by Homer
We might notice the sequence and shape of this command performance. The stories that Odysseus relates appear to follow a rhythm of two short episodes, then a long, then two more short, followed by another long one. For example, the Kikones and the Lotos-eaters are described in less than forty lines of verse; they lead up to the Kuklops episode, which takes ten times that many lines to tell. The same happens with the next three stories: Aiolos (short), Laistrugonians (short), and Kirke (long). The effect is nearly tidal. Another subtle pattern emerges if we consider the content of the episodes in social terms. Every place Odysseus describes represents a variation on the conditions of Greek life, if we define those basic conditions as extended family; worship of gods centered on sacrifice; and agriculture. The Kuklops are a negative example: they have no agriculture, no laws, live alone, and call no assembly (deficiencies unthinkable for a Greek community). The Lotos-eaters live, apparently, without cultural memory, and lead others to forget. Kirke and Kalupso—goddesses living alone—embody what is impossible for mortal Greek females. The Phaiakians, on the other hand, look nearly Greek. They worship recognizable gods, enjoy bardic song, and have an appetite for competitive sport. But they are removed from any real conflict, and therefore, from heroism—an unthinkable limitation for “real” ancient communities. In short, Odysseus’s tale works like a magnifying glass or measuring stick, clarifying and marking off what it is to be human and Hellenic.
It is perhaps not surprising that allegory-hunters have found fertile ground in these tales. One brand of reading—already current by the second century A.D.—saw Odysseus’s journey as the saga of every soul, seduced by worldly goods and concerns, but resisting the Siren-call and enduring to return to its (heavenly) home. More recently, psychoanalytic criticism has discovered oral-narcissistic fantasy or phallic symbolism beneath the text. Ecological thinkers can read these tales as meditations on the use and abuse of natural resources, or celebrations of technology. Such endless flexibility and suggestiveness keeps the story alive. On the cognitive plane, we can trace an arching curve through Odysseus’s own recollections, and find a story of education. From his initial savage pirate attack on the Kikones, through his near-fatal boasting to the enraged Kuklops and beyond, to his loss of everything he had, we get the sense that the hero really learns. He is wiser (and makes us wiser) for having seen the cities and grasped the mind of many people.
Although a centerpiece and tour de force within the Odyssey, the adventure story told in books 9 through 12 in the hero’s own voice, surprisingly, makes up only one-sixth of the whole poem. Yet it crystalizes and distills all the major themes at work in the rest of the composition. Many of the motifs found in the adventure tale are spun out further in books 13 through 24, spanning the time from Odysseus’s arrival back on Ithaka through the reunions with his servants and his son, the fight with the suitors, and the long-awaited meeting with his wife. For example, we learn from his tale how Odysseus constantly encountered unknown lands; then we see him make one more such landfall at his own island. We hear of the power of clever women—Kirke and Kalupso especially—while in the outer story, told by the poet rather than Odysseus himself, such powerful figures recur in the form of Penelopeia, Klutaimnestre, and the Phaiakian queen Arete (perhaps not coincidentally, a member of the audience for Odysseus’s storytelling). We are always being reminded of food—a distinct problem in the case of the Lotos-eaters, Kuklops, Kirke, and especially the cattle of the sungod episodes—while the outer narrative dwells on the insatiable appetite of the suitors. Indeed, the poem is careful to draw a parallel between the unwise crew of Odysseus, who devoured the sun-god’s herds, and the arrogant suitors, continually depleting the absent hero’s household stocks. Just as the god destroyed the men of Odysseus, so the homecoming warrior will wipe out the intruders. Disguise, cunning intelligence, the clever use of persuasion all occur in the inner tale of books 9 through 12 and find resonances in the larger narrative. And through the episode of the Kuklops—his behavior, his blinding, the fulfillment of his curse by Poseidon—our attention is especially drawn to the notion of cosmic justice. This concept (called dikê) for archaic Greeks included not only the proper functioning of nature but all kinds of social relations, most prominently the proper treatment of strangers. It is not accidental that the overall story makes Odysseus into an avenging revenant, a punisher of the suitors’ hubris, a restorer of order, and a representative of the justice of Zeus on earth. In this light, the continued performance of the Odyssey, within Greek culture, represented not just enduring entertainment but a constant reassertion of cultural values, of a society’s quest for stability and wholeness. These themes and others will be highlighted in the running notes to the translation.
Poem and Poet
Where does our Odyssey come from? It may help to work backward in time. Contemporary translators of the epic rely on a fairly standardized Greek edition of the poem, most often the Oxford Classical Text edited by the scholar Thomas W. Allen (2d ed., 1917). Allen’s Oxford text was the result of many years of painstaking editorial work. Since this process is crucial for establishing the text, yet hidden from the view of most general readers, it is worth outlining the basics here.
Printed editions of the Odyssey have been in circulation since 1488, when Demetrius Chalcondylas, a Greek living in Florence, first used the newly invented technology of type to conserve the gem of ancient Greek literature, Homeric poetry. Until his time, the poems had been transmitted only in manuscripts laboriously written by hand. For the Odyssey, nearly a hundred such manuscripts still survive. They are stored in libraries throughout Europe from Moscow, Bratislava, and Vienna to Florence, Venice, Vatican City, Munich, Paris, and Oxford, and they range in date from the tenth century A.D. to the sixteenth century, some being produced even after printing was available. All these copies are based on even earlier manuscripts that no longer exist, written by professional Greek scribes, either monks or laymen, on parchment (or, in later centuries, paper). A scholar seeking the fullest view of an ancient work cannot rely solely on the earliest printed editions, but must push back as far as possible toward antiquity. Therefore, through a combination of personal travel and inspection, and the use of facsimiles or reports by other scholars, Allen made a “collation,” or systematic word-for-word comparison, of all the manuscripts he could find.
When there are so many Greek manuscripts—as with Homer, and even more so, the New Testament—there are inevitably variations from one to another. This is the result of widespread copying and recopying of a popular text in the days before printing. Each scribe is liable to make errors, even when most attentive. Sometimes scribes themselves were collating and combining the information from several manuscripts at their disposal. Most often, the differences are minor—changes of verb tense, the use of an older or newer form of adjective, varied spellings, and so forth. In several places, the variation does have an impact on plot or characterization, however. Allen printed everything that the manuscripts agreed on, and where they disagreed, chose the best variant based on what is known about Homeric usage, style, meter, and poetic diction. Of course, editors of the Odyssey—and there have been scores of them over centuries—never coincide when it comes to such individual choices about the best “reading.” Sometimes, in order to make sense of a passage, an editor recommends a Greek word or form that happens not to be attested in any manuscript, a so-called emendation. That is why a scholarly edition, like Allen’s, always records at the bottom of each page the variants and a selection of previous editors’ speculations.
Two examples might clarify the process:
— When the crew of Odysseus were waiting for the Kuklops to return to his cave, they lit a fire and then “gave gifts to the Gods” (as McCrorie translates the Greek verb ethusamen, following Allen’s text for Od. 9.231). The Oxford editor chose to follow versions in which this verb appears, characterizing the men as ritually observant. But as his notes record, several manuscripts, including an eleventh-century copy i
n Florence, have a Greek verb meaning merely “remain” instead of “sacrifice” at this line—a minor detail, but one that colors the passage.
— Occasionally, the disputed portion extends to several lines, as at Od. 1.93, when Athene is describing how she will inspire Telemakhos to travel for news of his father. The line in all manuscripts reads “I’ll send him to Sparte too, and deep-sanded Pulos.” However, in one fairly large “family” of related manuscripts, another two lines follow: “And from there to Krete, to Lord Idomeneus, who was second to return from Troy.” Obviously, these verses do not correspond to the plot of the poem in the form that it finally reached us, in any manuscript—Telemakhos never goes to Krete. But they tantalize us with the possibility that a more elaborate version of the “Telemakhy” (books 1–4 of the poem) once existed.
Thus far, we have traced the Odyssey back to the Middle Ages. It should be remembered that in the period before the Renaissance in Italy, hardly anyone in western Europe knew the poem directly. If people had any idea about Odysseus, it was through the medium of Latin paraphrases from late antiquity, or from the mention of “Ulysses” (the Latin version of his name) in such well-known Roman authors as Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Horace, and Statius. Dante, who places Ulysses in canto 26 of his Inferno, clearly knew (or made up) a version of the hero’s fate completely unlike anything in the Greek tradition, one certainly missing from Homer.
From the thirteenth century on, and especially after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in A.D. 1453, a stream of Greek scholars emigrated to Italy and points west. It is to these Byzantine intellectuals and their students that we most likely owe the spread of Odyssey manuscripts. The business of copying the poem from generation to generation had extended within Greek-speaking lands all the way back to antiquity. The medieval manuscripts on which McCrorie’s translation ultimately depends are an endpoint. But how can we tell that these manuscripts—the earliest of which is from around A.D. 900—preserve with any accuracy what Greeks of the archaic age knew as Homer’s Odyssey?
The issue is hotly debated even today among Homerists. One sort of control on our text has actually been increasing in the past century—namely, papyri fragments, that is, pieces from ancient scrolls. Papyrus was a cheap and widely available writing material, made from plant fibers, but it rots away in most climates. Fortunately, the dry sands of Egypt, which was a center of Greco-Roman culture, preserve papyrus. Explorers in the nineteenth century uncovered piles of papyri—usually torn into bits in ancient trash heaps, or used to line mummy cases. Along with invaluable documents from antiquity—letters, contracts, deeds, and so on—they found dozens of fragments of Homeric papyri texts. These papyri, of which more are still being discovered by archaeologists every year, usually contain no more than a few lines. But what survives, dated from about 300 B.C. to A.D. 200, is enough to show that the texts inscribed in medieval manuscript books preserve by and large the same verses known to readers of Homer on papyrus rolls in ancient times.
There are a few more turnings in the road, however, before we reach the archaic Greek period, when the Odyssey was put down in writing. First, the fact cannot be ignored that a number of early papyri texts contain “extra” lines, compared to the “standard” texts built on full medieval manuscripts. The lines from these so-called wild papyri usually sound like padding—additional descriptions, or elaborated type-scenes, that can usually be paralleled elsewhere in the poem. Where did these lines come from? Most likely, they reflect various traditions of reciting the poem that were current about 300 B.C.
A second factor enters here—namely, ancient scholarship. Shortly after the time of Alexander the Great, who spread Greek culture all the way to India, two great centers of learning arose, one at Pergamum (about seventy-five miles southeast of ancient Troy in what is now Turkey), the other at Alexandria in Egypt. Not only was Homeric poetry Alexander’s favorite (he is said to have slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow). It was a valuable symbol of a shared high Greek culture as well. Fervent, erudite, and competitive Greek scholars at royally supported think tanks wrote about and debated Homeric poetry in every conceivable detail, from the use of pronouns to the diet of the heroes. (It was carefully noted that they never eat fish.) One result of all this scholarly activity by Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and the great Aristarchus, was, apparently, the establishment of a fairly standard ancient text by 150 B.C.—at least, after that date, “extra” lines occur much less often in the papyri. The Odyssey and the Iliad must have undergone a sort of winnowing process, a standardization that unfortunately must have erased some of the interesting variations that had flourished before.
Some scholars speculate that the Odyssey must have been, around 400 B.C., somewhat longer than our version, or quite different—depending on what city you bought your text in, or, more likely, whom you heard perform it. Plato, who was born in 427 B.C., cites as “Homeric” many lines that are either not in our texts or that have quite different wording. As we go further back in time, the Odyssey is more and more in the hands of oral performers, like the “rhapsode” (“song-stitcher”) named Ion, about whom Plato wrote in a dialogue with that title. This reciter, in Plato’s literary account, claims to have encyclopedic knowledge because he knows Homeric poetry so well (and Homer was already considered a universal sage by Plato’s time). Apparently this was a common attitude toward the poet in the fifth century B.C., when much of what passed for education was built on extensive learning of the epics.
As a rhapsode, Ion competed against other performers at international festivals. He was in the business, also, of explicating Homer in the intervals of acting out the poems as a dramatic one-man “reading.” It is easy to imagine such rhapsodic performers varying, expanding, or highlighting parts of the poem in line with changing audience conditions. There is no evidence that they stuck to an exact text. It is also possible that Odysseus’s wanderings were played up by performers who themselves were used to traveling incessantly from one gig to another. (Such an association of fictional hero and actual poet occurs even today among Egyptian epic singers, as the folklorist Dwight Reynolds has shown; see the Bibliography.)
It may not seem far, finally, from the historically attested “rhapsode,” a performer claiming to reproduce “Homer’s” Odyssey, to the phenomenon of a masterly oral poet, who composed in the very act of performance and varied his composition with every new audience, in the way that oral poets (and even rap singers) active today in various cultures still do. But here we finally arrive at the murkiest regions in the search for the Odyssey, the realm of the so-called Homeric Question. Did a bard named Homer ever exist? If so, was he the first one to write, or dictate the Odyssey and the Iliad? And if he was really a practicing oral poet, what motivated him (or her?) to shift technologies?
We know nothing positive about the date, place, or circumstances for the writing down of the Odyssey. Most likely, it crystalized within generations of live oral performances and competitions, in the period from about 800 B.C. to 500 B.C. It was probably committed to writing fairly late, perhaps under the patronage of the Peisistratid rulers of Athens (ca. 540–510 B.C.), and in connection with competitive performances of Homeric poetry at festivals (see Nagy, 2002). Nor do we have any reliable information about a poet Homer. He was thought by the Greeks of the classical period to have lived in Ionia (now the west coast of Turkey) about 400 years after the Trojan War (which took place, according to ancient reckoning, around 1150 B.C.). It is completely possible that a great performer named “Homer” existed at the time, but whether he is responsible for our Odyssey in its present overall shape is unprovable. Even if he is the “author” in a modern sense—responsible for choosing each word of the poem as we have it—we should not forget that the poem, as its allusions, style, and archaic artificial language show, must also be a highly traditional work. It contains several linguistic layerings that suggest that some elements in the Odyssey must have been handed down from the very period that
it commemorates—the time of the “heroes” of the Mycenaean age (ca. 1600–1200 B.C.). So there is at least a symbolic truth embedded in one of the many ancient legends that circulated about Homer, according to which he was the son of Telemakhos, son of Odysseus. Whenever the poem was conceived, its composer (thanks to the Muse) felt himself to be almost in immediate contact with its events. The result is the vivid, ageless composition we can still read, hear, and value today.
Homeric Technique
The texture of the Odyssey and the Iliad, the construction of scenes, speeches, and verses, can best be appreciated in the light of techniques found in traditional orally composed epics of the sort still performed today in parts of the world (especially Central Asia and Africa) and once common throughout Europe. Five interlocking arguments support the idea that Homeric poetry as we have it comes from an art form that did not rely on writing.