The Odyssey (Oxford World's Classics Hardback Collection) Read online

  Odysseus as hero

  While the Iliad portrays the pressures of the battlefield, the Odyssey explores a different form of heroism through the figure of Odysseus, who has to use intelligence and guile to overcome the many obstacles that keep him from returning to his home and family. We refer to the main figures of Homeric epic as heroes, but it is important that we make clear what being a ‘hero’ means in this context. For us the term ‘hero’ conjures up someone who has done something unambiguously positive: a fireman who rushes into a burning building to save people, for example. In ancient Greek culture, however, the ‘heroes’, often the offspring of unions between gods and humans, are not simply positive figures, but are characterized by their excessiveness, both for good and for ill. The heroes are capable of acts of superhuman and admirable prowess. But their heroic power is double-edged, because it can also lead to less desirable qualities: excessive anger, violence, cruelty, pride, recklessness, and egotism. So there is a tension within heroism itself, in that the very energy which makes the heroes outstanding is also the source of their instability and danger (both to themselves and to others). The Iliad and Odyssey are sophisticated epics, which not only celebrate the heroic world but also explore the complex nature of heroism itself.

  Moreover, as the Homeric epics make clear, heroes come in a variety of forms: Odysseus is not the same as Achilles, nor is Menelaus the same as Nestor. In other words, the basic heroic drive ‘always to be the best and to stand out above other men’ (Iliad 6.208) does not lead to a series of identical characters. Even if we sum up the heroic ideal in terms of being outstanding as ‘a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’ (Iliad 9.443), each hero will possess these abilities in his own individual way. Thus Odysseus and Nestor excel as speakers, Achilles and Ajax as fighters. To us such a close connection between fighting well and speaking well seems odd, but from a Homeric perspective they complement one another perfectly, since the battlefield and the assembly are the foremost arenas in which the hero can excel and thereby benefit both himself and his community.

  The ideal Homeric hero, then, has both brains and brawn: Achilles is intelligent and eloquent as well as the supreme fighter, while the wily Odysseus proves himself a formidable warrior too. But insofar as Achilles and Odysseus typify two contrasting forms of heroism (one favouring force, the other intelligence), we can see both Homeric epics exploring this opposition. In the Odyssey, Odysseus himself recalls the impetuous Achilles — but dead in Hades, emphasizing his own superiority as a canny and flexible survivor (11.467–540). Odysseus makes clear that, unlike Achilles, he will be reunited with his family, and that whereas Achilles had to choose between a short life with glory and a long life in obscurity, he will achieve both glory and a happy old age. Thus the poem highlights the benefits of being an Odyssean hero, and suggests that intelligence can be superior to might.

  So the protagonist of the Odyssey is not a new kind of hero. Nor is he even a new kind of Odysseus, since the Odysseus of the Iliad also combines warrior strength and guile. However, the post-war context of the Odyssey calls for more of the latter. Thus, for example, he uses his cunning and intelligence to escape the Cyclops’ cave when his men are being gobbled up around him, and he deceives everyone he meets when he gets back home to Ithaca. But when cunning has served its purpose, Odysseus drops his disguise and deploys heroic force, ruthlessly killing the suitors and restoring his honour.

  Odysseus’ typical Homeric epithets — ‘much-wandering’, ‘much-enduring’, ‘of many wiles’ — pick out the characteristics that ensure his survival and success: he is driven beyond the limits of the known world, endures the humiliation of life as a beggar in his own kingdom, and conceals his true identity with elaborate lying tales. This latter characteristic, Odysseus’ outstanding skill as a liar, could be portrayed negatively in Greek literature (as it was in some tragedies), but the circumstances of the Odyssey make such deception necessary for survival, and we (like his patron goddess Athena) enjoy Odysseus’ ingenious fictions and relish the irony of the nonchalant and arrogant suitors unaware of the avenger in their midst.

  Odysseus’ skill as a storyteller is one of the most striking features of the Odyssey, which displays an awareness of itself as poetic fiction that would not be out of place in a (post-)modern novel. Odysseus tells his tales to various audiences over many thousands of verses, some of them truly (his past adventures as told to the Phaeacians in Books 9–12), others falsely (most notably his tales of being a wandering beggar, as told on Ithaca in Books 13–24). In each case Odysseus is acting like a bard, celebrating a hero’s endurance and glorious past (in this case his own, to impress the Phaeacians), and spinning persuasive falsehoods in order to regain his honour and status on Ithaca. Indeed, the wandering beggar tales (told to Athena, Eumaeus, the suitor Antinous, and Penelope) show Odysseus using a narrative technique that is typical of the epic bard himself, for he presents variations on a basic story (of a wealthy man from Crete who endures various sufferings), whose details are changed to suit the identity of his addressee and the needs of the situation: so, for example, in seeking to gain Eumaeus’ sympathy, Odysseus emphasizes the idea of being sold into slavery, since he knows that Eumaeus himself has endured this (14.287–98, 334–59). Like a bard who composes his song anew in each performance, Odysseus recombines the basic elements of his false identity to create a story best suited to his audience at the time. Fittingly, this bardic imagery culminates in the moment of Odysseus’ revenge (21.404–13):

   Odysseus, man of many wiles,

  lifted up the great bow, examining it from every side,

  and then, just as a man skilled in lyre-playing and song

  without difficulty stretches a string around a new peg,

  tying the well-twisted gut of a sheep at both its ends,

  so, without any effort, did Odysseus string the great bow.

  Taking it up in his right hand he tested the string,

  and it sang out sweetly, like the song of a swallow.

  At this great distress fell upon the suitors, and the colour

  left their faces.

  To lose one ship on the voyage home may be forgiven, but to lose all of them, as Odysseus does, seems less than heroic. Indeed, it is essential to the concept of the hero in Homeric epic that these pow­erful men are not rampant individualists, but fundamentally social heroes; that is, they exist as part of a wider community whom they have a duty to protect. Hence the opening of the Odyssey insists that Odysseus’ men ‘perished by reason of their own recklessness, | the fools, because they ate the cattle of the Sun, Hyperion’ (1.7–9). But we see other members of Odysseus’ crew perish because of his mistakes, as when his comrades urge him to leave the Cyclops’ cave and he refuses, an error he later admits (9.228–30): ‘I was not persuaded — though it would have been much better —  | as I wanted to see him, hoping he might give me presents; but | when he did appear my crew found him anything but pleasant.’ So while most of Odysseus’ men do bring about their own destruction, some die due to Odysseus’ lack of judgement and personal ambition. Concern for others is an essential part of heroism, and even great figures like Odysseus sometimes fail to balance the pursuit of personal glory with the duty of care they owe to those who honour and depend upon them.

  It is sometimes claimed that, in comparison to the Iliad, the Odyssey displays a more critical attitude to war and heroic glory, but this underestimates the extent to which the Iliad too shows the cost of war, and risks obscuring how much pride Odysseus takes in the Greek victory at Troy. Odysseus may grieve for the suffering of the past, as (for example) when he weeps at Demodocus’ song of the Trojan horse and the sack of Troy (8.499–531), but he is just as focused on his honour and glory in the Odyssey as he is in the Iliad, and he secures his victory over the suitors in typically heroic style (22.1–329). Like every other major Greek hero, however, Odysseus is far from perfect. The loss of his men makes it clear that he will have to learn greater self-con
trol if he is to achieve success on Ithaca. Odysseus rises to the challenge, and proves himself truly ‘much-enduring’ in the midst of the suitors’ insults, and this newly learned restraint enables him to defeat his enemies and regain both his family and his kingdom.

  Mortals and immortals

  The gods’ concern for mortals and their constant intervention in human affairs is one of the most striking aspects of the Homeric epics. Yet Homer’s gods are not merely figures of literature: they are an expression of a coherent theology. According to the historian ­Herodotus (2.53), writing in the fifth century bc: ‘It was Homer and Hesiod who created for the Greeks a genealogy of the gods, gave the gods their names, assigned their honours and areas of expertise, and described their appearance.’ Since there was no established church or priestly caste or sacred book to prescribe religious beliefs in ancient Greece, poets played a fundamental role in shaping religious ideas, and none more so than Homer, who was the foundation of all education, including what the Greeks thought about their gods. It is a measure of the spell of Homer that when the philosopher Xenophanes (who was active in the sixth century bc) wishes to criticize conventional religious belief, he attacks the theology of the great poets (fr. 11): ‘Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that men find shameful and blameworthy: stealing, adultery, and deceiving one another.’ Despite such moral and intellectual criticisms (especially by philosophers such as Plato), the Homeric picture of the gods as pow­erful anthropomorphic figures, for good and for ill, remained the basis for popular religion throughout antiquity.

  To understand ancient Greek religion, then, it is essential that we jettison inappropriate (especially Christian) conceptions of the divine as intrinsically kind and caring. For although the Greek gods do care for humans, they are anything but selfless, and their honour is every bit as important to them as it is to the heroes. If a god is offended, as when Odysseus’ men kill the cattle of the sun-god, Helios, or Odysseus himself blinds Polyphemus, son of the sea-god Poseidon, the gods are no less relentless than the angriest of heroes in their pursuit of revenge, and their greater power means that their retribution is all the more terrifying. Indeed, the Odyssey’s plot is crucially shaped by the anger of these two gods, as Poseidon’s enmity accounts for the extent of Odysseus’ wanderings, while Helios’ rage leads to the destruction of Odysseus’ men.

  Poseidon’s persecution of Odysseus is motivated by kinship and personal vengeance, not by any abstract sense of morality. The narrator underlines from the very start of the poem the importance of the god’s anger to his version of Odysseus’ return (1.19–21): ‘All the gods had pity for him | except Poseidon, who raged unrelentingly against | godlike Odysseus until the time he reached his homeland.’ As Zeus’ speeches in Book 1 also make clear, it is Odysseus’ fate to return home and punish the suitors, so Poseidon knows that he cannot kill him; nonetheless, the god does his best to make his homecoming as painful as possible. It must be stressed, however, that this is not simply a case of divine cruelty or caprice, for Odysseus’ own errors have brought about this suffering: he foolishly rejected his men’s advice to leave the Cyclops’ cave (9.224–30), then taunted the blinded Polyphemus and boastfully gave away his name, enabling the Cyclops to call on his father Poseidon for vengeance (9.491–536).

  Poseidon’s anger also harms the kindly Phaeacians, whom he targets for helping Odysseus return to Ithaca. Their punishment seems —  from a human perspective — disturbing. For as their king Alcinous makes clear, the Phaeacians offer to help Odysseus because of their concern for strangers and suppliants (8.544–7); yet Zeus, the patron of strangers and suppliants, allows them to be punished. Indeed, Zeus not only approves of Poseidon’s plan to smite the Phaeacians’ ship as it returns from Ithaca, and to envelop their city behind a mountain, but also suggests turning the ship to stone, making it a permanent memorial of the Phaeacians’ punishment (13.154–8). By human standards of justice Zeus’ collaboration may appear vindictive, but it embodies a basic feature of his maintenance of divine order, since even Zeus cannot interfere constantly in other gods’ spheres of influence. It is also made clear that the Phaeacians, who have a privileged relationship with the gods, are particularly close to Poseidon: they are outstanding seafarers and their devotion to sailing and the sea is repeatedly underlined. Moreover, King Alcinous and his wife Arete are both descended from Poseidon (grandson and great-granddaughter respectively: 7.56–66). So whereas Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, exploits his kinship to punish his enemy Odysseus, the Phaeacians suffer from their proximity to the god.

  Moreover, as we saw with Odysseus’ own share of responsibility for Poseidon’s anger, it is important that the Phaeacians have been warned about their behaviour well before Odysseus’ arrival, as Alcinous recalls with an insouciance that alerts the audience to their future punishment (8.564–71):

  ‘I heard from my father Nausithous the tale I shall now tell you.

  He always said that Poseidon would hold a grudge against us,

  because we, remaining unharmed, give safe-conduct to all men.

  He said that one day he will smash a fine ship of the Phaeacians

  as it returns from an escort mission on the mist-shrouded sea,

  and will then hide our city behind a huge encircling mountain.

  This was what the old man said; and the god will either

  make it happen or leave it undone, as his spirit pleases him.’

  In failing to heed a warning, the Phaeacians are like Odysseus’ men, who eat the cattle of Helios after swearing an oath that they will leave them untouched (12.297–303). It makes no difference to Helios or his vengeful response that the men’s fatal error is the product of exhaustion and starvation. For as with Poseidon’s anger (whether at Odysseus’ blinding of his son or at the Phaeacians’ assistance to Odysseus), Zeus respects Helios’ right to punish those who offend the god or transgress in his domain. Moreover, Helios’ threat to descend to Hades and shine among the dead (if Odysseus’ men are not punished) threatens the whole cosmic order (12.382–3). Zeus’ response is immediate (12.385–8):

  ‘Sun-god, of course you must continue to shine on the immortals,

  and on mortal men who live on the grain-giving ploughland.

  As for these men, I shall at once hurl a shining thunderbolt at

  their swift ship, and smash it in pieces out on the wine-dark sea.’

  So these various episodes of divine punishment — of Odysseus, his men, and the Phaeacians — not only embody the basic principle of a god’s right to control his or her domain, but also show a fundamental system of divine justice, where punishment may be harsh, but is predictable (that is, based on human actions) and therefore (in ancient Greek terms) fair.

  A further essential aspect of the gods’ behaviour — their support for justice among humans — is best illustrated by the poem’s major and climactic example of punishment, namely the destruction of the suitors. However, although the punishment of the suitors is unquestionably demanded by the honour-based ethics of Homeric society, the Odyssey poet complicates the initial picture of the suitors as a gang of insolent reprobates. As the narrative develops, we get a more particularized view of the suitors, revealing that not all of them are wicked. Their varied natures emerge with greater clarity, significantly, as the vengeance draws closer.

  We first hear of Amphinomus, one of two decent suitors, in Book 16, where we are told that ‘he more than the others found favour with | Penelope through his words, for he was endowed with good sense’ (16.397–8). He persuades the suitors to reject Antinous’ proposal that they try once more to ambush and kill Telemachus (16.400–6). And his kind words to ‘the beggar’ prompt Odysseus to warn him against remaining any longer with the suitors and even to pray that some god may save him from Odysseus’ vengeance (18.122–50). Yet the narrator immediately contrasts Odysseus’ attitude to Amphinomus with that of Athena (18.153–6):

  Amphinomus . . . went
back through the house, troubled in spirit

  and shaking his head, because in his heart he could foresee evil.

  Even so he did not escape death; he too was bound fast by Athena,

  to be overcome by Telemachus’ hands and the force of his spear.

  Indeed, Athena’s determination to kill all the suitors, regardless of their individual conduct, is made clear (17.360–4):

  Athena came and stood next to Odysseus, Laertes’ son,

  and urged him to go round the suitors and collect crusts, to

  find out which were right-minded and which lawless;

  even so, she did not intend that any should escape ruin.

  Athena’s intervention simultaneously separates the suitors into the good and the bad and underlines her indifference to their de­cency. Thus the audience know Amphinomus’ fate even as he offers the disguised Odysseus protection and urges the suitors to stop abusing both ‘the beggar’ and the servants of Odysseus’ household (18.394–5, 414–21). The disjunction between character and fate is even clearer in the case of the suitor Leodes, whom the narrator introduces as the first to attempt to string Odysseus’ bow (21.144–7):

  The first to rise to his feet was Leodes, son of Oenops,

  who interpreted their sacrifices, and always sat furthest away,