Homer, Odyssey and Homecoming

An introduction

Odysseus’ Home: Ithaca

The Apotheosis of

Homer

The earliest notable portrayal of the scene is a 3rd century BC marble relief by Archelaus of Priene, now in the British Museum

The Homecomings: The Odyssey

An overview

Odysseus blinding

Polyphemus(Book 9)

Odysseus blinds the Cyclops

The Cyclops Polyphemuskey episode:• Note the description of the island and the nature of

Cyclopean society. Pay attention to Odysseus' behavior. Is it commendable? Is he a good guest? Is Polyphemus a good host? Look for mentions of Zeus and the guest-host relationship. What vice gets Odysseus into trouble? What virtue gets him out of it? What types of behavior are approved and condemned by this story? Does Odysseus' victory over the Cyclops, and the means he uses to achieve it, suggest any other myths? What is the significance of calling himself Nobody?

Odysseus escaping the Cyclops' cave

(Book 9)

Odysseus and the Cyclops

(another view)

Odysseus and Circe

Elpenor addressing

Odysseus, who stands next to

Hermes

The Odyssey Books 11Odysseus in Hades

Odysseus and the Sirens

Penelope at her loom, with Telemachos in attendance

The Nurse washing Odysseus' feet

Terracotta plaque, Plaque with the return of Odysseus,

ca. 460?450 B.C.; Classical Greek, Melian

Odysseus slaying the suitors; below, an overview of the vase

Odyssey, Books 5-8 (Year 10 of the wanderings)

• Hermes visits Calypso, who is with Odysseus • Calypso will grant him immortality; Odysseus wants

to go home. • Poseidon gets back and brings up a storm • Washed up on the island of the Phaeacians • Nausicaä, daughter of Alcinous, king of the

Phaeacians • The Athletic Games and Feast • The bard Demodocus sings of Troy, reveals

Odysseus

Odysseus helps his men escape from Polyphemus' cave by hiding them

under sheep. Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

Books 9-11: The Adventures, Part I (3 years)

• The Cicones • The Lotus Eaters Drug of Forgetfulness • Polyphemus, the Cyclops • Aeolus, Lord of the Winds Gives Bag of Winds; men open it; blown back • Laestrygonians (Man-eating giants) Every ship destroyed except Odysseus'

• Circe, the Sorceress a. Men turned to pigs b. Odysseus and Moly, the magic herb c. Odysseus and Circe get together d. They all stay for a year • The Trip to the Underworld a. The ghost of Elpenor b. Tiresias' prophecy c. The Parade of Women d. Agamemnon: Don't trust women e. Achilles: Asks about Neoptolemus f. Ajax: still bitter, walks away g. The sufferers: Tityus, Tantalus,

Sisyphus,

ORIENTALIZING STYLE: • The story portrays

Polyphemus as a giant, one-eyed cyclops who is blinded by a spear by Odysseus and his friends. The Cyclops is shown in a sitting position, and his monstrous size is noticeable in comparison to Odysseus and the others who are standing.

Works Cited

• Kim, Lawrence. Odyssey: Phaeacian Tales. 15 Nov 2004. 4 May 2005 <http://www.utexas.edu/courses/larrymyth/28OdysseyI.html>.

• Pottery Styles. 5 May 2005 <http://www.archaeonia.com/arts/pottery/styles.htm>.

Odysseus and Nausicaa:Athena visits Nausicaa, princess of Scheria, in a

dream and tells her to go wash clothes at the river.

She meets Odysseus. Try to visualize Odysseus' meeting with this young

woman. What do we learn about Odysseus' character in

this encounter? What information does he

withhold?

with the return of the heroes

• The other Homeric epic, the Odyssey, is concerned with the peace that followed the war and in particular with the return with the return of the heroes who survivedof the heroes who survived.

wandering in unknown seaswandering in unknown seas

• Its subject is the long, drawn-out return of one of the heroes, Odysseus of Ithaca, who was destined to spend then years wandering in wandering in unknown seas unknown seas before he returned to his rocky kingdom.

twenty years of war and seafaringtwenty years of war and seafaring

• When Odysseus’s wanderings began, Achilles had already received, at the hands of Apollo, the death that he had chosen.

• Odysseus struggles for life, and his outstanding quality is a probing and versatile versatile intelligenceintelligence that, combined with long combined with long experienceexperience, keeps him safe and alive through. the trials and dangers of twenty years of war the trials and dangers of twenty years of war and seafaringand seafaring

archetypal adventurerarchetypal adventurer

• Although Odysseus has become for us the archetypal adventurer,archetypal adventurer, the Odyssey gives us a hero whose one goal is to get homewhose one goal is to get home.

• He struggles not simply for his own and his shipmates’ personal survival but also to preserve and complete the heroic reputation preserve and complete the heroic reputation that he won in war at Troy.

Odysseus’ Tricks

• It may seem ironic that Odysseus succeeds by concealing his name, as when he tricks the tricks the Cyclops by presenting himself as “NobodyCyclops by presenting himself as “Nobody,” or when, at home on Ithaca, he tricks his wife’s suitors by disguising himself as a beggar.

• But Odysseus’s shiftinessshiftiness, his talent for his talent for disguise, deception, and disguise, deception, and plain lying, is part of his versatility.

• The adventures on the voyage home test these mental qualities, as well as Odysseus’s physical endurance, but tempting him to lapse from the struggle homeward.

• The Lotos flower offers forgetfulness of forgetfulness of home and familyhome and family.

• CirceCirce gives him a life of ease and self-indulgence on an enchanted island.

• In Phaeacia, Odysseus is offered the love of a young princess and her hand in marriage.

The Lotus-Eaters17th century etching/ Theodor van Thulden (1606 - 1669)

Fine Art Museum of San Francisco

• The Sirens tempt him to live in the memory of the glorious past.

• CalypsoCalypso, the goddess with whom he spends seven years, offers him the greatest temptation of all: immortality. In refusing, Odysseus chooses the human condition, with all its chooses the human condition, with all its struggle, its disappointments, and its struggle, its disappointments, and its inevitable endinevitable end.

Odysseus and Calypso, by Jan Brueghel

Return to ordinary lifeReturn to ordinary life

• The Odyssey celebrates return to ordinary celebrates return to ordinary life and makes it seem a worthy prize seem a worthy prize after excitement, toil, and danger.

• The adventures occupy only four of twenty-only four of twenty-four booksfour books (or eight if we include Calypso and the Phaeacians).

Ithaca

• For the entire second half of the poem, Odysseus is back on IthacaIthaca, winning his way, by deceit that only paves the way for force, from the swineherd Eumaios’s hut to the center of his own house.

Odysseus and Eumaios/ 17th century etchingTheodor van Thulden (1606 - 1669)

Telemachus

• There, and in books 1-4, we see the social disorder on Ithaca that Odysseus’s return is to set right.

• We also see Telemachus,Telemachus, his son, emerging from adolescence and impatient with all that keeps him from assuming a man’s role (his mother as well as her suitors).

Telemachus

Penelope

• And we see Penelope’s dealings with her son, with her suitors, and with the beggar who is really her husband in disguise.

Penelope’s cunning

• Penelope is a challenging figure, because the narrative does not give us full access to her thoughts and motives.

• But she seems, with a cunning that matches with a cunning that matches Odysseus’sOdysseus’s, to keep in balance two contradictory requirements of her situation.

Penelope’s weavingPainting By J.W. Waterhouse

If she remarries . . .

• If she remarries and Odysseus then returns, she will seem to have betrayed him and, in his and society’s eyes, she will be classed with those other adulterers Helen and Clytemnestra.

Penelope’s trick of the web

• In its ambivalence, Penelope’s trick of the web (she promised the suitors to choose one of them when she had finished a shroud for Odysseus’s father, Laertes, and for three years she unwove each night what she had woven by day) perfectly encapsulates the way she is forced to play loyal wife and available bride at the same time; it is both a delaying tactic and a way of stringing the suitors along

Penelope’s faithfulness

• Odysseus evidently interprets the trick simply as an expression of Penelope’s faithfulness to him, and so have readers over the ages.

Geopolitical remapping

• The period in which the Iliad and the Odyssey probably took shape, 750-700 B.C. or a little after, saw enormous cultural, political, and social developments in Greece, especially the formation, in many areas, of the polis, polis, oror “city-“city-statestate.”

civilization

• The Odyssey offers a more positive meditation on the nature of civilizationcivilization and of the structures of daily political life as the Greeks experienced it.

• In addition, Odysseus’s adventures explore alternatives to “ordinary” (that is, Greek) civilization.

Nature and culture

• Odysseus experiences nature itself as the threatening antithesisantithesis to human culture, and he encounters other cultural forms that seem defective or excessive when measured against Ithaca.

hospitality

• The richest contrast is provided by the Cyclopes, who lack many of the features of the evolving Greek civilization: houses (they live in caves), agriculture (they are herders), ships for trade and colonization, political integration (their highest political unit is the family), and the key institution of hospitality.hospitality.

The foreign

• When Odysseus finally is restored to Ithaca, he, and his Greek audience, can appreciate the familiar for having explored alternatives to it in these and many other ways.

• This self-fashioning by reference to the the foreign, foreign, which was to have a long history among the Greeks, must have been especially important during this formative period of their culture.

Prolong internal warfare

• One enormous contradiction underlies the final books: Odysseus restores order by killing men from his own community, within his house, and he is prepared to prolong internal prolong internal warfare warfare by killing the suitors’ relatives in the final book.

• In fact, this struggle recapitulates the Trojan War and resembles the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon in book 1 of the Iliad. In all three cases, men compete for honor over a woman. What is more, Odysseus Odysseus kills the suitorskills the suitors within his own house, which should be exempt from competition and conflict, as the Odyssey’s many scenes of feasting in this same hall show. Both poems leave us with questions.

Human aggression• How can human aggression be controlled, if not

eliminated? Can violence within the community be channeled into safe, perhaps even socially creative, forms? Can it be successfully controlled by being turned outward, against other communities? If so, does that justify the human suffering and waste that external wars cause? And what about the more refined forms of violence at the heart of social hierarchies that create asymmetries of gender and class?