligence, good looks, or ability
to fight, but rather from the special favours God gives them because they have
such a strong faith in Him. Abraham is ready to sacrifice his only son at the
Lord’s bidding, and Moses is prepared to take on the task of leading the
Israelites when God asks him to, although he insists that he is totally unfit
for the task (one cannot imagine any Greek hero displaying that sort of humility
or lack of self-confidence).
These
two very different visions of human character have given us our two main sorts
of cultural heroes—the fiercely competitive, self-assertive, egotistical hero,
who lives to insist upon his own excellence in comparison with others, and the
devout, unflagging, persistent, and faithful servant of the community, who
defines himself by service to the group’s shared ideals (usually, but not
always, in a religious context), if necessary at the cost of his own
individuality. From this difference Western Culture also derives that ambiguous
inherited tension between the Greek ideals of competition (which rests on an
aristocratic sense of inequality of the sort displayed in the Odyssey)
and the Hebrew ideal of cooperation (which rests on an idea of equality under
the law and before God)—but that’s something for another time.
Comedy
Before
concluding my discussion of the Odyssey, I'd like to generalize a bit
about this vision of life as I have described it. Because it is from this poem,
among some others, that we derive our understanding of what we call comedy.
This epic poem is one of the most important visions of life in our traditions,
enshrining our most endurable and popular sense of what matters most in human
experience.
When
we use the term comedy to describe a work of literature, we are referring to at
least two qualities of the work: its structure and the vision of life that
structure offers and celebrates. The term comedy does not, strictly speaking,
necessarily mean that the work is funny (although it often is).
In
terms of structure, the term comedy refers most simply to way the conflict in a
story is resolved. If we acknowledge that stories usually begin with a normal
situation being upset, so that the central characters have to deal with a
transformed reality, then the comic story will typically follow the adventures
of a hero or heroine who seeks to regain an upset normality. In other words, he
wants to go home again. The Odyssey provides the first great model of
this vision. Odysseus is displaced, his domestic normality is upset, and he
wants to get home. But many things stand between him and home—external
obstacles which threaten to destroy him and inner obstacles which threaten to so
sap his endurance and his faith in the voyage home that he will give up.
The
conflict in the story of Odysseus is essentially a linear series of obstacles
which Odysseus must overcome. He does so by using to the full his wide range of
qualities and by adapting who he is and what he does to fit the particular
situation he faces. In the process of overcoming this series of obstacles, he
learns or he becomes transformed in some way, so that when the home is restored
we have back again a lost normality or perhaps an even better reality, a
transformed normality. The story is basically over once the lovers are reunited,
the home relationships re-established, the traditional values rediscovered
(perhaps in an improved form). At the conclusion we look forward to happy times
for the new family (note the common formula: And They Lived Happily Ever After).
The
Odyssey is our first great fiction celebrating this structure and this
vision. Its decisive influence on western literature and art derives, in large
part, from the fact that we find this vision very congenial. We may not believe
in the same gods and goddesses, but, like Odysseus, many of us see in a story
that celebrates the restoration of community and the home as the highest value
in civilization—in the traditional comic vision—something very dear to our
imaginations. And thus the fundamental comic structure and comic vision have
enjoyed and continue to enjoy a vital life in our culture. That may be the main
reason why, as we read this book for the first time, it seems, in spite of the
significant differences between its vision of experience and our own beliefs (a
feature we should not underestimate), so familiar, so agreeable, so immediately
accessible to us (far more so, I would argue, than the Old Testament or the Iliad
or many of the Greek tragedies).
A
Postscript
These
necessarily rather cursory remarks have said little about the final book of the Odyssey,
where we return to the underworld and meet again some of the major figures from
the Iliad. This section has in the past invited a good deal of
commentary about its appropriateness in this narrative. Without going into
that in detail, I tend to see this final book as, in a sense, a conclusion to
both great epics, with a nod in the direction of the idea that saving the home
and the community might just be a higher ideal than continuing the warrior life
in a major civil war. Such a resolution is, as I have observed above,
quickly and rather arbitrarily imposed at the last minute by Athena and Zeus,
rather than something learned, a new insight earned by experience. For a
treatment of such a development we have to wait until Aeschylus' Oresteia.
The
narrative of the Odyssey also leaves somewhat up in the air the further
travels of Odysseus. Teiresias insists he must continue traveling, this
time far from the sea, and sacrifice to Poseidon in a country where no one has
ever seen an oar. And Teiresias also prophecies a peaceful death for
Odysseus among his prosperous people. But these details, like the various
legends about Odysseus' further travels, are ambiguous, so that we are not able
at the end of this story to cling firmly to a "happy ever after"
scenario, in which Odysseus and Penelope live to a ripe old age together in
Ithaca. To the extent that the different reminders of what the hero still
has in store add an ironic resonance to the story, we might want to suggest that
the endorsement this poem gives to the life in the home is not completely
robust. The home and the values associated with it are fragile, threatened
by the need for restless voyaging to dangerous and distant places, an urge
inspired and demanded by the gods.
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