by Homer
This is not the place for even the briefest sketch of Greek history. It will be enough to note that speakers of Greek about 1900 B.C. must have moved apart from speakers of closely related languages (the dialects within the “Indo-European” group that would evolve into the Italic, Indic, Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and other language families) and traveled from either the steppes of southern Russia, or the Caucasus region, pushing into the Balkans, then farther south. Around the shores of the Aegean, they encountered already established high civilizations, among them the Egyptians and “Minoans” (a non-Greek people centered on Krete). In time, a Greek warrior culture based on citadel sites and chieftainship borrowed from and then replaced the Minoans and other early peoples of what is now central Greece and the islands. The “Mycenaean” period (ca. 1600–1200 B.C.), named after one of the key citadel centers, ended—it is not clear why—with a series of destructions, of which the Trojan War is most likely an abstract, distilled reminiscence.
After antiquity, the existence of Troy and the war for it were regarded as merely fables. When travel to the east revived in the eighteenth century, antiquarians began to note the close similarity between actual landscapes and Homeric descriptions of the area of Asia Minor associated with the old legends. In the nineteenth century, the Romantic quest for origins and the growing European devotion to an idealized classical past combined to spur more attention to the physical remnants of that past, culminating in the 1870s with the investigations of a wealthy amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann. At the large mound of Hissarlik, in what is now western Turkey, Schliemann dug and discovered the remains of an ancient city, layer upon layer, dating back to the twelfth century B.C. and well beyond. Longburied “Troy” was suddenly brought to light.
Excavations at the site continue to this day. While no inscription or object pinpoints this site as the place that the Greeks besieged and destroyed, the spot was clearly an extensive and rich city, with great defensive walls and gates not unlike those described in the Iliad. There is little doubt that this was Troy. Several of its layers (“Troy VI and VIIa”) dated by archaeologists to about the time of the Trojan War (as computed by the ancients themselves) show evidence of a sack and fire. Whether Greeks from the mainland—Agamemnon of Mycenae, Menelaos of Sparte and companions—led the attack sometime between 1325 and 1200 B.C., cannot be proven. Nor is it known who the Trojans were, in ethnic and linguistic terms, or where the remnants of their populace might have gone.
Migrations from the mainland to Asia Minor, especially the coastal settlements of Ionia, began after the collapse of Mycenaean palace culture on the mainland of Greece. It is perhaps during this period that the story of a great culture in those places, once overcome by Greeks, gained popularity. It is not impossible that the saga of the Trojan War goes back, even in versified form of some sort, to the actual events of the twelfth century B.C. The poems we have preserve some elements that are of Mycenaean date, both linguistically and culturally. Thus, the heroes of both epics regularly use bronze weapons and implements; iron, which became the most common metal after the demise of Mycenaean culture (in the so-called Dark Ages of 1100–800 B.C.), is rarely mentioned. Chariot-fighting is known. The design of shields, helmets, and swords matches objects found from the twelfth century. Places named in the text as sending troops and ships in many cases were not inhabited after the twelfth century, and so the poems must preserve an ancient historical memory of them. And the warrior confederacy that took Troy seems to fit with the pattern of citadel settlement from the period that the epics purport to describe. Archaeology shows that Pulos and Tiruns, Mycenae and Thebes were important centers in the Bronze Age, and these cities figure prominently in the epics.
At the same time, it is clear that centuries of transmission and reshaping of the poems within an oral tradition have allowed historical elements from other eras to intertwine with the older threads. Although chariots are used, for example, heroes stop and step down from them to do battle (unlike their employment in cultures farther east)—it has been thought that the poet is unsure how they were employed in actual warfare. Some objects and place-names from as late as the sixth century B.C. have been detected within the epics, although the composers obviously have tried to archaize. The political structures of the polis (“city-state”), first crystalized in the eighth century B.C., and the importance of Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, another eighth-century phenomenon, are other, major non-Mycenaean traits. It has been argued that the emphasis on a unified Greek expedition itself is to be linked with the evolving “Panhellenic” institutions of the eighth century, which brought together Greeks of all regions after several centuries of isolation (see Nagy, 1999). A number of signs thus point to a period four centuries after the Trojan War as the crucial incubation period for continually developing epic traditions.
If the ruined citadel, object of this legendary siege, has been revealed, what of the place Odysseus left to go to Troy, and its history? Ithaka today is a rocky island some thirty miles off the west coast of mainland Greece. Small enough to hike the length of in a day, it is neither rich in antiquities, nor famous—except as the home and kingdom of Odysseus. As with the city of Troy, there is no way of telling for certain whether the island now called Ithaka or Thiaki was the spot imagined by the poet of the Odyssey. Ongoing excavations by a team from Washington University, St. Louis, have so far uncovered what could be Mycenaean remains, the identity of which is still unclear. At any rate, it is worth remembering that even within the poem, life on Ithaka hardly measured up to the splendor of palaces visited by Telemakhos on the mainland. The young hero tells his host Menelaos that his home island, unlike Sparte, does not have space enough for horse-breeding. In other ways as well, we can expect that Ithaka was less powerful and important. Deprived of large forces, its chieftain Odysseus must operate by other means: his intriguing indirect and cunning character fits the reduced resources of his compact kingdom.
Yet the household of Odysseus, even in its minor way, shows the signs of a royal economic center. The king has herds and flocks on other islands and on the mainland. Servants, such as the pig-herder Eumaios, who have been acquired by sale or conquest, maintain the resources of the great house. Women are constantly at work in the palace producing textiles. And the great storeroom of Odysseus, which Penelopeia visits in book 21, is full of gold, bronze, and iron. Such imperishable goods were used throughout early Greek times to build reciprocal exchange relationships, by way of ostentatious gift-giving, with other aristocrats. The presents of Menelaos and Alkinoos fit such a system; Odysseus, as we learn in book 1 (line 177), was in the habit of visiting others, even before his wanderings. Out of action for twenty years, however, he has not only lost opportunities to participate in such all-important prestige exchanges, but has also suffered threatening losses in livestock from the depredations of the suitors. The beggar’s disguise that he assumes on Ithaka lies dangerously close to the truth. The Odyssey seems to recognize that the dividing line between comfortable existence and penury is thin. No doubt, in the subsistence economy within which most Greeks in most eras have labored, this lesson makes sense. The poem’s insistence on loss and gain reflects real anxieties that the economic misfortune of just one man could blight the lives of his descendants for a long time afterward.
Modern readers look to politics and economics for their “history,” yet we should recall that one can also speak of history on the level of feelings and attitudes conditioned by a set of actual experiences. How Greeks of the past responded creatively to the strains and challenges of their own times—that, too, is history. Framed within the tale of Odysseus’s return, the abiding notion that each person needs a place is taken as a practical fact, without apology, sentimentality, or melodrama. Only in the fictions created by Odysseus (e.g., 14.199ff.) do we hear of men roaming for the sake of adventure alone. One senses that beneath the eloquence and economy of the Odyssey depiction there lies the experience of generations of Greeks yearning for home—politica
l exiles, warriors, colonizers, sailors, traveling bards. Because the disturbed centuries when the numerous Greek city-states arose—from 900 to 700 B.C.—coincided with the development of epic poetry, it is even more likely that audiences would have been found sympathetic to a homecoming story like this one. In its distillation of feeling, and its celebration of survival, rather than its representation of social facts, the epic makes good its claim to tell the truths of the past.
The Gods of Homer
Another facet of the appeal of Homeric epic is its persuasive picture of a world beyond the human. The gods and goddesses of archaic Greece are like humans in nearly every way but one—they never die. Ageless and immortal, fed on nectar and ambrosia, with clear ikhôr in their veins instead of blood, the gods live at ease in cloudless calm on the snowy height of Mount Olumpus in northern Greece. Theoretically they could ignore the death-bound humans. But in the Greek imagination the gods need people as much as people need them. The Homeric poems are enthralled by this symbiotic bond of gods and mortals, a relation always teetering between adoration and antagonism.
The gods are much more than a Homeric fantasy. For millennia, Greeks worshiped the divinities mentioned in the epics, and many more. We can never be sure what they actually had in mind while doing so. But if we take the Odyssey as a guide, it was something like this: gods are inquisitive, meddlesome, proud of their favorite humans, and dangerously quick to anger. To maintain their favor, mortals must offer sacrifice, making sure to fill heavenly nostrils with the savor of roasting meat. The ritual of pouring out wine, coupled with prayer, also works to appease gods. The hero strives to win the only immortality available to humans: epic fame (kleos). To do so, he must win out over opposition, with divine help, or must lose spectacularly by spiting it. Odysseus could be seen as involved in a religious quest, testing the efficacy of his attitude toward the divine, and determining for himself whether the gods will hear and aid him.
The divine is everywhere in Homer; this poetry is deeply theological. One reason that epic dwells so much on feasting and drinking, for example, is that these are crucial ritual events: in archaic Greece every meat meal was also a religious act. Every daybreak is actually the work of a goddess, Dawn. Moon and sun, rivers, caves, and trees are either gods or have divine inhabitants. At a deeper emotional level, we hear throughout the Odyssey of humans actually descended from Zeus or Ares or Poseidon. Odysseus the hero of this poem has an interesting ancestry—his maternal grandfather Autolukos (whose name means “the very wolf”) is a trickster and a thief who, in some versions of myth, was son of the conniving god Hermes himself. The Homeric version downplays this shady past, sticking instead to the story that Hermes taught Autolukos the art of burglary (19.395–98).
This raises the issue of the morality of Homer’s gods. Not long after the epics took shape, philosophers were already criticizing their divinities. Said one sixth-century moralist, Xenophanes: “Homer attributes to the gods all that is most shameful among mortals. Stealing, adultery, and deceiving one another.” In the early fourth century B.C., Plato went so far as to ban Homer’s poetry from the idealized morally upright city that he sketches in his work The Republic. The good order of a state, in his view, was threatened not only when its leaders read about and imitated characters whom Homer depicted as failing to control their emotions. It was also put in jeopardy if the inhabitants believed in less-than-perfect divinities.
But if Homer’s gods make poor ethical paradigms, they nevertheless embody real truths. There are powers greater than us at work in the world. These powers seem capricious and sometimes cruel. Overwhelming emotions—melting desire, intoxication, the rage of war—where else could these come from if not from gods? To call such experiences, respectively, Aphrodite, Dionusos, and Ares, was to name them but at the same time to control them. For the gods, once humanized, function like an extended and somewhat dysfunctional family, one in which there is at least some order. Ruling from on high is Zeus, who backs up his commands with a white-hot thunderbolt. Hades and Poseidon, his brothers, have their places, on sea and under earth. Other gods and goddesses fall into line as sons or daughters of Zeus. There is a nice economy in such a polytheistic system—one god balances another, in a mode almost comically domestic. If mother (Here) says no, you can always ask father (Zeus). Humans get to hedge their bets by praying to as many gods as they wish.
When it comes to the Odyssey, Athene deserves special attention. Although we never hear the tale in Homer, the unusual birth of the virgin goddess from Mêtis (“cunning intelligence”) was well known (see “Plots and Performances,” above). We might question why this goddess of craft—including warcraft—becomes so attached to the modest mortal Odysseus. Primarily, it seems, because he is like her: indeed, his regular epithet is polumêtis (literally, “having much cunning intelligence”). Yet one senses an element of competition in their relationship. A revealing conversation between goddess and protégé occurs in book 13, when Odysseus has just returned to his island. In reply to his convenient fiction, about how he arrived home, Athene replies with friendly rebuke and a touch of pride:
… It seems you will never
stop your lying, not even here in your own land.
You love such guile and fakery, right from your feet up!
Come on now, stop such talk. Both of us know well
how you’re shrewd, the best by far among all men
with words and plans. And I’m well known among all Gods
for wisdom and counsel. Yet you’re failing to know me: (lines 293–99)
Plenty of mythic stories tell of humans who matched themselves with gods and lost. So part of the suspense of the Odyssey must arise precisely from this dangerous divine and mortal collaboration. Will Odysseus somehow cross the line? Is he good enough to win the admiration and aid of the goddess? Or will he boast too much of his own ability, risk Athene’s jealousy, and court abandonment or death?
In the Odyssey, Zeus, his brother Poseidon, and his daughter Athene are more than arbitrary or independent powers. The poet, from the start of the epic, emphasizes the complex family relations and repercussions involved as the three divinities become wrapped up in issues of human justice. Zeus, the chief god, is responsible for maintaining justice on the cosmic level. If anyone, Greek or Trojan, is mistreated, Zeus can be summoned to witness the outrage and take corrective action. He sometimes does with blazing thunderbolt. At the same time, both Athene and Poseidon have claims against the Greeks for personal injuries (the desecration of Athene’s Trojan temple and the blinding of Poseidon’s son, the Kuklops Poluphemos). So Zeus, while keeping order in the world, must also work for Olumpian harmony. In this regard, the adventures of Odysseus bring the gods themselves to a new realization of their limitations and interdependence. Thus, one religiously observant human can alter the configurations of the divine.
In this sense of ethics, human and divine, the Odyssey especially differs from simpler narratives of vengeance. This epic is not about brutal payback or gratuitous violence. Throughout the poem, the justice of major actions—human or divine—is carefully scrutinized, debated, and evaluated. Competing claims are argued and weighed by the various figures involved. Already, we can see at work the analytical spirit that pervades Plato’s examination of justice in his Republic centuries later. At first sight, the world of the Odyssey may seem lawless. Clearly, its inhabitants live without formal, written rules established and enforced by legal authorities. But justice does not require law. In fact, the Greek word dikê, most often translated as “justice,” is closer to the ideas of custom, habit, and propriety. The way things normally are, when family, community, and world are in order, is the way things should be. And this does not depend on adherence to some externalized code of behavior.
Dikê, in this archaic Greek sense, can even describe the working of nature. When, for instance, Odysseus meets his mother in the underworld, and cannot embrace her, she tells him that it is the “way” (dikê) of mortals, when they
die, to have their soul fly off like a dream, while the body is burned (11.218–24). Animals can have dikê, too. But both humans and animals sometimes go beyond the boundaries of this natural “justice.” They do so when they disturb the order of things, either by refusing to give others their rightful due, or by trying to take somebody else’s goods or honor. Such actions—the opposite of dikê—are called in Greek hubris.
In the Odyssey, the suitors of Penelopeia embody hubristic behavior. Not only are they breaking the norms of hospitality, an important part of dikê; they court the queen arrogantly, without regard to precedent, truth, or custom. They ruin the household and dishonor its inhabitants. By contrast, Odysseus throughout the poem employs his native wit in adapting himself to the way of things and the will of the gods. It is this, rather than a pious righteousness, that makes him “just” in Homeric terms. His miraculous victory over the 108 suitors is a confirmation that Zeus and the Olumpian gods maintain equilibrium in the world. Overstepping the limits eventually brings reprisal. Odysseus is the agent of such divine justice.
To appreciate fully the ethical stance of the Odyssey, it will help to know something more about the link between justice and hospitality. In ancient Greek, the concepts of “host,” “guest,” and “stranger” are expressed by one and the same word: xenos. This unified idea, so different from the way in which we split apart the three notions, can be seen at work throughout the Odyssey. Again and again the poem foregrounds the theme of xenia (the guest-host relationship). The plot unfolds in relation to this notion, and characters, from the Kuklops to the suitors, are judged by how well they adhere to the ideal of the proper treatment of strangers. Xenia, in sum, represents the epitome of Odyssean morality.