A Magnificent Saga

Title Page

Copyright

Note

Epigraph

Introduction

Preface

BOOK I: WHAT WENT ON IN THE HOUSE OF ODYSSEUS

BOOK II: HOW THE COUNCIL MET IN THE MARKETPLACE OF ITHACA; AND WHAT CAME OF IT

BOOK III: WHAT HAPPENED IN SANDY PYLOS

BOOK IV: WHAT HAPPENED IN LACEDAIMON

BOOK V: HERMÊS IS SENT TO CALYPSO’S ISLAND; ODYSSEUS MAKES A RAFT AND IS CARRIED TO THE COAST OF SCHERIA

BOOK VI: HOW ODYSSEUS APPEALED TO NAUSICAÄ, AND SHE BROUGHT HIM TO HER FATHER’S HOUSE

BOOK VII: WHAT HAPPENED TO ODYSSEUS IN THE PALACE OF ALCINOÖS

BOOK VIII: HOW THEY HELD GAMES AND SPORTS IN PHAIACIA

BOOK IX: HOW ODYSSEUS VISITED THE LOTUS-EATERS AND THE CYCLOPS

BOOK X: THE ISLAND OF THE WINDS; THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN; CIRCÊ

BOOK XI: HOW ODYSSEUS VISITED THE KINGDOM OF THE DEAD

BOOK XII: THE SINGING SIRENS, AND THE TERRORS OF SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

BOOK XIII: HOW ODYSSEUS CAME TO ITHACA

BOOK XIV: ODYSSEUS AND THE SWINEHERD

BOOK XV: HOW TELEMACHOS SAILED BACK TO ITHACA

BOOK XVI: HOW TELEMACHOS MET HIS FATHER

BOOK XVII: HOW ODYSSEUS RETURNED TO HIS OWN HOME

BOOK XVIII: HOW ODYSSEUS FOUGHT THE STURDY BEGGAR

BOOK XIX: HOW THE OLD NURSE KNEW HER MASTER

BOOK XX: HOW GOD SENT OMENS OF THE WRATH TO COME

BOOK XXI: THE CONTEST WITH THE GREAT BOW

BOOK XXII: THE BATTLE IN THE HALL

BOOK XXIII: HOW ODYSSEUS FOUND HIS WIFE AGAIN

BOOK XXIV: HOW ODYSSEUS FOUND HIS OLD FATHER, AND HOW THE STORY ENDED

Afterword

I have to thank several friends for reading and commenting upon certain parts of this translation; and particularly Miss A. M. Croft, B.A., whose help has been indispensable.

Four Books were published in the New English Weekly (1935), for which I thank the Editor, Mr. P. Mairet.

To guard against possible mistakes I add that the translation was made before T. E. Lawrence’s Odyssey was published. Whenever I was in doubt as to the meaning I consulted the scholiasts, Merry and Riddell and Munro for the Odyssey, Walter Leaf for the Iliad, and the most careful and exact translation I know, that of A. T. Murray in the Loeb Library, to all of whom I return my sincere thanks.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

—JOHN KEATS

HOMER’S ODYSSEY TELLS A SIMPLE AND FAMILIAR STORY: the return of a hero, a veteran of the Trojan War, who has spent ten trial-filled years wandering in exotic lands. Arriving at last in his homeland, Ithaca, he finds that domestic and community affairs have gone badly wrong in his absence. His wife, Penelopeia, is surrounded by aggressive suitors who presume her husband has perished abroad; his son, Telemachos, on the brink of manhood, lacks the authority to expel these unruly interlopers, who are eating him out of house and home. In this power vacuum, where lowly swineherds and housekeepers try to fill the roles vacated by their masters, Odysseus, slowly and painfully, begins to recover his position as master of his household and patrimony. Using first guile, and then force, he ultimately takes vengeance on those who are seeking to displace him, restores his household and reclaims his wife.

If the story is simple, Homer’s narrative is brilliantly complex. Its opening is a notorious tease, a deliberate play on audience expectations and a taste of what this convention-breaking song will offer. The poem’s first line springs a double surprise: where Homer’s Iliad, the predecessor and countermodel to the Odyssey, begins by announcing in resounding fashion both the name of its protagonist, “Achillês, son of Peleus,” and the prime mover of its story—the cosmic wrath that drives Achillês to destroy his nearest and dearest, and himself too—the second composition tells us only that it is about a man, “one who was never at a loss.” From the outset then, Odysseus is a hero with a difference; alone among those celebrated in epic by the ancient bards, he allows himself to remain incognito, and the suppression of his identity proves key to his resourceful nature and survival. It will be nine books before Odysseus declares who he is and the source of his renown: no Achillês-like rage or battle prowess, but a “readiness for any event.”

Nor do the novelties end there. Our poet has a supremely compelling story to tell: Odysseus’ adventures on his journey home include encounters with the one-eyed cannibal Polyphemos and a visit to a land where the mind-altering lotus is the food of choice: fresh dangers come in the form of the drug-dealing Circê, whose potions turn Odysseus’ crew into swine, a visit to the land of the dead, singers whose voices are so alluring that seafarers linger to listen until their bones rot, and battles with sea-swallowing monsters. But instead of leading with these famous episodes, which Homer’s audience would have been expecting, for the first four books of the poem, the poet says nothing of the travels that make Odysseus a paradigm for contemporary Greeks embarking on their first colonizing ventures. Instead we accompany Telemachos, a somewhat backward youth, on his own mini-odyssey; roused from inaction by a visit from his father’s patron goddess, Athena, he sets out to discover news of Odysseus, visiting veterans of the Trojan War in the hope of learning whether his father is alive or dead. In postponing the main event, the poet knows exactly what he is about. For a hero whose best hope of salvation depends on his remaining unknown, an oblique introduction is required, and we, members like Telemachos of the post-heroic age, must encounter Odysseus indirectly before meeting him face-to-face.

As we realize later on, Telemachos’ seemingly low-key journey also proves a dress rehearsal, in which the son’s experiences hold up a mirror to those that his father, in the poem’s multilayered chronology, simultaneously undergoes. Here too Homer flirts with audience expectations, making us think ourselves embarked on a typical coming-of-age story, where a young man achieves manhood and a sense of who he is by virtue of the ancient equivalent of a Grand Tour and his initiation into family lore. But ultimately the poet discards this first trajectory: were Telemachos fully to join the rank of heroes, what role would be left for his father? The Odyssey charts no Oedipal struggle in which the son displaces the paternal figure (although the poet occasionally nods toward that scenario); instead, when father and son do find each other in the poem’s second half, the youth gamely consents to play second fiddle to his illustrious progenitor.

The master story resumes in book V, when Athena engineers our hero’s release from the nymph Calypso’s too warm attentions (not for nothing does her name mean “the concealer”). Within this larger narrative, a smaller one is inscribed. Washed up naked and destitute on the island of the Phaiacians, Odysseus is rescued by another seductive and nubile maiden, and treated to the choicest hospitality in a land whose luxuries would have answered to the fantasies of the elite among the poet’s audience. But there is something sinister about the entertainment the Phaiacians supply, and when Odysseus inserts his own story into the poet’s larger tale in books IX-XII, bringing us up to the point at which Homer began his song, he designs his narrative as a warning to his hosts. As the adventures he relates demonstrate, two criteria distinguish good hosts from bad: poor hospitality means feeding off your guest (instead of treating him to a meal) and/or detaining him against his will. Fortunately the Phaiacian king, Alcinous, understands the message. After hearing the spellbinding story of the hero, whose compositional powers equal those of a poet and whose audience responds with all the generosity the ancient singer would hope to receive, the king completes the duties of the ancient host: where a stranger’s arrival demands the provision of a bath, food and maybe some clean clothes, departure requires gifts and conveyance home. The Phaiacians come up trumps: their magical, self-propelled ships can travel in wintertime, when no real-world Greek would risk seafaring, and they deposit the sleeping Odysseus on his native shore when hibernal cold still holds the site in frozen inactivity. The chronology and nature of the hero’s homecoming shows Homer’s novelistic skill and the archetypal nature of his story. Odysseus’ recovery of his home and kingdom will coincide with the springtime season of renewal, and his passage back to reality from the supernatural realm—this encompassing all Odysseus’ experiences after leaving Troy and including his sojourn in Phaiacia, a halfway house mingling fairy tale elements with details familiar to those acquainted with actual Greek colonies—occurs in the unconsciousness of sleep.

Like all good storytellers, Homer then seals off his magical world. When we last glimpse the Phaiacians, Poseidon, whose wrath against Odysseus stems from the hero’s blinding of his son Polyphemos, has turned their ship to stone and threatens to cover their...