W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. Independent Publishers Since 1923 New York * London HOMER THE ODYSSEY TRANSLATED BY EMILY WILSON Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. To my daughters, Imogen, Psyche, and Freya CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TRANSLATOR’S NOTE MAPS 1. 2. 3. 4. The World of The Odyssey The Aegean and Asia Minor Mainland Greece The Peloponnese THE ODYSSEY The Boy and the Goddess BOOK 1 A Dangerous Journey BOOK 2 An Old King Remembers BOOK 3 What the Sea God Said BOOK 4 From the Goddess to the Storm BOOK 5 A Princess and Her Laundry BOOK 6 A Magical Kingdom BOOK 7 The Songs of a Poet BOOK 8 A Pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave BOOK 9 The Winds and the Witch BOOK 10 The Dead BOOK 11 Difficult Choices BOOK 12 Two Tricksters BOOK 13 A Loyal Slave BOOK 14 The Prince Returns BOOK 15 Father and Son BOOK 16 Insults and Abuse BOOK 17 Two Beggars BOOK 18 The Queen and the Beggar BOOK 19 The Last Banquet BOOK 20 An Archery Contest BOOK 21 Bloodshed BOOK 22 The Olive Tree Bed BOOK 23 Restless Spirits BOOK 24 NOTES GLOSSARY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks. INTRODUCTION The Odyssey is, along with The Iliad, one of the two oldest works of literature in the Western tradition. It is an epic poem: “epic” both in the sense that it is long, and in the sense that it presents itself as telling an important story, in the traditional, formulaic language used by archaic poets for singing the tales of gods, wars, journeys, and the collective memories and experience of the Greek-speaking world. Modern connotations of the word “epic” are in some ways misleading when we turn to the Homeric poems, the texts that began the Western epic tradition. The Greek word epos means simply “word” or “story” or “song.” It is related to a verb meaning “to say” or “to tell,” which is used (in a form with a prefix) in the first line of the poem. The narrator commands the Muse, “Tell me”: enn-epe. An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that is told. The Odyssey is grand or (in modern terms) “epic” in scope: it is over twelve thousand lines long. The poem is elevated in style, composed entirely in a regular poetic rhythm, a six-beat line (dactylic hexameter), and its vocabulary was not that used by ordinary Greeks in everyday speech, in any time or place. The language contains a strange mixture of words from different periods of time, and from Greek dialects associated with different regions. A handful of words in Homer were incomprehensible to Greeks of the classical period. The syntax is relatively simple, but the words and phrases, in these combinations, are unlike the way that anybody ever actually spoke. The style is, from a modern perspective, strange: it is full of repetitions, redundancies, and formulaic expressions. These mark the poem’s debt to a long tradition of storytelling and suggest that we are in a world that is at least partly continuous with a distant, half-forgotten past. But in some ways, the story told in this long piece of verse is small and ordinary. It is a story, as the first word of the original Greek tells us, about “a man” (andra). He is not “the” man, but one of many men—albeit a man of extraordinary cognitive, psychological, and military power, one who can win any competition, outwit any opponent, and manage, against all odds, to survive. The poem tells us how he makes his circuitous way back home across stormy seas after many years at war. We may expect the hero of an “epic” narrative to confront evil forces, perform a superhuman task, and rescue vast numbers of people from an extraordinary kind of threat. Failing that, we might hope at least for a great quest unexpectedly achieved, despite perils all around; an action that saves the world, or at least changes it in some momentous way—like Jason claiming the Golden Fleece, Launcelot glimpsing the Holy Grail, or Aeneas beginning the foundation of Rome. In The Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back to the way it was before he went away. For this hero, mere survival is the most amazing feat of all. Only a portion of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey describes the magical wanderings of Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca. These adventures are presented as a backstory partly told by the hero himself (in Books 5 through 12). The poem cuts between far-distant and diverse locations, from Olympus to earth, from Calypso’s island to the palace at Ithaca, from the underworld to the cottage of the swineherd. Sometimes the setting feels entirely realistic, even mundane—a world where a mother packs a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where there is a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and play checkers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together. At other moments, we are in the realm of pure fantasy, inhabited by cannibals, witches, and goddesses with six barking heads, where it is possible to cross the streams of Ocean (the mythical river that encircles the known world), and come to the land of asphodel, where the spirits of dead heroes live forever. Different characters tell their own inset stories—some true, some false, of past lives, adventures, dreams, memories, and troubles. The poem weaves and unweaves a multilayered narrative that is both simple and artful in its patterning and composition. The story begins in an unexpected place, in medias res (“in the middle of things”—the proper starting point for an epic, according to Horace). It is not the start of the Trojan War, which began with the Judgment of Paris and the Abduction of Helen and was fought for ten years. Nor does the poem start at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey home, which has been in progress for almost as many years as the war. Instead, it begins when nothing much seems to be happening at all; Odysseus, his son, and his wife are all stuck in a state of frustration and paralysis that has been continuing for years and is becoming unbearable. Odysseus, at the start of the poem, is trapped by the goddess Calypso, who wants to have him stay there as her husband for eternity. He could choose to evade death and old age and stay always with her; but movingly, he prefers “to see even just the smoke that rises / from his own homeland, and he wants to die.” Odysseus longs to recover his own identity, not as a victim of shipwreck or a coddled plaything of a powerful goddess, but as a master of his home and household, as a father and as a husband. He sits sobbing by the shore of the island every day, desperately staring at the “fruitless sea” for a boat that might take him back home. Meanwhile, in Ithaca, Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is surrounded by young men who have forced their way into her home and are making merry with daily feasts, wasting the provisions of the household, waiting for her to agree to give up on Odysseus and marry one of them. Penelope has a deep loyalty both to her lost husband, for whom she weeps every night and whom she misses “all the time,” and also to the “beautiful rich house” in which she lives, which she risks losing forever if she remarries. She has devised clever ways to put off the suitors, but it is clear that she cannot do so forever; eventually, she will have to choose one of them as her husband and perhaps leave the household of Odysseus for a new home. When that happens, either the suitors will divide the wealth of Odysseus between them—as they sometimes threaten—or the dominant suitor may gain the throne of Ithaca for himself. The ambiguity about what the suitors are seeking matches an even more central ambiguity, about what Penelope herself wants. Indefinitely, tearfully, Penelope waits, keeping everyone guessing about her innermost feelings and intentions. As the chief suitor complains, “She offers hope to all, sends notes to each, / but all the while her mind moves somewhere else.” This premise allows for artful resonances with earlier moments in the myth of Troy. Much-courted Penelope resembles Helen, the woman to whom all the Greek heroes came as suitors (Menelaus, her husband, eventually won her hand by lot), and whom Paris, Prince of Troy, later stole away. Like Paris, Penelope’s suitors threaten to steal away a married woman as if she were a bride. Penelope’s house also echoes the besieged town of Troy, when the Greeks were fighting to take Helen back home—but there is here no strong Hector to defend the inhabitants. Telemachus, Odysseus’ almost-adult son, is in a particularly precarious situation. Left as a “little newborn baby” when Odysseus sailed for Troy, he must be twenty or twenty-one years old at the time of the poem’s action, but he seems in many ways younger. To fight off the suitors and take control of the household himself, he would need great physical and emotional strength, a strong group of supporters, and the capacity to plan a difficult military and political operation—none of which he possesses. Telemachus must complete several difficult quests in the course of the poem: to survive the mortal danger posed by the suitors; to mature and grow up to manhood; to find his lost father, and help him regain control of the house. The journey with which the story begins is not that of Odysseus himself but of Telemachus, who sets out to find news of his absent father. The son’s odyssey away from home parallels the father’s quest in the opposite direction. The poem intertwines the story of these three central characters—the father, the mother, the son—and shows us how something different is at stake for each of them, in the gradual and difficult struggle to rebuild their lost nuclear family. The Odyssey puts us into a world that is a peculiar mixture of the strange and the familiar. The tension between strangeness and familiarity is in fact the poem’s central subject. Its setting, in the islands of the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, would have been vaguely familiar to any Greek-speaking reader; but this version of the region includes sea-monsters and giants who eat humans, as well as gods who walk the earth and talk with select favorites among the mortals. We encounter a surprisingly varied range of different characters and types of incident: giants and beggars, arrogant young men and vulnerable old slaves, a princess who does laundry and a dead warrior who misses the sunshine, gods, goddesses, and ghosts, brave deeds, love affairs, spells, dreams, songs, and stories. Odysseus himself seems to contain multitudes: he is a migrant, a pirate, a carpenter, a king, an athlete, a beggar, a husband, a lover, a father, a son, a fighter, a liar, a leader, and a thief. He is a man who cries, takes naps, and feels homesick, but he is also a man who has a special relationship with the goddess who transforms his appearance at will and ensures that his schemes succeed. The poem promotes but also questions its own fantasies and ideals, such as the idea that time and change can be undone, and the notion that there is such a thing as home, where people and relationships can stay forever the same. Who Was Homer? The authorship of the Homeric poems is a complex and difficult topic, because these written texts emerge from a long oral tradition. Marks of this distinctive legacy are visible in The Odyssey on the level of style. Dawn appears some twenty times in The Odyssey, and the poem repeats the same line, word for word, each time: emos d’erigeneia phane rhododaktulos eos: “But when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared . . .” There is a vast array of such formulaic expressions in Homeric verse, which suggest that things have an eternal, infinitely repeatable presence. Different things will happen every day, but Dawn always appears, always with rosy fingers, always early. Characters and objects all have their own descriptive terms in Homer; these are known as epithets, rather than adjectives, because they express an essential quality or characteristic, rather than a trait that the object or person possesses only in a particular moment. Ships are “black,” “hollow,” “swift,” or “curved,” never “brown,” “slow,” or “wobbly.” Chairs are “well-carved” or “polished,” never “uncomfortable” or “expensive.” Penelope is “prudent Penelope,” never “swift-footed Penelope” even if she is moving quickly. Telemachus is “thoughtful,” even when he seems particularly immature. Moreover, many types of scene follow a certain predictable pattern. There is a fixed sequence of events described, with variations, whenever someone gets dressed or puts on armor, whenever a meal is prepared, or whenever a person is killed. Through its formulaic mode, The Odyssey assures us that, once we know the patterns, the world will follow a predictable rhythm. This feature of the Homeric poems is a mark of their debt to a Greek oral tradition of poetic song that extends back hundreds of years before the poems in their current forms came into existence. In The Odyssey itself we meet two singers who play the lyre while they give their performances of traditional tales at the banquets of the rich. The first is Demodocus at the court of King Alcinous of Phaeacia, who tells stories about Odysseus himself and the Trojan Horse, as well as about the affair between the god Ares and the goddess Aphrodite. The second is Phemius, who performs under compulsion for the suitors of Penelope. These characters give us some important insights into the composition of the poem, and the person (or people) who composed it. In an obviously selfinterested spirit, The Odyssey suggests that poets have a particularly honorable place in society. But the singer is also presented as a servant, perhaps a slave, who earns food and a place to rest by giving performances that are enjoyed by wealthy banqueters. Demodocus does not read out his poetry from a script; his inability to do so is underlined by the fact that he is blind (not incidentally, no one in the entire Odyssey reads or writes anything). Moreover, Demodocus does not invent an original story of his own composition. Instead, Demodocus is inspired by the Muse to sing the “deeds of heroes”—which are, at least in outline, already well-known to his audience. The skill and inspiration of these illiterate singers is shown not in the invention of entirely new stories, but in their ability to retell ancient stories, and to transport their audience to the scenes they describe. But Homer himself—if there was such a person—was not exactly a Demodocus. A blind, illiterate bard could not, by himself, have written the monumental Iliad and Odyssey. Homer is usually described in Greek sources not as a singer (aoidos) or rhapsode (“song-stitcher”), but as a poet, poetes —a word that means “maker.” Indeed, a normal way to refer to Homer in Greek is as “the Poet”—the name Homer can be omitted, since there is only one primary poet in the canon. The Odyssey as we know it is based, like almost all the Graeco-Roman literature we have, on medieval manuscripts. But there is an important difference with this text. The medieval manuscripts of an author like Virgil or Horace are based on earlier manuscripts, based in turn on earlier manuscripts, and so on, each scribe copying the work of a predecessor, and moving back from the medieval codex (a leaved book written on animal skin parchment) to the Byzantine and then ancient papyrus (a scroll written on a kind of thick paper made from papyrus leaves). The Odyssey and The Iliad are different, not only because they are older than other ancient texts, but because of the specific difficulties of understanding how these poems were created—not, or not simply, from the mind of an individual creator, but also from a long oral tradition, which has been transformed into two monumental written texts. How exactly did this process happen? Did a single, particularly talented folk-poet learn to write? Or did an illiterate singer collaborate with scribes? Was there one creator, or many? At what time in the process of composition did writing enter the picture? This takes us to what is known as the Homeric Question, which is really a whole cluster of questions about the composition of The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Question is given a capital Q, because scholars still disagree on some crucial issues even after a couple of centuries of discussion. How exactly did the Homeric poems as we have them emerge from the oral tradition that preceded them? Who was Homer? Was there a single author of The Odyssey, or several? Did the same person produce The Iliad and The Odyssey? When exactly did the poems get written down, and how? Can we trace earlier and later parts of the poems, or tie particular passages to different geographical locations? And to what extent do the poems reflect real historical events, cultures, and peoples—a real Trojan War, or the real Mycenean civilization of late Bronze Age Greece (which existed from the sixteenth to the twelfth centuries BCE)? Most generally, how exactly did multiple people over hundreds of years across the Greek-speaking world work together to create this magnificent, challenging, and coherent work of poetic storytelling? Design “by committee” has a very bad name, and yet The Odyssey seems like an unexpected success. How was it done? During the Renaissance, when the Homeric poems were rediscovered in Europe, Homer was assumed to have been a writer, in the same way that Virgil or Dante were writers— albeit a writer from an ancient time. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dissenting voices began to emerge. In 1664, the Abbé d’Aubignac attacked Homer, arguing that The Iliad and Odyssey were incoherent, immoral, and tasteless poems, cobbled together out of an oral folk tradition. A generation later, the British scholar Richard Bentley studied Homer’s language, and proved that it was much earlier than classical (fifth- and fourth-century) Greek, because it still showed traces of a letter of the alphabet that dropped out of the language: the digamma. Bentley argued that “Homer” was a prehistoric oral poet of about 10,000 BCE, whose disparate and rambling songs were not gathered into the epics we have until the late sixth century. Scholars began to apply new methods of historical and linguistic analysis, and to ask new questions about how and when these texts were produced. In his Prolegomena to Homer of 1795, a pioneering work in this “new philology,” Friedrich August Wolf argued that the Homeric poems were transmitted orally, and that they had undergone a long period of change and adaptation, through multiple oral reperformances and multiple reformulations by literate editors to suit changing contemporary tastes. He suggested that the poems, which he saw as the product of “the whole Greek people,” were forged into their state of apparent unity only at the stage of transcription. Wolf’s new vision initiated a fresh discussion of how the original Homer, or the original building blocks of the poem, might be uncovered out of the text as we have it. During the nineteenth century, Homeric scholarship was divided between the Analytic and Unitarian schools. The Unitarians opposed Wolf’s ideas, largely on literary grounds, and argued that the poems as we have them are not an aggregate of earlier, shorter compositions, but were composed by a lone author with a single overarching structure in mind. The Analysts, by contrast, argued that the epics were produced by many different hands. There were multiple theories about how exactly the compilation took place, and what the original kernel might have been. Some argued that there was an original core narrative, an urOdyssey, which had been encrusted with many later and clumsier accretions; their scholarly task was to strip away the layers of later sub-Homeric narrative and restore the original purity of the poems. Others believed that the poems as we have them are a compilation of originally separate folk stories welded together. The Analysts shared the view that the earlier, more original layers of the poems were superior to the later additions and edits, although they disagreed about where exactly the original Homer could be located in the poems as we have them. Even in more recent times, Homerists have been slow to shake off the notion that earlier means better, as well as to rid themselves of the hope that one might chisel a more perfect poem out of the rough marble of the text we have. Up until the start of the twentieth century, scholars took the oral roots of Homeric poetry more or less for granted, not fully understanding the degree to which they can help us explain important features of Homeric style and narrative technique. The emergence of Homeric poetry from folk traditions explained its “primitive” style, but the generic and stylistic structures of oral poetry and folk traditions were not examined in a systematic way. The state of Homeric scholarship changed radically and permanently in the early 1930s, when a young American classicist named Milman Parry traveled to the then-Yugoslavia with recording equipment and began to study the living oral tradition of illiterate and semiliterate Serbo-Croat bards, who told poetic folk tales about the mythical and semihistorical events of the Serbian past. Parry died at the age of thirty-three from an accidental gunshot, and research was further interrupted by the Second World War. But Parry’s student Albert Lord continued his work on Homer, and published his findings in 1960, under the title The Singer of Tales. Lord and Parry proved definitively that the Homeric poems show the mark of oral composition. The “Parry-Lord hypothesis” was that oral poetry, from every culture where it exists, has certain distinctive features, and that we can see these features in the Homeric poems— specifically, in the use of formulae, which enable the oral poet to compose at the speed of speech. A writer can pause for as long as she or he wants, to ponder the most fitting adjective for a particular scene; she can also go back and change it afterwards, on further reflection—as in the famous anecdote about Oscar Wilde, who labored all morning to add a comma, and worked all afternoon taking it out. Oral performers do not use commas, and do not have the luxury of time to ponder their choice of words. They need to be able to maintain fluency, and formulaic features make this possible. Subsequent studies, building on the work of Parry and Lord, have shown that there are marked differences in the ways that oral and literate cultures think about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literate cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as cliché; we think of it as boring or lazy writing. In primarily oral cultures, repetition tends to be much more highly valued. Repeated phrases, stories, or tropes can be preserved to some extent over many generations without the use of writing, allowing people in an oral culture to remember their own past. In Greek mythology, Memory (Mnemosyne) is said to be the mother of the Muses, because poetry, music, and storytelling are all imagined as modes by which people remember the times before they were born. It is now generally agreed that, in broad terms, Parry and Lord were right. Many features of the Homeric poems are indeed formulaic (such as those standard “epithets” and those formulaic “type-scenes” of arming or eating), and must have originated from an oral tradition. But there is still a very wide range of opinion about how, exactly, the words of many generations of illiterate and semiliterate bards turned into the written texts of Homer that we have. Several essential factors need to be accounted for by any viable theory. Most obviously, the Homeric poems are written texts, not oral performances. Writing must have played a central part in the process of composition, so it is very misleading to describe The Odyssey simply as an “oral” poem, as is far too often done. It is a written text based on an oral tradition, which is not at all the same as being an actual oral composition. Moreover, these texts are far too long for any singer to perform them on a single occasion, and far too long for any individual to hold in memory without the use of writing. Songs that had an influence on the Homeric poems were sung for hundreds of years in preliterate Greece; but none of them was The Odyssey. These are written texts that display the legacy of a long oral tradition. In important ways the poems are a patchwork. The language is a mishmash of several different dialects, which marks the fact that the Greek singers and storytellers lived and developed their legends in multiple different locations across the Greek-speaking world. Moreover, there are small inconsistencies in the narrative itself, which usually pass unnoticed by the casual reader (such as a slight confusion about how many cloaks Eumaeus possesses, and an apparent switch in who sets up the axes for the contest in which the suitors and Odysseus compete for Penelope’s hand). The inconsistencies could mark the text’s emergence from multiple different earlier versions of the story of Odysseus, or they might suggest multiple stages of composition and revision, by one poet or by many. Yet despite their mixed language, and despite the few inconsistencies, both The Iliad and The Odyssey display striking structural coherence. There is a grand architecture to the storytelling, which might seem to imply the careful planning of a single architect, or architects. It is possible, as Albert Lord argued, that an oral poet worked closely with a literate scribe or scribes over the course of many days, weeks, or months. On this model, the composition of The Odyssey may have been not so different from that of Paradise Lost, composed by a blind poet who dictated his work over a long period to a number of amanuenses. Lord and Parry thought that the composer of the poem could not have been literate, because in the Yugoslavian context, singers who acquired literacy tended to lose their ability to compose oral poetry. But it has now been shown that oral traditions, or “orature,” can interact with literacy in a number of different ways, and they are not necessarily driven out as soon as literacy arrives; in Somalia, for example, oral poets have been able to continue their oral compositions even after acquiring literacy. Oral literature is more diverse than Parry, with a single point of cultural comparison, could discern. Some scholars argue that The Odyssey was composed by a single person who was well acquainted with the oral tradition but had become literate. This is certainly possible, but there is really no evidence one way or the other. Alternatively, perhaps the poem was composed when one particularly talented illiterate or semiliterate poet (or several) teamed up with a scribe or a group of scribes. Perhaps the scribe or scribes were entirely passive in the process of writing down what the poet composed; or perhaps there was an ongoing collaboration between two or more members of a group. Again, it is difficult to adjudicate between these various possibilities, in the absence of any solid evidence, or a time machine. The same person could, in theory, have composed The Iliad and The Odyssey, though many scholars believe that different individuals wrote the two poems, because they are notably different in terms of language as well as narrative content. It certainly seems likely that the person or people who composed The Odyssey were aware of The Iliad, since The Odyssey supplements but does not repeat any incidents from The Iliad—which is unlikely to have happened by chance. Scholars who claim that The Odyssey was composed by a single person acknowledge that this poet drew on a long and complex set of earlier poetic and folkloric traditions, and that the initial composition underwent considerable alteration in subsequent years, decades, and centuries. Homer—whoever he, she, or they may have been— composed this definitive version of the homecoming of Odysseus with a deep awareness of multiple different versions of the story, as well as a deep knowledge of multiple other parallel folk traditions and myths. For instance, there were probably versions of the story in which Penelope was aware of Odysseus’ plans to slaughter the suitors at a much earlier stage, and thus proposed the Contest of the Bow in full knowledge that it would help further her husband’s plot. The Odyssey is also influenced by other related archaic legends, originating both around the Mediterranean and the Near East; for instance, the ancient myth of Jason and the Argonauts seems to hover behind the story of Odysseus and his wanderings. Maybe an individual genius, a “Homer,” had a particularly important role in the creation of The Odyssey. But we should question the notion that a unified structure and coherent creative product must necessarily be seen as the result of an individual’s work. Scholars have tended to assume so, because many long-form narrative genres that we are familiar with, like novels, are produced that way. However, we are also familiar with long narratives that do not have single authors. Many movies, for example, are the product of a team. Most contemporary long-form television drama series are put together by multiple people, even if there is a single creator who came up with the show’s initial premise. It may be helpful to think in these terms when considering the authorship of The Odyssey. Perhaps we are more prepared than readers of the past to approach The Odyssey as a poem that exists as a mostly unified whole, but which was created by multiple different people, over a long period of time. When Was The Odyssey Composed? The date of the poem, no less than its authorship, is a matter of serious disagreement. In the middle of the eighth century BCE, the inhabitants of Greece began to adopt a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet to write down their language. The Homeric poems may have been one of the earliest products of this new literacy. If so, they would have been composed some time in the late eighth century. But some scholars have suggested a significantly later date, in the early, middle, or late seventh century BCE; others, less plausibly, have suggested even later dates of composition. The near consensus is that, at some point between the late eighth and late seventh century, a hundred-year-long window, The Odyssey was composed. It is frustratingly difficult to be any more precise. Arguments about dating the Homeric poems usually involve an appeal to material evidence. Objects can often be dated with some precision, especially since the advent of carbon dating and other technological advances in archaeology. People use different artifacts as time goes by, or behave differently in ways that leave a material record: for instance, we know that people in the Mediterranean world switched from using bronze weapons to using, primarily, iron, once new metallurgical techniques developed. Ceramics survive well over thousands of years and are useful for tracking cultural change, since pottery fashions often change fairly rapidly. But it is extremely difficult to use any such evidence to date The Odyssey. For example, inscribed on a clay drinking cup that was found on the Italian island of Ischia there is the fragment “Nestor’s cup, good to drink from.” Some scholars, citing an extensive description of King Nestor’s magnificent golden cup in The Iliad, have claimed that this inscription must be an allusion to the poem. It is nice to imagine that the words are a kind of joke: this simple, ordinary piece of crockery is identifying itself as a magnificent, heroic item. The cup can be dated to 750–700 BCE, so if this really is an allusion, The Iliad cannot be later than that date. But it is also quite possible that there were other poems and traditions about Nestor; the cup does not actually quote The Iliad, so it is not conclusive evidence that its maker knew the Homeric poem as such, rather than a set of associated Trojan legends—which we know also circulated in non-Homeric versions throughout the archaic period. The Homeric poems reflect a mixture of artifacts and practices that existed at different historical times (such as divergent funeral practices, by burial or cremation, and different dowry practices). Indeed, the poems seem to have no interest in conveying an accurate, realistic account of the culture in which they were produced. Rather, they combine elements of a fictionalized, heroicized past with details of the more recent or contemporary world. Consider, as one example, the diets of characters in Homer. The Odyssey’s noble classes subsist on bread and, especially, wine and meat—usually large, impressive domesticated animals like pigs, sheep, and cattle (not chickens or geese, although Penelope dreams of geese and geese are kept in the palace). Nobody ever drinks water, and the men eat fish only when the alternative is starvation—as when Odysseus and his men are stranded on the island of Thrinacia. In real life, as the archaeological record shows and as common sense would predict, the people who lived around the Mediterranean ate fish, vegetables, cheese, and fruit. It has been suggested that the diet of these heroes might reflect a vague memory of even more ancient Indo-European civilizations; the nomadic people of the steppes by the Black Sea ate far more meat than the Greeks ever did. But it seems most likely that Homeric elites do not eat meat as a reflection of reality, but because it is a way for the poem to demonstrate their distinguished and extraordinary status. Meat makes them strong, and it shows how strong and important they already are—the stuff of legends. Questions of dating are further complicated by the fact that the Homeric poems, or sections of them, were performed regularly by rhapsodes for several hundred years. These “song-stitchers”—professional poetry performers— competed in public competitions, and imagined themselves as stitching together a quilt of poetic narrative out of an already existing cloth, one often presented as the poetry of “Homer.” It seems likely that rhapsodes made use of written texts to learn their lines of Homer, although they may also have ad-libbed and riffed off the script. Rhapsodes presumably introduced variations on the texts in performance, until the first Homeric scholars, men associated with the library of ancient Alexandria in the second century BCE, tried to “correct” the texts. By this time there must have been many slight textual variants in the Homeric poems, and the Alexandrians tried to come up with the “best” reading at each moment when their manuscripts did not agree. We have evidence of the type of variant that existed in the texts of Homer in circulation in the classical period, because quotations of Homer by authors such as Plato are sometimes a little different from the text as we have it. But The Odyssey as read by Sophocles or Plato in fifth- or fourth-century Athens was presumably not significantly different from our own. Minor variations aside, the Homeric poems existed by the late seventh century BCE, and they quickly claimed a canonical place all over the Greek world. By the sixth century, they had acquired a central place in the cultural institutions of ancient Athens. In 566 BCE, Pisistratus, the tyrant of the city (which was not yet a democracy), instituted a civic and religious festival, the Panathenaia, which included a poetic competition, featuring performances of the Homeric poems. The institution is particularly significant because we are told that the Homeric poems had to be performed “correctly,” which implies the canonization of a particular written text of The Iliad and The Odyssey at this date. From that time onward, if not before, The Iliad and Odyssey acquired a central place in the cultural and educational life of ancient Greece and Rome. There was no holy scripture in the classical world, but everyone knew the stories of Achilles and Odysseus as told in the Homeric poems. Homer’s World The geographical setting of The Odyssey is almost as hard to pin down as its temporal location. Some of the places visited by Odysseus are obviously fictional or mythical—the Land of the Dead, the island of the Sirens, the home of the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, or the city of the giant, cannibalistic Laestrygonians. But even the places that seem less clearly unrealistic are often difficult to plot onto an accurate map. Ethiopia is the most distant place imaginable, located “between the sunset and the dawn.” Libya is a mythically wealthy place where sheep produce lambs three times a year. Egypt is a little less hazy, but still not described with any precision: it is the fertile land of the Nile, where traders or visitors (like Menelaus) can acquire fabulous amounts of wealth. Even the island of Ithaca itself is described in a muddled way. This may be a sign that the traditions that informed the poem developed primarily in the eastern part of the Greek world, so that the composer(s) had only a vague notion of the actual geography of the western islands like Ithaca. It is also a sign that the poem has little interest in the realistic depiction of geography. Nevertheless, readers since antiquity have tried to locate the wanderings of Odysseus in the real Mediterranean and Aegean world. By the third century BCE, certain traditional identifications of Homeric geography with real geography had developed. Scylla and Charybdis were identified with the Straits of Messina (where there are often rough currents, though never six-headed sea-monsters). Sicily was identified as the Island of the Cyclops—a rich, fertile land inhabited by non-Greek people, whose customs and agricultural practices are different from those of Greece. These identifications reflect an awareness that there is some correspondence between the world of Homer and the real world, although the relationship is partial and inexact; see Map 1, which depicts the fictional wanderings of the hero, in contrast to Maps 2, 3, and 4, which depict the geographical realities on which the fantasy is loosely based. The Odyssey explores the relationship of its central character, a man from the western Greek world, with people, gods, and monsters from many different regions, each of which has its own separate identity, and which correspond in wildly different degrees to real life. “Greece,” as a unified entity, is an invention of the classical age; in the sixth and especially the fifth centuries BCE, Greek-speaking people began to define themselves as Hellenes, in contrast to the “barbarian” (meaning “nonGreek-speaking”) peoples of other civilizations, such as the Persians and the Egyptians. But in Homer, as Thucydides points out, there is no single term for all Greek people. Those who sail to attack Troy from places that would later be defined as “Greek” are categorized by names for smaller ethnic tribes, or as the followers of individual leaders: the Danaeans, the Achaeans, the Myrmidons, and so on. The Odyssey reflects an awareness of the many diverse peoples who inhabited the territories around mainland Greece. During the Bronze Age, in the fourth to second millennia BCE, the Minoans, who may have been proto-Greek speakers, inhabited Crete, while other proto-Greek speakers lived on the Cycladic islands of the Aegean, and others again on the mainland. These people left tantalizing glimpses of their cultures, through material remains, including wall paintings and pottery and ruined palaces and homes. In the sixteenth to twelfth centuries BCE, the so-called Mycenean Greeks established a powerful civilization on the Greek mainland, with grand palaces in locations such as Mycenae itself, but also in many other cities, including Pylos (home, in The Odyssey, of old King Nestor). The Myceneans had a system of writing known as Linear B, a syllabic script that was used by scribes to make administrative records on clay tablets. But when Mycenean civilization fell—perhaps due to invasion by non-Greek people or, more likely, because of civil warfare and possibly climate change—the great palaces were destroyed and, with them, the Linear B writing system was lost. In the Greek “dark ages,” from the twelfth to the eighth centuries BCE, Greece was illiterate, and it was in this period that the oral poetic tradition that led into The Odyssey developed. The stories and myths that circulated in this period reflected memories and fantasies about the lost cultures of the Minoans and the Myceneans—although they were also drawn from neighboring cultures, such as the civilizations of the ancient Near East (including Egypt, Iran, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor). The oral tradition provided Greek-speaking people with a way to remember and memorialize the cultures that had been lost, including the wealthy and hierarchical civilization of the Myceneans. The legends of the Trojan War—tales of a great conflict, the fall of a mighty people, and the attempts of scattered survivors to regain or build new homes—are informed by folk memory of this fallen culture. The Iliad tells the story of a conflict between two elite warrior kings, Agamemnon of Mycenae and Achilles of Thessaly—perhaps echoing a real collapse of Mycenean civilization through civil war. In The Odyssey, the rich palaces of Nestor on Pylos and Menelaus in Sparta may reflect folk memories of Mycenean grandeur. Crete is another important point of reference in The Odyssey. When Odysseus in Ithaca tells false tales about himself, he often says that he comes from Crete—which may echo archaic Minoan or Mycenean myths, and reflect a cultural memory of the days when Crete was at the center of Greekspeaking civilization. It is hard to say how much the Homeric poems depict the realities of actual historical events, such as “the” Trojan War. In the late nineteenth century, an amateur archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann excavated a site in Turkey, Hissarlik, that he theorized was the original Troy. He made some extraordinary discoveries, including a cache of gold that he labeled “Priam’s treasure”; later, on a different excavation in Mycenae, he claimed to have uncovered the real tomb of Agamemnon. Modern archaeologists tend to be more skeptical, and to lament the way in which Schliemann —like other archaeologists of his time—rashly shoveled his way into the earth, destroying a vast amount of evidence in the process. Hissarlik is still identified as the site of Troy, but it is now generally believed that there were at least nine towns built in the area over the course of some three millennia, from early Bronze Age settlements to a Roman imperial city. Some of these cities were destroyed by natural means, such as earthquakes, and others were destroyed by fire and war; but we cannot identify any one of these multiple destructions with the single sacking of Troy described in Homer. It was from the Phoenicians that, in the middle of the eighth century, Greece adapted their alphabetic system of writing. The Phoenicians, a trading, seafaring people who originated from the western part of the Fertile Crescent (in the area which now includes Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan), are portrayed in the poem as rich traders who are liable to trick, rob, and enslave the unwary. Odysseus tells his swineherd, Eumaeus, an elaborate false story that he came from Crete, stayed in Egypt for seven years getting rich, and then was tricked by a “cunning man” from Phoenicia into sailing with him; the Phoenician hoped to trade him as a slave, for a profit. Eumaeus replies with his own, presumably more truthful story, which again involves being tricked and trafficked into slavery—which explains how he has ended up in Odysseus’ own household. These sinister, deceitful, profit-mongering Phoenicians are ostensibly contrasted with Odysseus himself. Similarly, the seafaring people of Taphos are described as “pirates,” who live by looting, robbing, and enslaving their neighbors— in contrast to the maritime wanderings of Odysseus, whose only goal is to reach his home. But the line is uncomfortably difficult to draw. Odysseus is depicted as a master of deceit, a compulsive liar; he is also, like a Phoenician or Taphian trader or pirate, hoping to return home with as large a pile of loot as he can. He enriches himself from the sacked city of Troy, and from various other places along the way, where the inhabitants either willingly equip him with presents (as in the case of Calypso, Circe, Aeolus, and the Phaeacians) or are robbed by Odysseus and his men. When telling the story of his various adventures to the Phaeacians, Odysseus begins with an episode in which he and his men stop by the city of the Cicones. He explains, I sacked the town and killed the men. We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us. (9.41–43) No justification is given for this act of plunder; it is presented simply as the kind of thing that Odysseus does, or perhaps the kind of thing that any Greek man would do, given the chance. A little later, Polyphemus the Cyclops asks Odysseus suspiciously if he is a “pirate,” like people who “risk their lives at sea to bring disaster / to other people.” Odysseus’ answer is notably equivocal. He declares that he and his men are part of the great expedition to Troy, and claims We are proud to be the men of Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, whose fame is greatest under the sky, for sacking that vast city and killing many people. (9.263–66) Being a “hero,” heros—which in archaic Greek suggests a warrior, and does not imply virtue—is different from being a “pirate” in that it is a much more positive term, which a man can proudly apply to himself; nobody in Homer admits to being a pirate. Like pirates, warriors sack towns and kill the inhabitants; the main difference is scale. Odysseus goes on to infiltrate the enemy’s dwelling, maim him, and poach his beloved sheep, the wealth of his household—an act that is clearly analogous to the hero’s previous triumph over the Trojans. The late eighth century was a period of increasing trade across the Mediterranean world—including trade of objects, stories, skills (like writing), ideas, and people. It was also a period in which Greek speakers had begun to create colonies. Colonization was a way to improve trading opportunities and increase the wealth of the originating city or settlement, as well as to house a growing population. Greek colonies developed in Libya, in southern France, along the Black Sea, and on the southern coast of Italy and Sicily— later known as Magna Graecia, “Big Greece.” The Odyssey shows an acute awareness of the processes of colonization, and Odysseus himself seems sometimes to think as much like a colonizer as a pirate. When scoping out the uninhabited island adjacent to that of the Cyclopes, he gives a description that sounds like an advertisement for prospective colonial inhabitants, as well as a critique, from the colonizer’s point of view, of the natives who have failed to exploit their country’s natural resources: Cyclopic people have no red-cheeked ships and no shipwright among them who could build boats, to enable them to row across to other cities, as most people do, crossing the sea to visit one another. With boats they could have turned this island into a fertile colony, with proper harvests. By the gray shore there lie well-watered meadows, where vines would never fail. There is flat land for plowing, and abundant crops would grow in the autumn; there is richness underground. (9.125–35) It is not surprising that the island was identified in antiquity with Sicily, given both the lush natural resources of this location in the poem, and the ways that the Polyphemus episode seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization. In real life, we know frustratingly little about the process by which the Greeks established their control. The Greek invaders quickly imported their own agricultural products—olives for oil, and grapes for wine—and later used slaves, perhaps including native Sicilians, to construct monumental architecture, vast temples to the Greek gods to represent Hellenic dominance in the region. The various tribes who inhabited Sicily before the Greeks took over do not seem to have managed to fight back against the invaders, and there is no way to reconstruct what they felt about it all. We can see in The Odyssey a complex response by the Greeks to their own growing dominance as traders, travelers, colonizers, pirates, leaders, and warriors. The Polyphemus episode, for example, can be read as an attempt to justify Greek exploitation of non-Greek peoples. Odysseus enters the Cyclops’ cave without the host’s permission, and then tricks, blinds, robs, and abuses the native inhabitant. As narrator, he makes his actions seem acceptable or even admirable, by emphasizing morally irrelevant considerations —such as the fact that the Cyclops lives by herding animals rather than growing crops (as presumably was also true of the native Sicilians), and by presenting his victim as loud, ugly, and oversized. Of course, Polyphemus also has the nasty habit of eating his human visitors. By this means, the text invites us to imagine that all non-Greek and pastoralist societies should be seen as barbaric and cannibalistic. The narrative is told only through the mouth of Odysseus himself, and we may well see him as an unreliable narrator. Odysseus implies that the Cyclopic people (also known as the “Cyclopes,” plural of Cyclops) are “lawless,” or lacking in customs; but Polyphemus does his chores in an entirely regular and predictable fashion. Odysseus implies that these people are loners who care nothing for one another; but Polyphemus’ neighbors arrive promptly when they hear him calling for help, and the Cyclops treats his animals with attentive care and affection—his blind petting of his favorite “sweet ram” is particularly touching. Odysseus first tells us that the Cyclopes “put their trust in gods,” who provide them with crops (implying that these people can be blamed for their lazy lack of Greek-style agricultural practices), but then suggests that a failure to welcome strangers should be construed as an insult to “the gods,” or at least to Zeus, the god of strangers—suggesting that the gods are all on the Greek side. In fact, Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, has some powerful divine backing of his own. The Odyssey looks back to a lost heroic age, the time before the Greek dark ages, when elite Mycenean families, living in great palaces, dominated the surrounded regions, clashed with one another, and maintained power through wealth, military prowess, and a traditional way of life. But the poem also meditates on the social and geographical changes undergone by Greek society in the late eighth century, as the new literacy enabled new forms of communication with outsiders, and as colonizers, traders, and pirates pushed outward across the Mediterranean, encountering alien cultures and alien peoples. Friends, Strangers, Guests Before approaching the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus tells his men that he has to find out some important information: whether the inhabitants are “lawless aggressors,” or people who welcome strangers. Odysseus presents these categories as if they are mutually exclusive: the willingness to welcome strangers is figured as enough, in itself, to guarantee that a person or culture can be counted as law-abiding and “civilized.” The Cyclopes would have good reason to be suspicious of these visitors, who have looted and slaughtered the inhabitants of the previous island that they visited. But the dichotomy hints at the importance in The Odyssey of xenia, a word that means both “hospitality” and “friendship.” The cognate word xenos can mean both “stranger” and “friend”; it is the root from which we get the English word “xenophobia,” the fear of strangers or foreigners, as well as the sadly less common “xenophilia,” the love of strangers or of unknown objects. Hospitality is important in all human cultures, ancient and modern; in this respect, there is nothing special about archaic Greece. What is distinctive about the customs surrounding hospitality in this culture is that elite men who have entered one another’s homes and have been entertained appropriately are understood to have created a bond of “guest-friendship” (xenia) between their households that will continue into future generations. Guest-friendship is different from philia, the friendship, affection, love, and loyalty that connects a person to his or her family members and neighborhood friends. It is created not by proximity and kinship, but by a set of behaviors that create bonds between people who are geographically distant from each other. Xenia is thus a networking tool that allows for the expansion of Greek power, from the unit of the family to the city-state and then across the Mediterranean world. It is the means by which unrelated elite families can connect to one another as equals, without having to fight for dominance. It is no coincidence that the origin of the Trojan War, the abduction of Menelaus’ wife by his guest, Paris, is presented in Greek literature as an abuse of xenia, since the laws of hospitality are what stave off a world where men kill those who are different from themselves. When xenia is absent or is abused, violence follows. Xenia acquired an extra importance in the era when Greek men were expanding their world. Travelers, in an era before money, hotels, or public transportation, had to rely on the munificence of strangers to find food and lodging and aid with their onward journey. The Odyssey suggests that it was the responsibility of male householders to offer hospitality of this kind to any visitor, even uninvited guests, strangers, and homeless beggars. Those who traveled to an unfamiliar land used the norms and expectations of xenia to form bonds with people who might otherwise have treated them as too ragged and dirty to deserve a welcome, or as too dangerous to accept into their home. Conversely, the promotion of Greek xenia as a quasi-universal and quasi-ethical concept can be used as imaginative justification for robbing, killing, enslaving, or colonizing those who are reluctant to welcome a group of possible bandits or pirates into their home. The Odyssey shows us both sides of this complex concept, which hovers in an uneasy space between ethics and etiquette. The poem’s episodes can be seen as a sequence of case studies in the concept of xenia. In the first four books— known as the Telemachy, the story of Telemachus— Odysseus’ young son grapples with the suitors, who are presented as bad guests: they have taken over Odysseus’ household without his permission and are abusing its resources and inhabitants. By contrast, Telemachus shows that he himself is capable of being a good, polite guest who is more or less able to overcome his crippling shyness with the magical help of Athena. He thanks his hosts appropriately, and does not overstay his welcome. He manages to be a good host also, when he welcomes a stranger in need, Theoclymenus, on board his ship. He even manages to circumvent a tricky dilemma of etiquette—how to avoid having to make a second visit with touchy, longwinded Nestor, without being rude to the old man—although only at the cost of putting his friend, Nestor’s son, in a difficult position. Telemachus’ visits to the homes of Nestor and Menelaus provide contrasting examples of elite hospitality. The first is old-fashioned, pious, rich in horses and sons, presided over by moralizing old Nestor. The second is piled high with newly acquired treasure, brought by blustering, self-pitying Menelaus, and the dominant figure is beautiful, magical Helen, who has frightening drugs that can take away all pain and grief. But in both Pylos and Sparta, the visit follows a set pattern. The guest is welcomed, washed by slave women, given an honorable and comfortable place to sit, and offered food and wine. Only after he has eaten and had some wine is he asked to tell his story. The visitor is then given lodging for the night, and when it is time to leave, the host provides gifts and some practical help with the onward journey. As Menelaus pompously declares, “To force a visitor to stay / is just as bad as pushing him to go.” Providing help with the next leg of the trip—pompe in Greek, “sending,” a common word and essential concept in the Odyssey—is thus an important component in hospitality. Nestor, for example, gives Telemachus a horse-drawn chariot to get to Sparta, and sends along his youngest son, Pisistratus, as a companion. Odysseus is not so lucky in some of his hosts. We first see him suffering the burdens of a hospitality even more insistently lavish than that of Nestor. Calypso gives her human guest more than enough of everything a visitor could ask for, except the final crucial ingredient: pompe—the ability to get away. When, thanks to divine intervention, Calypso finally lets Odysseus build a raft and be on his way— an unorthodox “sending” in which the guest has to construct his own means of transportation—his next hosts are challenging in different ways. The shipwrecked, naked stranger finds himself rescued by a young princess of marriageable age, among a nation of sailors, and has to muster all his powers of flattery and politeness. Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess, warns Odysseus that her people are not welcoming to strangers; yet the court of Arete and Alcinous seems in many ways ideally hospitable. Odysseus is bathed, wined and dined, entertained with poetic song, and given the chance to tell his own story at great length. He watches and then is put to the test in the Phaeacian contests, performing far better than expected—an episode that anticipates the later challenges and contests back home in Ithaca. The Phaeacians then give him the most lavish possible pompe—a magical boat that sails itself—at a high personal cost to themselves; Poseidon punishes them by crushing their boat with a mountain hurled into the sea, thus blocking their island from the outside world forever after and curtailing any future Phaeacian generosity. The limits and antonyms of xenia are explored in Odysseus’ account to the Phaeacian king of his wanderings to other fantastical, monstrous places he has visited. Each of these hosts seems to offer a perversion or a frightening exaggeration of the ordinary modes of hospitality. Aeolus, the god of the winds, provides Odysseus with a means of transportation or “sending” that is more powerful than he or his men can handle: the bag of winds, once opened, blasts the ship back in entirely the wrong direction. A normal host may provide his guests with poetic and musical entertainment before he goes to sleep; the Sirens entice their visitors with a song so fascinating that they want to stay forever, and never go home again. Many of these hosts pervert the ordinary way that guests are given food and drink. The Lotus-Eaters share a plant that makes those who eat it forget all thoughts of going home. In order to meet the dead, Odysseus himself has to act like a peculiar kind of host, welcoming them into the world of the living—by allowing them to drink blood from a ditch. The witchlike goddess Circe provides her guests with a magical drink that turns them into pigs. Several of those whom Odysseus visits—the giant Polyphemus, the gigantic Laestrygonians, the thirsty whirlpool Charybdis, and the six-headed Scylla—are defined as monstrous because they do not feed their guests: instead, they eat them (or, in the case of Charybdis, gulp them down like drink). The majority of Odysseus’ men are devoured alive. Some are eaten by the Cyclops; many more are skewered in the water by the Laestrygonians and devoured, like fish. Later, Odysseus watches Scylla eating six of his men and hears them “still screaming, / still reaching out to me in their death throes.” After this climactic moment, the ship—the last left from Odysseus’ fleet—sails directly on to Thrinacia, the island of the Sun God (Helius), and is becalmed there. Supplies dwindle and the men grow hungry. While Odysseus is absent, taking a nap in a cave, the men kill and eat the Cattle of the Sun, although they know that it is forbidden. This momentous choice is made for understandable reasons: the men are hungry and desperate, and they choose to risk the anger of the gods rather than endure the pain and slow humiliation of death by starvation. The ringleader of the insurrection, Eurylochus, speaks bravely, urging the others not to worry about the Sun God’s response: “If he is so angry about these cows that he decides to wreck our ship, and if the other gods agree— I would prefer to drink the sea and die at once, than perish slowly, shriveled up here on this desert island.” (12.347–52) The language is inspiring, as if from a rousing battle speech. We may well wonder what exactly is wrong with Eurylochus’ suggestion. The episode hints at an important idea in the poem: that the willingness to die for honor, which is valued so highly on the battlefield, is not always useful in these strange new worlds. Military valor, in the world of The Odyssey, risks looking too much like impatience. The poem shows us the rewards that come to the “much-enduring” or “long-suffering” protagonist through his willingness to wait for the right moment to act, without ever giving up the goal. Moreover, the determination of this crew member to eat even forbidden foods, and to drink even “the sea,” represents a kind of self-assertion that is out of keeping with his place both in society and in the narrative. He is usurping the leadership role of Odysseus. This act of forbidden consumption is a terrible mistake, which condemns the men to death and deprives them of their chance of getting home. Helius, the Sun God, responds to the eating of his cattle as if the men had taken a bite out of the god himself, and Zeus backs him up by drowning them all. Eating is important in The Odyssey, and eating the wrong things or eating in the wrong way results in violence or death. Like the Cyclops or the Laestrygonians, the suitors who have taken over Odysseus’ palace in Ithaca are defined as abnormal and monstrous eaters. We are repeatedly told that they are “devouring” and “wasting” the household wealth of Odysseus, by consuming his fattest animals and drinking his wine in their constant feasts, and failing to repay the absent owner or take care of the estate. It is, of course, a violation of hospitality to enter a person’s home uninvited and remain there day after day, using up his food stores, wine, and wealth. The poem emphasizes that it is also unjust: the norms of behavior require a person to pay back what he or she owes, and a guest is supposed to give presents to a generous host, rather than simply enjoy the benefits of hospitality without giving anything in return. Greed, ingratitude, and rudeness are annoying but, one might think, rather trivial faults. These boorish, selfish, immature young men are certainly unpleasant to be around, but not necessarily the epitome of evil, and it may be difficult to understand how anybody could think they really deserve death. The poem itself invites us to feel a degree of horror at Odysseus’ violence, and sympathy for the murdered boys. On the other hand, the language in which The Odyssey presents the suitors’ eating and drinking magnifies the enormity of their crime. The standard epithets applied to the suitors often emphasize their excessive desire to be “above” or “beyond” others (hyper: above and beyond): they are hyper-phialos or hyper-thymos (“selfindulgent,” “heedless,” “overbearing”). These words can be neutral or even positive (suggesting “noble” or “highminded”—above the norms in a good way), but they acquire a sinister connotation here, since they are also applied to the man-eating Laestrygonians and Cyclops. We are repeatedly told that the suitors are devouring not only the literal “property” of Odysseus, but also, metonymically, his “house” and hence his “livelihood” or “life”—the words bios and biotos can mean both “way of making a living” and “life” itself. It is as if in eating Odysseus’ animals, the suitors are metaphorically eating the man himself, and his son. Telemachus complains that the suitors are “consuming my whole house, and soon they may / destroy me too.” The rage Odysseus musters against his uninvited guests seems to stem from a desperate need to preserve not only his wealth but even his identity from the mouths of those who are eating him alive. But people who feel oppressed can become more dangerous than the people they fear. Once he reaches Ithaca, Odysseus is in the position of a guest in his own home, disguised as an old beggar. He is given a modest but warm welcome by the slave pig-keeper, Eumaeus, while the suitors act as unfriendly, hostile hosts, mocking and throwing stools at their ragged guest. However, when Odysseus is restored to his own persona, taking charge again of his household, the roles of guest and host make a sudden switch. The poor old visitor is now the householder himself. Odysseus becomes one of the most terrifying hosts of all, defending his property against unwanted visitors as thoroughly and violently as the Laestrygonians or the Sun God himself. Gods Xenia is particularly important to the gods in general, and especially to Zeus, the father and king of all the gods. One of the standard titles of Zeus was Xenios (“God of Strangers”). He is the god who presides over visitors, foreigners, and beggars, and who is invoked to defend the rights of guests or of hosts, when people fail to adhere to the norms of xenia. Zeus is also the god associated most closely with justice— dike in Greek, a notion linked to the idea of balance, and hence to the idea of retribution. Some readers have assumed that the gods in this poem—or at least Zeus—are defenders not only of xenia (which is, as we have seen, only partly an ethical concept), but also of morality in general. Some leap to the further notion that the triumph of Odysseus over the suitors represents an ethical victory, sanctioned by the gods. This certainly goes too far. Odysseus is presented as a morally complex character, as ancient readers recognized. The gods in The Odyssey, like those of The Iliad, are selfinterested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law. The main difference between gods and humans is that gods are far more powerful and, unlike mortals, immune from old age and death. Humans in the poem, especially Telemachus and Odysseus himself, invoke the gods as guardians of what is “right,” but it is less clear that the gods see themselves in quite this way. At the start of The Odyssey, Zeus is contemplating a problem in the human world. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, had raised troops to help his brother Menelaus reclaim his wife, Helen, who had been taken to Troy by Paris, son of Priam, king of Troy. But in Agamemnon’s absence, Aegisthus, who had an alternative claim to the throne of Mycenae, seduced Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, seized control of his kingdom, and murdered Agamemnon when he came back home from Troy. Later, Agamemnon’s young son Orestes— who had been sent away for his own protection—returned to Mycenae and killed both Aegisthus and his own mother, Clytemnestra, in revenge for the killing of his father. Zeus presents the story of Aegisthus as an object lesson in human folly. People are already destined to suffer a certain amount, and yet sometimes they increase their quota of suffering by making bad choices—as Aegisthus did in killing Agamemnon and partnering with Clytemnestra, despite the warnings of the gods. Athena replies by reminding her father that Odysseus is stuck on Calypso’s island, thanks to “bad luck,” the hostility of Poseidon, and the negligence of Zeus himself—although perhaps also, we may speculate, thanks to his own decisions. This first exchange between divine father and divine daughter has sometimes been read to imply that the gods of The Odyssey ensure that good people, like Odysseus, are rewarded for their virtue, while bad people, like the suitors, are punished. Aristotle, the philosopher of the fourth century BCE, may hint at this interpretation in a very brief allusion to the poem: he says that The Odyssey has a double structure, and ends in opposite ways for the “better” and “worse” characters (Poetics 1453a). But “better” is not the same as “good,” and the word Aristotle uses can mean simply “more noble” or “higher class.” In fact, neither Zeus’ words nor the narrative of the poem suggests that morally good behavior guarantees a happy life. Zeus says nothing about virtue as such in this speech. Although one may speculate that the gods warned Aegisthus because they are on the side of ethical behavior (against adultery, murder, and usurpation), this is not what Zeus himself says. Rather, he insists that Aegisthus was imprudent and foolish in pursuing a course of action that he should have known would result in his doom. When Athena urges Zeus to help Odysseus, she does not claim that her favorite human is morally superior to all others—a case that would be hard to make about this lying, self-interested sacker of cities. Instead Athena reminds Zeus that Odysseus “is more sensible than other humans.” His intelligence sets him apart from other adulterers and murderers. Gods usually favor people who are exceptionally talented in some way, and the poem makes it clear that it is Odysseus’ special form of cleverness that has earned him the attention of Athena. Moreover, Odysseus has made the prudent habit of regular sacrifice to the gods. The gods in this poem, like the human characters, prefer people who show them respect and provide plenty of lavish gifts. Gods in Homer, like humans, care about eating and drinking, and associate the proper forms of consumption with honor and identity. The consumption of meat and wine demonstrates the heroes’ close relationship to the gods, since these, unlike other foodstuffs, are always offered to the gods: a splash of wine from any drinking occasion is always poured for the gods (as a libation), and animals that are killed are always “sacrificed,” never merely butchered. The gods are the most important guests who are always present at human feasts. Gods have their own particular interests. As father and king of the gods, Zeus takes a special interest in masculine political power. Chieftains in Homer, whether or not they descend from Zeus in terms of lineage, are often given the epithet diotrephes, “sprung from Zeus”; in The Odyssey, this epithet is applied exclusively to Odysseus himself, whose role as king of Ithaca is apparently important to Zeus. Zeus is associated with the eagle, the king of the birds, and at more than one key moment in the poem (including the omen in Book 3, and the dream in Book 18), eagles represent Odysseus himself as the king whose power as king, and capacity to exact retribution on his enemies, seem to be favored by Zeus. In Book 1, Telemachus’ attempt to speak out against the suitors is valorized by Zeus, who sends two eagles to swoop into the assembled crowd: they wheeled and whirred and flapped their mighty wings, swooping at each man’s head with eyes like death. (2.152–53) The birds anticipate the moment, twenty-two books later, when Telemachus and Odysseus together will slaughter the suitors. The day before the massacre, in a memorably creepy episode, the prophet Theoclymenus is able to foresee the suitors’ deaths, when they lose control of their own faces, and their cooked meat begins to drip with blood; the prophet declares, “Your faces, heads and bodies are wrapped up in night; your screams are blazing out like fire. The ornate palace ceilings and the walls are spattered with your blood. The porch is full of ghosts, as is the courtyard—ghosts descending into the dark of Erebus. The sun has vanished from the sky, and gloomy mist is all around.” (20.353–60) Even before their deaths at the human hands of Odysseus and his helpers, the suitors are doomed by a divinely ordained fate. But there is more than one god in this poem, and more than one point of view from which to look at Odysseus. The god most hostile to the hero is Zeus’ brother Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes. Indeed, the narrative of the poem can be seen as an extended balancing act between Athena’s desire to restore Odysseus to a place of honor and stability in his household, and Poseidon’s to curse him with eternal wandering. Poseidon is understandably angry that Odysseus tricks and blinds his son, Polyphemus the Cyclops, who in Book 9 calls on his father to curse the homeward journey of the man who maimed him. Poseidon is less prominent as a character in the poem than his rival, Athena; he gets far fewer speeches and far fewer appearances interacting with the human characters. But we can see his work behind every storm and shipwreck, and behind every disaster that befalls Odysseus’ unlucky fellow travelers. Homer presents us with a world where gods mingle with humans, and may touch their lives in ways that are not always visible to the mortals involved. Great charm and magic comes from the notion that the divine and human worlds are less separate than we might otherwise imagine. Telemachus, for example, is guided by Athena on his journey, and the presence of the goddess imparts a special comfort and joy even to the most mundane moments of the trip. Wind blew the middle sail; the purple wave was splashing loudly round the moving keel. The goddess surfed the waves and smoothed the way. The quick black ship held steady, so they fastened the tackle down, and filled their cups with wine. They poured libations to the deathless gods, especially to the bright-eyed child of Zeus. All through the night till dawn the ship sailed on. (2.427–34) Mortal characters, and their accessories, are very frequently referred to by the standard approbatory epithet, “godlike” (or variations thereof), and one of the most common epithets of all, dios—often translated as “noble” or “shining”—literally suggests “associated with Zeus” (the word has the same root as the Latin deus, “god”). The sixth-century BCE philosopher Thales said, “The world is full of gods.” This is certainly true of the world of Odysseus. On his travels, he meets a number of minor deities, including the “nymph” Calypso. “Nymph” is the normal Greek word for a human young bride, but it is also applied to goddesses who are particularly closely associated with the natural landscape in particular places; there are nymphs of the sea (Nereids), nymphs of the woods (Dryads), and nymphs of caves (like Calypso herself, whose name suggests “hidden,” and like the unnamed nymphs whom Odysseus greets as soon as he arrives back in Ithaca). Every place has its own special deity —some welcoming or helpful, like the White Goddess who rescues Odysseus from shipwreck, and some hostile, like Scylla and Charybdis—goddesses who emerge from the dangerous natural world. A particularly important god in this poem about journeys and interactions between people from different cultures and different households is Hermes, the messenger god, the god of travelers. Hermes is a son of Zeus who has the ability to fly at supernatural speed, bringing news or passengers from one realm to another, wearing the magical sandals “of everlasting gold with which he flies / on breath of air across the sea and land.” Hermes can dive from sky to earth and down to the underworld, and can flash through water to travel across the sea: He touched Pieria, then from the sky he plunged into the sea and swooped between the waves, just like a seagull catching fish, wetting its whirring wings in tireless brine (5.50–53) Hermes has a certain elusive quality, appearing and disappearing at will; he is, like Odysseus himself, a trickster. In the (post-Odyssean) “Homeric Hymn to Hermes,” this clever, deceitful thief acquires an epithet often used of Odysseus himself—polytropos, “much-turning.” Hermes plays a key role at three important junctures. He is the one who is sent down unwillingly from Olympus, to the distant island of Calypso, to persuade the goddess to release Odysseus; he saves Odysseus and his men from Circe; and in the final book, he is the one who leads the spirits of the suitors to the underworld. The most important deity in the poem, however, is Athena, the goddess of technical expertise and strategic thinking. She is a military deity, often represented as dressed in battle armor, and she reminds Odysseus that she is the one who helped him sack the city of Troy, inspiring the construction of the Wooden Horse. Athena also presides over activities associated more with peacetime; Penelope’s weaving, no less than Odysseus’ fighting, is done under the aegis of Athena. Whereas Poseidon favors the untamed world of the stormy sea, Athena loves fixed settlements and the olive tree—a crop whose oil was used in archaic Greece for cooking and skin care. Poseidon makes the earth shake; Athena makes even the most rugged, barren landscape available for cultivation. Athena’s most common epithet, glaucopis, suggests bright or shimmering eyes. The poem constantly reminds us that Athena is alert to whatever is happening to Odysseus and Telemachus; nothing escapes her intelligent, careful notice. We can detect her presence in the narrative, her sharp eyes, even at moments when she is not visible to the human characters. For instance, when Odysseus and his men put out the eye of the Cyclops, they do so with a staff made of olive wood. When Odysseus meets Athena in person on Ithaca, she tells him that she has always been watching over him and helping him, even during the terrible storms at sea when Odysseus thought that she was giving him no protection: “I am Athena, child of Zeus. I always / stand near you and take care of you, in all / your hardships,” she declares. Athena’s ultimate motives are mixed and not always benevolent, as befits a divine being in the Greek imagination. She presents herself as consistently the defender of Odysseus and his male line. However, we are also reminded (in Book 5) that the storms which scattered the Greek fleet after the sack of Troy were caused by Athena herself, working alongside Poseidon, since she was enraged at how the Greeks defiled the Trojan temples—and she wanted to increase the glory of her favorite when, after long delays, he finally returns to slaughter the suitors. When Odysseus is in disguise in Ithaca, Athena goads him to greater and greater rage, and prompts the suitors to mistreat him. Athena loves violence, and knows how to manipulate events so as to maximize her own pleasure in battle. Her skill in weaving clothing for domestic use sits uneasily with her ability to weave deception and military strategy for the tapestry of war. The major Olympian gods do not usually appear in their own true form to mortals. Athena appears in multiple different guises to Telemachus and Odysseus. She can be a bird of prey, not an eagle (the bird of her father Zeus) or a hawk (bird of Apollo), but a European vulture (an ossifrage) or an owl. The cult of Athena in Greece may have originated from that of a Minoan owl goddess. When disguised as a human, Athena appears as Odysseus’ old guest-friend, Mentor. But she also assumes other guises. In Phaeacia, she is a little girl, carrying water from the well. When she has her most extensive conversation with Odysseus, in Book 13, she appears first as a well-dressed young man; then, as if to make herself recognizable to him, she transforms herself again, this time into a beautiful woman. Athena transforms Odysseus as well as herself. She can change him into a ragged old man, and then into a tall, handsome, strong man in the prime of life. Athena can mask places, too: she casts a magical mist to make Ithaca unrecognizable, even to Odysseus himself. Athena’s powers of transformation and disguise are part of her cunning, the quality she shares with Odysseus. In myth, Athena’s mother is Metis, a goddess who is the personification of Odysseus’ central quality: metis, which means “cunning,” “skill,” “scheming,” or “purpose.” It is the kind of cleverness that enables one to prepare for any new challenge and to come out as a winner. Metis was supposedly swallowed up by Zeus, and Athena emerged whole from the head of her father—a myth that hints at how the archaic Greeks imagined this potentially dangerous and unattractive quality as one that could become acceptable, even admirable, in the right contexts. Unlike the English word “wisdom,” which tends to suggest a staid, peaceful, possibly moral kind of intelligence acquired by long years of experience, metis suggests cunning plots and deception employed in the service of self-interest. It is not necessarily seen as a bad thing; metis is a very useful quality for a person who hopes to survive in a dangerous environment. Odysseus is often described as polymetis, a term that suggests an abundance of metis. When the man and the goddess meet face-to-face in Book 13, they agree that they share a capacity for scheming, for deceit, for transformation, and for telling elaborate lies, as well as an ability to wait a surprisingly long time to achieve their ends. Athena tells him, “No man can plan and talk like you, and I am known among the gods for insight and craftiness.” (13.298–300) These shared characteristics explain why the man and the goddess get along so well together. The relationship between Athena and Odysseus has a flirtatious quality that is made all the more interesting by the fact that they come from different worlds—she a goddess, he a mortal—and by the fact that she is a mostly female character who has the absolute upper hand, as well as the power of life, death, and identity, over this dominant Greek male. The relationships of Odysseus with Calypso, Circe, and especially Athena give us glimpses of an alternative to the “normal” mortal world, in which female characters are always less powerful than their male partners. Goddesses, Wives, Princesses, and Slave Girls We know frustratingly little about the lives of women in archaic Greece. The Homeric poems themselves are rich sources of information about Mediterranean society in the eighth century BCE, although both are highly artificial literary texts, and both were presumably created primarily by and for men. We see in The Iliad a world in which women were often treated by elite warrior men as if they were objects, prizes traded in war for men’s honor, along with other possessions, like bronze tripods and piles of treasure. But women also had their own distinctive work (as mothers, wives, weavers, and caretakers), and their own perspective on the male-dominated world of war. They fed, washed, and clothed the men who left them to fight among themselves for honor, and they washed, wrapped, and wept for the dead bodies that returned. They gave birth and cared for their children, and cried when men hurled them from the city walls. Fathers traded their daughters to other men as wives, and they were passed on to yet more men as trafficked slaves. But perhaps life for women in archaic Greece was not always as bleak as this. The Odyssey allows us to imagine a far more varied array of possible female lives. Its various settings—in multiple different islands, homes, and palaces, in peacetime rather than war—are mostly places where women or goddesses have a defined position and a voice. Some scholars have tried to find buried memories in The Odyssey of an ancient, pre-Greek matriarchal society—for example, in the peculiarly high status of Queen Arete in Phaeacia, who sometimes, confusingly, seems more important than her husband, or in Penelope’s power in Ithaca over even the male members of her household, most prominently Telemachus. But these elements in the poem probably tell us more about male fears and fantasies, both ancient and modern, than about the historical realities of archaic or prearchaic women’s lives. Samuel Butler famously suggested in the nineteenth century that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman, because it has so many interesting and sympathetically portrayed female characters: “People always write by preference of what they know best, and they know best what they most are, and have most to do with.” Few modern scholars would agree: we have, sadly, no evidence for women participating in the archaic Greek epic tradition as composers or rhapsodes. Moreover, Butler’s claim relied on the dubious assumptions that only a woman would want to write about female characters in any depth, and that all the elements he regarded as ham-fisted could be explained by positing a young, unmarried girl as the “authoress”—in contrast to The Iliad, which was clearly the work of an adult man, a person capable of writing convincing battle scenes. It is more plausible to view The Odyssey as the product of archaic male imaginations, questioning and defending the inequalities of male dominance within the status quo. The poem meditates on what women might be capable of, and the degree to which their potential can or should be suppressed. We are shown differences in how men and women behave—for instance, women in Homer do not fight, attack, or kill one another, or travel to foreign countries for trade or war. There are also similarities: both men and women speak, sing, cry, steal, think, plan, deceive, celebrate, organize, give orders, and feel a whole range of emotions—grief, surprise, frustration, rage, embarrassment, shame, loneliness, and joy. The Odyssey is a poem in which certain females have far more power than real women ever did in the society of archaic Greece. Most obviously, the goddess Athena, born from the head of her father, guides Odysseus through all his wanderings and all his plots, schemes, disguises, and battles back in Ithaca. Only through female divine power can his patriarchal dominance over his household be regained. On a human level, it is essential for the plot that Penelope has the power to choose in her husband’s absence to marry one of her suitors, and that if she does so, the suitors will either divide the wealth of the house, or the new bridegroom will take control of the whole palace. It never seems to have been a normal Greek custom for power over the household to transfer through the woman to a new husband. But the notion is vitally important in The Odyssey: if Penelope remarries, Odysseus will lose not only a person he loves, but also, perhaps more important, all his economic wealth and social status. It is at least hinted as a possibility that the wife in this poem, unlike most wives in real archaic society, has the power to choose the man who will have control over her household. In many respects, the text reflects social roles that presumably existed in real life. Girls and women in The Odyssey occupy different social spheres from those of men and boys, and their particular types of expertise are different. Female slaves (like Eurycleia) take care of children inside the house and perform domestic labor, like making the beds and lighting the torches, while some male slaves (like the old swineherd Eumaeus) take care of animals and others (like Dolius and his sons) do farmwork and gardening. The task of feeding and clothing the elite is also divided along gender lines. Women slaves grind the grain, bake the bread, and set and clear the tables, while male slaves prepare and serve the meat and pour the wine. Women slaves (like Eurycleia and Eurynome) are the ones who wash, scrub, and anoint the bodies of male guests, and female slaves help elite women make the household clothes and linens, by spinning and weaving cloth, and help them take care of the clothes by doing laundry. Girls make the daily trip to fetch water for the household. Carpenters, shipbuilders, construction workers, ironmongers, priests, fishermen, hunters, pirates, tradesmen, and poets are male. Among the elite, too, there are clear distinctions between male and female kinds of activity. Powerful men participate in male-only council meetings, and they are the ones who lead troops to war or (what is presented as much the same thing) on raids to kill and rob from neighboring settlements. Elite men are the primary participants in athletic competitions, although we glimpse girls playing ball in their spare time. Men predominate at feasts and banquets, although exceptional noblewomen (such as Helen, and Arete, queen of Phaeacia) are present. Elite women have a separate suite in the house, a set of “upper” or “inmost” rooms, such that Penelope is able to withdraw from the rowdy bustle of the suitors to her own tearstained bed. The poem circles around the question of whether an elite woman’s worth depends entirely on sexual fidelity. Odysseus has affairs with Calypso and Circe in the course of his wanderings, as well as a carefully calibrated flirtation with young Nausicaa. These episodes are not presented as a sign of disloyalty to his wife or a blot on his character—although it is notable that he is rather selective in his final account of these adventures when he tells Penelope about his journey. By contrast, the poem presents it as a matter of the utmost importance that Penelope must keep her suitors at bay and wait indefinitely for her absent husband. Female fidelity is important for maintaining a husband’s sense of honor and control; it is associated with the preservation of a particular wealthy household and the perpetuation of a particular elite family line. The double standard creates a particular kind of vulnerability for both men and women within the system. But the story of the affair between the god Ares and the goddess Aphrodite, told by the poet Demodocus in Book 8, reminds us that female fidelity may be important only in specific human social environments. Hephaestus, Aphrodite’s husband, is furious about the affair, traps the lovers in bed, and wants to punish Ares; but the other male gods (with the important exception of Poseidon) treat the whole thing as an amusing joke. The divine lovers, male and female, skip away unharmed, with apparently no damage done to their reputation or status. Odysseus, whose greatest fear is that Penelope will act like Aphrodite, reacts oddly to this narrative: he is delighted. Perhaps there is a kind of relief in imagining a situation so different from his own—a world in which an adulterous affair does not result in loss of status, loss of wealth, and loss of life. The most insistent declarations that women’s value depends entirely on their loyalty to their husbands comes in the mouth of the murdered Agamemnon, who has good reason to be upset about adulterous wives; his wife’s sexual infidelity represents the takeover of his household by Aegisthus. Odysseus meets the ghost of Agamemnon in Book 11 and is given a stern warning to keep a close watch on Penelope—lest she act as Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, did, murdering him when he comes home and allowing the suitors to take control of Ithaca. Later, in Book 24, the spirit of Agamemnon meets the spirits of the murdered suitors, learns their story, and responds by exclaiming how lucky Odysseus was to have such a faithful, intelligent wife, whose fame should be made the subject of a divine poem—perhaps a poem like The Odyssey itself, but one that would allow a more prominent role for “intelligent Penelope.” The story of Aegisthus, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Orestes recurs repeatedly in The Odyssey as the shadowy parallel to the story of the suitors, Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. This parallel homecoming serves as a dark warning of what could have happened to Odysseus if he had arrived home openly, as Agamemnon did, rather than in disguise. The story of Agamemnon’s death invites us to read Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors in terms of preemptive self-defense, as if he had to kill them in order to avoid being killed in turn. It is also presented as an important lesson for Telemachus. Without a son mature and determined enough to kill Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s murder would have been left unavenged. Telemachus’ growth to maturity seems in some ways to threaten Odysseus’ position in the household: there would be less need for the father to return and regain control, if the son were already adult enough to manage everything and keep his mother’s suitors at bay. Conversely, the example of Orestes presents a case where the son’s maturity unambiguously benefits his father, albeit only after the father’s death. In some versions of the Agamemnon story, Clytemnestra actually kills her husband, with Aegisthus merely the accessory to the crime. This is the version used by Aeschylus in his later tragedy, the Agamemnon; but it was likely that this version of the myth was already known at the time of the composition of The Odyssey. Why, then, is Clytemnestra’s role consistently minimized in the references to the story here? A possible reason is that presenting Clytemnestra as eager to sleep with her suitor and murder her husband would cast a disturbing light on Odysseus’ own wife, Penelope. The Agamemnon story is thus not simply contrasted with the Odysseus story, but also made parallel to it: in both cases, the wife is a decent person whose loyalty is tested when her husband is away at war. But the shadowy presence of the Agamemnon story may also underline our awareness that Penelope may not be able to wait forever for her absent husband. Moreover, in other early versions of the myth (as in Aeschylus), Orestes kills not only Aegisthus but also his own mother, Clytemnestra. In The Odyssey, we are told only that Orestes killed Aegisthus; the matricide is carefully erased from the story. But the uneasy relationship between Penelope and Telemachus clearly shows us that the interests of mothers and sons need not coincide. This parallel story acts as a reminder of the importance of Penelope’s loyalty, and also reminds us that a sensible wife whose husband is long gone might have to move on. The idea that male power depends on female sexual fidelity is also central to the myth of Clytemnestra’s sister, Helen, whose abduction by Paris led to the Trojan War. In The Odyssey, we meet the beautiful and frighteningly intelligent Helen back home in Sparta, with her wealthy, blustering, and rather less intelligent husband, Menelaus. The affair between Helen and Paris, like the affair of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, can be seen as another alternative but parallel narrative, showing what might happen if Penelope decided to go off with one of the suitors. But this counternarrative complicates the idea that it would be a disaster if Penelope had an affair, since Helen and Menelaus seem to have suffered no obvious ill effects from her escapade—beyond the fact that so many people decided to engage in the war and died as a result. The marriage seems, if anything, cemented by a shared sense of regret and a shared interest in the wonderful consumer goods they have acquired through their foreign conquests. At the moment when Penelope and Odysseus are reunited, Penelope speaks of Helen, and draws a complex, confusing comparison between her own situation—vulnerable to any deceitful stranger who may show up—and that of Helen, who left her husband for Paris. Penelope seems to suggest that Helen was forced into adultery (because Aphrodite compelled her and Paris tricked her), and also that, insofar as she made a choice, it was informed, as perhaps most choices are, by limited knowledge of the outcome. She could not know that “the Greeks would march to war / and bring her home again.” Should war, defined in The Iliad as “the work of men,” be seen as ultimately the fault of a woman—because Helen inspired Paris to abduct her? The question is left largely unanswered in Homer. In The Iliad, Helen tells Priam she wishes she had “chosen death” rather than leave her husband for Paris—suggesting that she did have some kind of choice, but also that her only alternative was suicide. The affair is not presented as something that she actually desired. In The Odyssey, a much more self-possessed and cheerful Helen declares that the Greeks made war “for the sake of” her face—a formulation that suggests that the woman’s appearance is the men’s supposed motive, but does not imply that it, let alone its owner, can be blamed for their actions. Helen describes her face, the face that, in Christopher Marlowe’s famous words, “launched a thousand ships,” not as beautiful but as “doglike”; it is a face that (in this translation) “hounded” the Greeks to war. The idea that women or goddesses, especially desirable ones who sleep with men outside marriage, are like dogs, or have doglike faces, recurs at several moments in the poem: Hephaestus uses the same term of his unfaithful, divinely beautiful wife, Aphrodite; the dead Agamemnon calls his murderous wife a “she-dog”; and the pretty slave girl Melantho is called a “dog” by both Penelope and Odysseus. As a term of insult, “dog” is applied not only to women. Odysseus also calls the suitors “dogs” when he inveighs against their greedy, shameless consumption of his food supplies, and he suggests that the human belly is also always like a whining dog: it begs for food, even in circumstances where it is not appropriate or possible to eat. The night before the slaughter of the suitors, Odysseus feels his heart “bark” inside him, like a “mother dog” defending her puppies. Odysseus has to restrain his doglike heart, because it is nudging him to act too soon, rather than follow through carefully on his plan. In our culture, “bitch” is used as an insult term only for women, and it implies a kind of malice that is imagined as specifically feminine. In The Odyssey, to be “doglike” does not usually connote this kind of malice or cruelty (which is why “bitc...
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