Day 24, Book 24

Odysseus reunited with Laertes,
photo of Roman sarcophagus
(Roger Ulrich)

The ghosts of Achilles and Agamemnon – both figures who have loomed large over Odysseus' martial and marital quests – unite in marveling at "Happy Odysseus!" (210) as they receive the shades of the slaughtered suitors in Hades. 

Then, another reunion (with Laertes, Odysseus' father), but not before another test through tale-telling, and another sign of "Living proof" – both his scar (that disclosed him the Eurycleia) and his trees (the vineyard here recalling the rooted bed of Book 23). 

At long last, Athena commands peace, restoring order to Ithaca and drawing closure to the epic.

Day 23, Book 23

"Tree Dream," Joan Harmon (2003)

Penelope tests Odysseus by telling Eurycleia to "move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber" – impossible, since (as the infuriated Odysseus retorts)

Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,

would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,

a great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction.

I know it, I built it myself – no one else . . .

There was a branching olive-tree inside our court,

grown to its full prime, the bore like a column, thickset.

Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls

with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly

and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged.

Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,

clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up,

planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze –

I had the skill – I shaped it plumb to the line to make

my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger.

Working from there I built my bed, start to finish,

I gave it ivory inlays, gold and silver fittings,

wove the straps across it, oxhide gleaming red.

There's our secret sign, I tell you, our life story! (210–28)

Their mutual recognition confirmed through their intimately crafted space.

Day 22, Book 22

The pent-up fury of revenge (with a guest appearance by Athena) produces gore matching any battle in The Iliad. 

Even the punishment of the women is gruesome – first, forcing them to clear the bodies and scrub the floors; then, 

as doves or thrushes beating their spread wings

against some snare rigged up in thickets – flying in

for a cozy nest but a grisly bed receives them –

so the women's heads were trapped in a line,

nooses yanking their necks up, one by one,

so all might die a pitiful, ghastly death . . . 

they kicked up their heels for a little – not for long. (494–99)

Day 21, Book 21

Apollo with lyre

Penelope has declared that she will marry the suitor who can string the bow of her supposedly absent husband. Of course everyone tries, everyone fails, and Odysseus prevails. But in the midst of the prevailing, we are given an extraordinarily lovely detail, a prolonged hesitation between the stringing of the bow and the vengeful launching of the arrows. Colum's version reads: "For long Odysseus stood with the bow in his hands, handling it as a minstrel handles a lyre when he stretches a cord or tightens a peg. Then he bent the great bow; he bent it without an effort, and at his touch the bow-string made a sound that was like the cry of a swallow."

Here's how George Chapman's translation (c. 1615) lingers further with this same pause:

But when the wise Ulysses once had laid
His fingers on it, and to proof survey’d
The still sound plight [pliability] it held—as one of skill
In song and of the harp, doth at his will,
In tuning of his instrument, extend
A string out with his pin, touch all, and lend
To ev’ry well-wreath’d string his perfect sound,
Struck all together—with such ease drew round
The king the bow. Then twang’d he up the string,
That—as a swallow in the air doth sing
With no continu’d tune, but, pausing still,
Twinks out her scatter’d voice in accents shrill—
So sharp the string sung when he gave it touch,
Once having bent and drawn it.
Listen to how Chapman stretches these lines beyond their endings—"extend / A string out with his pin," "drew round / The king the bow." Those two extended similes likewise draw out the tension before the conclusive outburst of violence.

As noted for Book 19, the great philologist Erich Auerbach famously opens his study Mimesis with a comparison between Homeric style and the Genesis account of the sacrifice of Isaac. Auerbach insists upon the "externalization" of phenomena in Homer, characterizing the narrative as concentrating on "foreground" instead of being "fraught with background": "the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless." Perhaps true on the whole, but I'm not so certain that's the case here in this felicitous conflation of warrior and artist. The poem itself was likely sung to the accompaniment of a lyre—the epic is lyrical.

What a wonderfully self-conscious moment, then, to say that Odysseus re-familiarizing himself with his bow is somehow akin to a singer tuning a harp (and to say this via lyrics themselves performed with a lyre). As Shakespeare's Ulysses puts it, when discussing "degree" (order and hierarchy), "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows." Odysseus' kingdom is a mess; it's out of tune. It's time to re-pair it. And the power compressed in the singular stringing of that bow chimes with the power compressed within the poet's lyre. Pluck it, and the string sings.

(p.s. an enigmatic line from the later Greek philosopher Heraclitus (who thought Homer should be flogged) also fixes upon this productive tautness: "that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre" and elsewhere: "the name of the bow is life, but its work is death.")

Day 20, Book 20

More laughter from the suitors:

. . . Athena set off uncontrollable laughter in the suitors,
crazed them out of their minds—mad, hysterical laughter
seemed to break from the jaws of strangers, not their own,
and the meat they were eating oozed red with blood—
tears flooded their eyes, hearts possessed by grief. (385–89)

At that
they all broke into peals of laughter aimed at the seer—
Plybius' son Eurmachus braying first and foremost, (398–400)

So they jeered . . . (428)

Are they meant to look insipid? rude? verging on madness?

Day 19, Book 19

Bending closer
she started to bathe her master . . . then,
in a flash, she knew the scar –
       that old wound
made years ago by a boar's white tusk . . . (444–47)

This marvelous instant of recognition occasioned an extraordinary meditation by Erich Auerbach, a brilliant critic who contrasted the narration of the Homeric epic with that of the Hebrew Bible. He concludes: 

the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present. . . . 

It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, [the Homeric is] externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the [Biblical] externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.”

The entire essay can be found here; really, I can't recommend it highly enough. Please take a moment to read it, in conjunction with Book 19. 

Day 18, Book 18

Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter (2008)

"And Antinous, that grand prince, hearing them wrangle,
broke into gloating laughter . . .

All leapt from their seats with whoops of laughter . . . " (41–42, 48)

Why do we laugh? Because we are relieved, or find something incongruous? Philosophers have often puzzled over an explanation for this oddly human behavior. Plato was discomfited by the Gods' laughter at lame Hephaestus in The Iliad.  Hobbes thought laughter a sign of superior feeling, the apprehension of "sudden glory."

The suitors' laughter, here instigated by Antinous, confirms yet again their callousness, their willful delight in witnessing cruelty (sadly akin to contemporary youtube videos of fights between  homeless people). Odysseus, of course, has the last laugh.

Day 17, Book 17

Theodor van Thulden (1606–69)

Book 16 reunited father and son, with a disbelieving Telemachus ("No, you're not Odysseus! Not my father!" [220]) finally persuaded by the ipseic declaration "No other Odysseus will ever return to you. / That man and I are one, the man you see . . ." (232–33). In Book 17, in the midst of the pitiless inhospitality he must face, Odysseus has another poignant reunion, with his loyal dog (317–60):

Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears…
It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus’ dog
he trained as a puppy once, but little joy he got
since all too soon he shipped to sacred Troy.
In the old days young hunters loved to set him
coursing after wild goats and deer and hares.
But now with his master gone he lay there, castaway,
on piles of dung from mules and cattle, heaps collecting
out before the gates till Odysseus’ serving-men
could cart it off to manure the king’s estates.
Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the old hound Argos.

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength left to drag himself an inch
toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side
and flicked away a tear, hiding it from Eumaeus,
diverting his friend in a hasty, offhand way:
“Strange, Eumaeus, look, a dog like this,
lying here on a dung-hill…
what handsome lines! But I can’t say for sure
if he had the running speed to match his looks
or he was only the sort that gentry spoil at table,
show-dogs masters pamper for their points.”

You told the stranger, Euamaeus, loyal swineherd,
“Here, it’s all too true, here’s the dog of a man
who died in foreign parts. But if he had now
the form and flair he had in his glory days —
as Odysseus left him, sailing off to Troy —
you’d be amazed to see such speed, such strength.
No quarry he chased in the deepest, darkest woods
could slip this hound. A champion tracker too!
Ah, but he’s run out of luck now, poor fellow…
his master’s dead and gone, so far from home,
and the heartless women tend to him not at all…”

With that he entered the well-constructed palace,
strode through the halls and joined the proud suitors.
But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos’ eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away.

Day 16, Book 16

An intriguing comment from the philosopher Hans Blumenberg:

Henri-Lucien Doucet,
Reunion of Odysseus & Telemachus (1880)

"Shipwreck, as seen by a survivor, is the figure of an initial philosophical experience. It is said that the founder of the Stoic school, Zeno of Cition, was shipwrecked with a cargo of Phoenician purple dye near Piraeus and was led thereby to philosophy, summing up: 'I was first fortunate in seafaring when I was shipwrecked.'" Vitruvius reports that the Socratic philosopher Aristippus, shipwrecked on the shores of the island of Rhodes, recognized that there were humans nearby when he saw geometrical figures traced on the beach. The account has the philosopher—who was not exactly esteemed by the other students of Socrates, because he was too well acquainted with money and pleasure—undergo a kind of conversion. He entrusted to his homebound fellow passengers the message that one ought to provide one’s children with only such possessions as could be saved from a shipwreck, for the only things important in life were those that neither the trials of fate nor revolution nor war could harm. We have here the moralizing version of an anecdote that originally related to sophistic practice: even in the hopeless situation of being shipwrecked on a foreign shore, a philosophically trained person still knows what to do, when he recognizes civilized reason in geometrical diagrams and thereupon decides to proceed immediately to the city’s gymnasium and earn through philosophical disputation what he needs to restore his lost outfit. That is, he is a man who can take care of himself rather than a man who draws lessons from the shipwreck."

Day 15, Book 15

Poor Telemachus – remember him? – has been detained at Menelaus' court since Book 4! At least he has two prophecies to encourage him.

Helen offers the first (191–200):

"Listen to me and I will be your prophet,
sure as the gods have flashed it in my mind
and it will come to pass, I know it will.
Just as the eagle swooped down from the crags
where it was born and bred, just as it snatched
that goose fattened up for the kill inside the house,
just so, after many trials and roving long and hard,
Odysseus will descend on his house and take revenge –
Unless he's home already, sowing seeds of ruin
for that whole crowd of suitors!"

The second comes from the fugitive Theoclymenus, after the return to Ithaca (594–98):

"Look, Telemachus,
the will of god just winged that bird on your right!
Why, the moment I saw it, here before my eyes,
I knew it was a sign. No line more kingly than yours
in all of Ithaca – yours will reign forever!"

Day 14, Book 14

The loyal swineherd Eumaeus urges a disguised Odysseus to "tell me the story of your troubles." Our hero launches into a semi-fictive account, one that coyly overlaps with his own life (he even gets to praise Odysseus's cunning! [530–73]) without revealing his identity. The exploits at Troy are similar, as well as the homeward travails. (The threat of his enslavement anticipates our later readings this term, whether through figures like Caliban or Crusoe or Equiano.) 

The ceaseless restlessness of "the Cretan"(/Odysseus) is captured in lines like: 

"No, it was always oarswept ships that thrilled my heart" 

and 

"Each man delights in work that suits him best" 

and 

William Blake (c. 1825)

"a spirit in me urged 'Set sail' . . ." 

The trope of the restless Odysseus recurs in Dante's (1265–1321) Canto 26 of The Inferno:

"Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
Of my old father, nor return of love,
That should have crown'd Penelope with joy,
Could overcome in me the zeal I had
To' explore the world, and search the ways of life,
Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sail'd
Into the deep illimitable main . . ."

Tennyson (1809–92) draws upon this inquietude as well, in his Victorian version of "Ulysses":

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met; [on a plaque in Palmer 3rd!]
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

          This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. [on a plaque outside of Rhodes Tower!]

Day 13, Book 13

A lovely Homeric (or "epic") simile for the hunger for home:

As a man aches for his evening meal when all day long 

his brace of wine-dark oxen have dragged the bolted plowshare

down a fallow field – how welcome the setting sun to him, 

the going home to supper, yes, though his knees buckle,

struggling home at last. So welcome now to Odysseus 

the setting light of day . . . 

Here's the Czech novelist Milan Kundera on 'nostalgia' (from his beguiling novel Ignorance):

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostosidea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

“Odysseus and Kalypso,” Arnold Bröcklin (1882)

The dawn of ancient Greek culture brought the birth of the Odyssey, the founding epic of nostalgia. Let us emphasize: Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all time, is also the greatest nostalgic. He went off (not very happily) to the Trojan War and stayed for ten years. Then he tried to return to his native Ithaca, but the gods' intrigues prolonged his journey, first by three years jammed with the most uncanny happenings, then by seven more years that he spent as hostage and lover with Calypso, who in her passion for him would not let him leave her island.

In Book Five of the Odyssey, Odysseus tells Calypso: "As wise as she is, I know that Penelope cannot compare to you in stature or in beauty ... And yet the only wish I wish each day is to be back there, to see in my own house the day of my return!" And Homer goes on: "As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank; the dusk came: and beneath the vault deep within the cavern, they withdrew to lie and love in each other's arms."

Day 12, Book 12

Leon Belly (1870)

Again, many of the children's retellings of The Odyssey elaborate upon these brief episodes, as if they were almost the entirety of the epic – whereas by the next book, we're already back in Ithaca, with half of the poem as yet to unfold. The proto-picaresque escapades are all related in the past tense during the narration that consumes books 9–12. 

Odysseus' resoluteness (some would say stubbornness) charts this book. Returning from the underworld, listening to the seductive sirens, not fully revealing his plans for the path between (the since proverbial) Scylla and Charybdis – all are actions characterized by defiant isolation. Not surprisingly, the insubordination by his starving "headstrong men" (349) leads to the catastrophic consumption of the "oxen of the sun." By the end of the book, we have returned to the narrative present of the Phaeacian banquet: "His tale was over now" (13.1).

Day 11, Book 11

John Flaxman (1835)

Odysseus' voyage to the kingdom of the dead . . . his unburied friend Elpenor begs for proper ceremony; the blind Tiresias prophesizes Odysseus' doom. In a poignant moment, Odysseus seeks to embrace the shade of his  mother:

Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her,
three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away 
like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time
the grief cut to the heart, sharper, yes, and I,
I cried out to her . . . 

A parade of female ghosts processes by – and suddenly, we are back with Alcinous, who interrupts the telling, before Odysseus resumes. Agamemnon relates his treacherous return home (always a threat, for both Odysseus and Telemachus).

Achilles arrives, and we have something of a face-off between the hero of The Iliad and the hero of The Odyssey. Achilles addresses Odysseus as a "reckless friend . . . what greater feat can that cunning head contrive?" Odysseus seeks "to reassure the ghost," but Achilles impatiently retorts:

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! 
By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man – 
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive –
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

Day 10, Book 10

Circe recalls Calypso – or rather, Circe anticipates Calypso, since the former precedes the latter in the chronology of encounter, if not narration.

The great African American artist Romare Bearden made a series of collages based on episodes from The Odyssey, displayed last year at the Brooks Museum. The images of Circe were particularly striking, as Bearden blends the tradition of the conjure woman with the Greek sorceress.

Day 9, Book 9

Book 9 is where many children's versions start – that is, at the 'beginning' of the story, with the fall of Troy, which generates the sequential wanderings of Odysseus. But it takes Homer 1/3 of the poem to reach this point, here in the midst of things.

Adorno and Horkheimer read Odysseus as a kind of proto-bourgeois venturer, anticipating one of later readings this semester:

"The wily solitary is already homo economicus, for whom all reasonable things are alike: hence the Odysseus is already a Robinsonade. Both Odysseus and Crusoe, the two shipwrecked mariners, make their weakness (that of the individual who parts from the collectivity) their social strength. Delivered up to the mercy of the waves, helplessly isolated, their very isolation forces them recklessly to pursue an atomistic interest. They embody the principle of capitalist economy, even before they have recourse to a servant; but what they preserve materially from the past for the furthering of their new enterprise is evidence for the contention that the entrepreneur has always gone about his competitive business with more initial capital than his mere physical capacity. . . . Hence the universal socialization, as outlined in the narratives of the world traveler Odysseus and the solo manufacturer Crusoe, from the start included the absolute solitude which emerged so clearly at the end of the bourgeois era. Radical socialization means radical alienation. Odysseus and Crusoe are both concerned with totality: the former measures whereas the latter produces it. Both realize totality only in complete alienation from other men, who meet the two protagonists only in alienated form—as enemies or as points of support, but always as tools, as things." (61–62)

Day 8, Book 8

Hans Erni, Demodokos singing

Framing Book 8 are two songs by the blind poet Demodokos, both about the Trojan war. The first song (75–95), regarding a supposed quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, makes Odysseus break down into tears. The second, recounting the ruse of the Trojan horse, comes in response to the rather intrusive request of Odysseus (485–93). (In-between is inset a third song, about the adulterous love of Ares and Aphrodite [266–366].)

Peculiarly, there is no other classical source for this purported quarrel – at best, it echoes a similar dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon at the outset of the Iliad. 

And what is the point of the final song, in relation to the first? 

One critic, Clifford Broeniman, has posited that "Odysseus needs to have his most famous deed recounted for all to hear. This subtle maneuvering is used by the stranger to gain a favorable reputation and, if need be, identify himself after such a glorifying story." 

When we have a poem within a poem, or a play within a play, or a painting within a painting, we call this recursively embedded sequence a mise en abyme, French for "placed into abyss." The inset songs within Book 8 have been characterized by some scholars as a mise en abyme.

Day 7, Book 7

At the threshold of entering Phaeacia's halls, Odysseus is arrested by the space – a stay in his forward motion that endures for over 50 lines [Fagles]:

"Now as Odysseus approached Alcinous' famous house
a rush of feelings stirred within his heart,
bringing him to a standstill,
even before he crossed the bronze threshold . . ." (94–97)

"And there Odysseus stood,
gazing at all the bounty, a man who'd borne so much . . . " (156–58)

He pauses, as do we, suspended. In the midst of this parenthesis, we partake in an ekphrastic description of the space, a well-ordered and flourishing palace (in contrast to his palace back in Ithaca). 

The "man who'd borne so much": as we've seen, Odysseus is often described as crafty, or wily, or cunning ("the man of craft" [277]); just as often, his is given the epithet "long-suffering." In Book 7, we have "how long have I suffered!" (181); "long-suffering great Odysseus" (210); "all I've suffered" (249); "How much I have suffered" (259); "doomed to be comrade still to many hardships" (310); "after many trials" (394). 

As the classicist W. B. Stanford suggests in "The Homeric Etymology of the Name Odysseus":

Laocoon by Charles Bell (1806), Wellcome Library

The whole career of Odysseus in European literature from the Epic Cycle to James Joyce's "Ulysses" demonstrates this nemesis of the man with Autolycan heredity, this man who suffers from the disadvantage of intellectual superiority. The Cyclic stories of the death of Palamedes and the deception of Philoctetes (which Homer ignores), the anti-Ulyssean plays of Euripides and Sophocles, the strictures of Socrates and Plato, the antipathy of Virgil together with the Latin and Romance writers on the Troy Tale, the condemnation in Dante's "Inferno," the scurrilities of Thersites in "Troilus and Cressida" . . . all attest the latent truth in the title "the man doomed to odium." Autolycus in naming his grandson showed himself a prophet as well as a humorist.

It sounds as if suffering is not unrelated to his craftiness . . . 

Day 6, Book 6

Henri Matisse, 1935

[from the translation by Robert Fitzgerald]

"Now by my life, mankind again! But who?
Savages, are they, strangers to courtesy?
Or gentle folk, who know and fear the gods?"

Odysseus is awakened by the sound of shouts from Nausicaa and her maids. His first thought: savages, or gentle folk?

We'll find this anxiety – friend or foe? – reiterated throughout the semester, whether in More's Utopia, Montaigne's essays, Shakespeare's Tempest, Defoe's Crusoe, Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Cook's voyages, Coleridge's Rime, Bishop's poems, or Coetzee's Foe. 

Day 5, Book 5

Shakespeare's contemporary George Chapman's (1559–1634) translation of The Odyssey celebrates its (likely) 400th anniversary this year (1614–15). He writes in rhyming iambic pentameter lines, known as heroic couplets. 

Chapman takes lovely liberties with Homer, elaborating upon images, even adding his own indirect commentary on occasion. Listen to his version of Athena's complaint on behalf of Odysseus, left on "an island suffering strong pains" (Lattimore 13):

Thralld in an Iland, shipwrackt in his teares (Chapman 23)

Shipwrecked in his tears! The island that holds him in thrall sounds like it is almost an island of his own making, isolated by  the flood of his own sorrow – or, as Chapman later puts it, "drowned in discontent" (201).

The generalist critic George Steiner characterizes this translation as "spendthrift, inebriate with waste motion, at times precious and as yet uncertain of its coruscating force."

There is much to marvel at here – the complicated dialogue between Odysseus and Calypso, where he must flatter her ageless beauty while reaffirming his desire to return to Penelope; the careful construction of the raft; Poseidon's storm; Odysseus' near-drowning; the pity Ino feels for Odysseus; another wave that finally impels Odysseus to leave the wreckage of his ship to go "wrestling with the sable seas" (505); his ultimate collapse upon the "unhop't for shore" (538). Throughout, Chapman emulates and amplifies Homer's mimesis of the action. 

Day 4, Book 4

[back to the Lattimore translation]

What a tender pause Menelaos makes, out of respect for Telemachos' tears:

He spoke, and stirred in the other the longing to weep for his father,
and the tears fell from his eyes to the ground when he heard his father's
name, holding with both hands the robe that was stained with purple
up before his eyes. And Menelaos perceived it,
and now he pondered two ways within, in mind and in spirit
whether he would leave it to him to name his father,
or whether he should speak first and ask and inquire about everything. (113–19)

"craftiness" (251): another word for Odysseus' "wiliness," or "resourcefulness." In "The Iliad," this comes across rather less favorably, more like "scheming," especially in contrast to Achilles' valor. But here, in a narrative beset by catastrophes, it seems more apt, and more laudable.

Menelaos relates a fascinating anecdote about how Helen circled the wooden horse, calling out the names of the Greek soldiers, even emulating "the voice of the wife of each of the Argives" (279). Odysseus, too, will try on different 'voices' throughout the poem, including pseudonyms.

385ff: Menelaos' tale of wrestling knowledge from Proteus.

Giulio Bonasone, 1555, "Menelaus Binding Proteus"

625ff: "meanwhile before the palace of Odysseus the suitors / amused themselves . . ." A kind of cinematic moment here, as we are presented with a simultaneous scene in another location: Antinoos plots an ambush for Telemachus' return.

810ff: Penelope's lament, to the dreamed-induced image of her sister, anticipates the piteous letter that Roman poet Ovid crafts for the voice of Penelope in his Heroides.

An interlude on our theme of 'islands,' by physicist Marcelo Gleiser:

So, the image of an island captures our struggle to make sense of things, surrounded by an ocean of the unknown. As the island grows, so do the shores of our ignorance: as we learn more about the world we are able to ask questions we couldn't have anticipated before.

Day 3, Book 3

"There was a tale, old soldier, so well told" (372). Being able to weave a captivating story is highly prized in this poem. Indeed, one of the characteristics of Odysseus, as we will later find, is his facility with telling tales (whether fictive or true). 

Telemachus' confidence in speaking serves as yet another sign his father's legacy. As Nestor marvels: "Your father, yes, if you are in fact his son . . . / I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me. / Your way with words – it's just like his – I'd swear / no youngster could ever speak like you, so apt, so telling" (137–40). 

And yet, Telemachus initially conveys deep hesitancy about his speech, confessing to Mentor(/Athena): "How can I greet him, Mentor, even approach the king? / I'm hardly adept at subtle conversation" (24–25).

(Recall Moses' similar hesitation at the call to approach Pharoah:

And Moses saide vnto the Lord, O my lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken vnto thy seruant: but I am slow [kaved] of speach, and of a slow tongue. (Exodus 4:10; 1611 KJV)

Did Moses have some kind of speech impediment (a stutter)? Was he simply reluctant to take on this enormous task? Was he divinely assisted? Or did he not know he could do it until he made himself do it?)

 Attic red figure pelike vase, 510 - 500 BC.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 

The counter-model of the vengeful Orestes keeps haunting Telemachus: "Ah, how fine it is, when a man is brought down, / to leave a son behind . . . And you, my friend – / how tall and handsome I see you now – be brave, you too, / so men will sing your praises down the years" (222–23; 225–27).

Day 2, Book 2

A few comments, drawn from the Fagles translation – a bit more stylistically loose, or rough, than the Lattimore cited for Book 1.

48: "No, the crisis is my own." Telemachus curtly proclaiming to the assembly that the absence of his father and, the "worse disaster," the brazenness of the suitors, are what impel him to address them. 

91–122: the insolent Antinous (wouldn't you like to see him get his comeuppance?) sneers at Penelope's stratagem of delay, the daily weaving and then nightly unweaving of the "shroud for old lord Laertes" until they "caught her in the act – unweaving her gorgeous web." There are many classical instances of a women using a domestic practice as a vehicle for resistance. According to the great critic Geoffrey Hartman,

Edward Burne-Jones, "Philomene" (1896).

Aristotle, in the Poetics (16.4), records a striking phrase from a play by Sophocles, since lost, on the theme of Tereus and Philomela. As you know, Tereus, having raped Philomela, cut out her tongue to prevent discovery. But she weaves a telltale account of her violation into a tapestry (or robe) which Sophocles calls "the voice of the shuttle." If metaphors as well as plots or myths could be archetypal, I would nominate Sophocles' voice of the shuttle for that distinction.

178: being skilled at "reading bird signs" vs. the skepticism that "not all are fraught with meaning" (204). Throughout the epic, there are many portents from the gods, some more ambiguous than others. They are sometimes misread, ignored, denied. Usually, we (as listeners) know whether these signs and wonders are genuine, which gives us an ironic superiority in knowledge over some of the characters within the poem itself. 

250: "Mentor took the floor." 'Mentor' starts here as a character, and by the 18th century becomes what's called an 'eponym' – a noun formed after the name of a person (a 'mentor'). See the Online Etymology Dictionary:

mentor (n)

"wise advisor," 1750, from Greek Mentor, friend of Odysseus and adviser of Telemachus (but often actually Athene in disguise) in the "Odyssey," perhaps ultimately meaning "adviser," because the name appears to be an agent noun of mentos "intent, purpose, spirit, passion" from PIE *mon-eyo- (cognates: Sanskrit man-tar- "one who thinks," Latin mon-i-tor "one who admonishes"), causative form of root *men- "to think" (see mind (n.)). The general use of the word probably is via later popular romances, in which Mentor played a larger part than he does in Homer.

306–13: So how can your journey end in shipwreck or defeat?

Only if you were not his stock, Penelope's too,

then I'd fear your hopes might come to grief. 

Few sons are the equals of their fathers; 

most fall short, all too few surpass them.

But you, brave and adept from this day on —

Odysseus' cunning has hardly given out in you —

there's every hope that you will reach your goal.

"Your goal" is both a geographical destination as well as a kind of 'telos,' the ultimate 'goal' or 'end' of Telemachus' development into a man, a man worthy of being the son of Odysseus. In a way, his paternity (think back to Book 1) will be proven by his own performance. 

378: [wine] waiting the day

Odysseus, worn by hardship, might come home again.

What do you make of Telemachus drawing this wine reserved for his father's homecoming? Premature? Prolepsis? 

468–71: Suddenly wind hit full and the canvas bellied out

and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow,

sang out loud and strong as the ship made way,

skimming across the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.

And with that lyricism, we have launched. At last.

24 books in 24 days

I've challenged my humanities students to commit to (re)reading Homer's Odyssey, slowly and pensively. It's a foundational narrative for our seminar on islands, shipwrecks and disasters.  

Book 1 commences with an Olympian debate, while Odysseus' tormentor Poseidon happens to be away in Ethiopia. Athene makes her way to Ithaka, to spur on Odysseus' son, Telemachos. Where's Odysseus? "detained" by the nymph Kalypso (although in some post-Homeric accounts, Odysseus is rather less "unwilling," as he fathers children by her!). In fact, these first few books are sometimes characterized as "The Telemachy," since they concentrate on this young (approximately your age) man's "heart grieving deep within him" (114). His life is overshadowed by his father's absent but looming legacy. (It's also overshadowed by the example of a righteously vengeful son, Orestes.) The ever-present obligation of hospitality, so rudely abused by the suitors ("eating up my substance" 250), is rightly extended by the "thoughtful" Telemachos to Mentes(/Athene). 

There's much to be said about long-suffering Penelope, who is introduced at the close of the book. The purpose of lyric – and of artistic creation more generally (including this very poem) – is self-reflexively staged through her disagreement with her son about "this sad / song" (340–41).

My favorite lines: "My mother says that indeed I am his. I for my part / do not know. Nobody really knows his own father" (215–16). In part, Telemachos is simply repeating a truism, invoked in a debate about Shakespeare in James Joyce's Ulysses (itself a retelling of the Odyssey, set in modern-day Dublin): "A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil . . . Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?"

On a deeper, less forensic level, Telemachos is taking a factual statement (about the father who has literally been absent for two decades) and spinning it into a philosophical meditation: can one really ever know one's parents? As Telemachos sets off in search of his father, this journey will also, predictably, entail a search for himself as he is coming into adulthood. He, too, will need to depart his island home before he can return to it, no longer stuck in stasis. 

(In these notes, I cite  the Lattimore translation.)