essay about homer

The Greek poet Homer is credited with being the first to write down the epic stories of 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' and the impact of his tales continues to reverberate through Western culture.

Who Was Homer?

The Greek poet Homer was born sometime between the 12th and 8th centuries BC, possibly somewhere on the coast of Asia Minor. He is famous for the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey , which have had an enormous effect on Western culture, but very little is known about their alleged author.

The Mystery of Homer

Homer is a mystery. The Greek epic poet credited with the enduring epic tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey is an enigma insofar as actual facts of his life go. Some scholars believe him to be one man; others think these iconic stories were created by a group. A variation on the group idea stems from the fact that storytelling was an oral tradition and Homer compiled the stories, then recited them to memory.

Homer’s style, whoever he was, falls more in the category of minstrel poet or balladeer, as opposed to a cultivated poet who is the product of a fervent literary moment, such as a Virgil or a Shakespeare. The stories have repetitive elements, almost like a chorus or refrain, which suggests a musical element. However, Homer’s works are designated as epic rather than lyric poetry, which was originally recited with a lyre in hand, much in the same vein as spoken-word performances.

All this speculation about who he was has inevitably led to what is known as the Homeric Question—whether he actually existed at all. This is often considered to be the greatest literary mystery.

When Was Homer Born?

Much speculation surrounds when Homer was born because of the dearth of real information about him. Guesses at his birth date range from 750 BC all the way back to 1200 BC, the latter because The Iliad encompasses the story of the Trojan War, so some scholars have thought it fit to put the poet and chronicler nearer to the time of that actual event. But others believe the poetic style of his work indicates a much later period. Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), often called the father of history, placed Homer several centuries before himself, around 850 BC.

Part of the problem is that Homer lived before a chronological dating system was in place. The Olympic Games of classical Greece marked an epoch, with 776 BC as a starting point by which to measure out four-year periods for the event. In short, it is difficult to give someone a birth date when he was born before there was a calendar.

Where Was Homer Born?

Once again, the exact location of Homer’s birth cannot be pinpointed, although that doesn't stop scholars from trying. It has been identified as Ionia, Smyrna or, at any rate, on the coast of Asia Minor or the island of Chios. But seven cities lay claim to Homer as their native son.

There is some basis for some of these claims, however. The dialect that The Iliad and The Odyssey are written in is considered Asiatic Greek, specifically Ionic. That fact, paired with frequent mentions of local phenomena such as strong winds blowing from the northwest from the direction of Thrace, suggests, scholars feel, a familiarity with that region that could only mean Homer came from there.

The dialect helps narrow down his lifespan by coinciding it with the development and usage of language in general, but The Iliad and The Odyssey were so popular that this particular dialect became the norm for much of Greek literature going forward.

What Was Homer Like?

Virtually every biographical aspect ascribed to Homer is derived entirely from his poems. Homer is thought to have been blind, based solely on a character in The Odyssey , a blind poet/minstrel called Demodokos. A long disquisition on how Demodokos was welcomed into a gathering and regaled the audience with music and epic tales of conflict and heroes to much praise has been interpreted as Homer’s hint as to what his own life was like. As a result, many busts and statues have been carved of Homer with thick curly hair and beard and sightless eyes.

“Homer and Sophocles saw clearly, felt keenly, and refrained from much,” wrote Lane Cooper in The Greek Genius and Its Influence: Select Essays and Extracts in 1917, ascribing an emotional life to the writer. But he wasn't the first, nor was he the last. Countless attempts to recreate the life and personality of the author from the content of his epic poems have occupied writers for centuries.

'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey'

The Odyssey picks up after the fall of Troy. Further controversy about authorship springs from the differing styles of the two long narrative poems, indicating they were composed a century apart, while other historians claim only decades –the more formal structure of The Iliad is attributed to a poet at the height of his powers, whereas the more colloquial, novelistic approach in The Odyssey is attributed to an elderly Homer.

Homer enriched his descriptive story with the liberal use of simile and metaphor, which has inspired a long path of writers behind him. His structuring device was to start in the middle– in medias res – and then fill in the missing information via remembrances.

The two narrative poems pop up throughout modern literature: Homer’s The Odyssey has parallels in James Joyce’s Ulysses , and his tale of Achilles in The Iliad is echoed in J.R.R. Tolkien 's The Fall of Gondolin . Even the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? makes use of The Odyssey .

Other works have been attributed to Homer over the centuries, most notably the Homeric Hymns , but in the end, only the two epic works remain enduringly his.

"Plato tells us that in his time many believed that Homer was the educator of all Greece. Since then, Homer’s influence has spread far beyond the frontiers of Hellas [Greece]….” wrote Werner Jaeger in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture . He was right. The Iliad and The Odyssey have provided not only seeds but fertilizer for almost all the other arts and sciences in Western culture. For the Greeks, Homer was a godfather of their national culture, chronicling its mythology and collective memory in rich rhythmic tales that have permeated the collective imagination.

Homer’s real life may remain a mystery, but the very real impact of his works continues to illuminate our world today.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Homer
• Birth Year: 800
• Birth Country: Greece
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: The Greek poet Homer is credited with being the first to write down the epic stories of 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' and the impact of his tales continues to reverberate through Western culture.
• Fiction and Poetry
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• Death Year: 701
• Death Country: Greece

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• Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
• Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other's good, and melt at other's woe.
• Light is the task where many share the toil.

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The Life and Work of Homer

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Homer was the most important and earliest of the Greek and Roman writers. Greeks and Romans didn't count themselves educated unless they knew his poems. His influence was felt not only on literature but on ethics and morality via lessons from his masterpieces. He is the first source to look for information on Greek myth and religion. Yet, despite his prominence, we have no firm evidence that he ever lived.

" Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealing and adulteries and deceiving on one another. " —Xenophanes (a Pre-Socratic philosopher)

The Life of the Blind Bard

Because Homer performed and sang he is called a bard. He is thought to have been blind, and so is known as the blind bard, just as Shakespeare, calling on the same tradition, is known as the bard of Avon.

The name "Homer," which is an unusual one for the time, is thought to mean either "blind" or "captive". If "blind," it may have to do more with the portrayal of the Odyssean blind bard called Phemios than the poem's composer.

Homer's Birthplaces and Date

There are multiple cities in the ancient Greek world that lay the prestigious claim of being the birthplace of Homer. Smyrna is one of the most popular, but Chios, Cyme, Ios, Argos, and Athens are all in the running. The Aeolian cities of Asia Minor are most popular; outliers include Ithaca and Salamis.

Plutarch provides a choice of Salamis, Cyme, Ios, Colophon, Thessaly, Smyrna, Thebes , Chios, Argos, and Athens, according to a table showing ancient authors who provided biographical information on Homer, in "Lives of Homer (Continued)," by T. W. Allen; The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Vol. 33, (1913), pp. 19-26. Homer's death is less controversial, Ios being the overwhelming favorite.

Since it's not even clear that Homer lived, and since we don't have a fix on the location, it should come as no surprise that we don't know when he was born. He is generally considered to have come before Hesiod. Some thought him a contemporary of Midas (Certamen).

Homer is said to have had two daughters (generally, the symbolic ones of the Iliad and the Odyssey ), and no sons, according to West [citation below], so the Homeridai, who are referred to as Homer's followers and rhapsodes themselves, can't really claim to be descendants, although the idea has been entertained.

The Trojan War

Homer's name will always be linked with the Trojan War because Homer wrote about the conflict between Greeks and Trojans, known as the Trojan War, and the return voyages of the Greek leaders. He is credited with telling the whole story of the Trojan War, but that is false. There were plenty of other writers of what is called the "epic cycle" who contributed details not found in Homer.

Homer and the Epic

Homer is the first and greatest writer of the Greek literary form known as epic and so it's in his work that people look for information about the poetic form. Epic was more than a monumental story, although it was that. Since bards sang stories from memory, they needed and used many helpfully mnemonic, rhythmic, poetic techniques that we find in Homer. Epic poetry was composed using a rigorous format. 

Major Works Credited to Homer - Some in Error

Even if the name isn't his, a figure we think of as Homer is considered by many to be the writer of the Iliad , and possibly the Odyssey , although there are stylistic reasons, like inconsistencies, to debate whether one person wrote both. An inconsistency that resonates for me is that Odysseus uses a spear in The Iliad , but is an extraordinary archer in the Odyssey . He even describes his bow prowess demonstrated at Troy [source: "Notes on the Trojan War ," by Thomas D. Seymour, TAPhA 1900, p. 88.].

Homer is sometimes credited, although less credibly, with the Homeric Hymns . Currently, scholars think these must have been written more recently than the Early Archaic period (aka the Greek Renaissance), which is the era in which the greatest Greek epic poet is thought to have lived.

• Homeric Hymns

Homer's Major Characters

In Homer's Iliad , the lead character is the quintessential Greek hero, Achilles. The epic states that it is the story of the wrath of Achilles. Other important characters of the Iliad are the leaders of the Greek and Trojan sides in the Trojan War, and the highly partisan, human-seeming gods and goddesses—the deathless ones.

In The Odyssey , the lead character is the title character, the wily Odysseus. Other major characters include the family of the hero and the goddess Athena.

Perspective

Although Homer is thought to have lived in the early Archaic Age, the subject matter of his epics is the earlier, Bronze Age , Mycenaean era. Between then and when Homer may have lived there was a "dark age." Therefore Homer is writing about a period about which there is not a substantial written record. His epics give us a glimpse of this earlier life and social hierarchy, although it is important to realize that Homer is a product of his own times, when the polis (city-state) was beginning, as well as the mouthpiece for stories handed down the generations, and so details may not be true to the era of the Trojan War.

The Voice of the World

In his poem, "The Voice of the World," the 2nd-century Greek poet Antipater of Sidon, best known for writing about the Seven Wonders (of the ancient world), praises Homer to the skies, as can be seen in this public domain translation from the Greek Anthology:

" The herald of the prowess of heroes and the interpreter of the immortals, a second sun on the life of Greece, Homer, the light of the Muses, the ageless mouth of all the world, lies hid, O stranger, under the sea-washed sand. "

• "'Reading' Homer through Oral Tradition," by John Miles Foley;  College Literature , Vol. 34, No. 2, Reading Homer in the 21st Century (Spring, 2007).
• The Invention of Homer, by M. L. West;  The Classical Quarterly , New Series, Vol. 49, No. 2 (1999), pp. 364-382.
• Greek Gods, Myths, and Legends
• List of Characters in 'The Iliad'
• 'The Odyssey' Overview
• Who Is Who in Greek Legend
• Ancient/Classical History Study Guides
• Biography of Helen of Troy, Cause of the Trojan War
• Table of Roman Equivalents of Greek Gods
• Answers to FAQs About the Trojan War
• Understanding the Achaeans That Are Mentioned in Homer's Epics
• Ulysses (Odysseus)
• Most Important Figures in Ancient History
• The Major Events in the Trojan War
• Overview of the Archaic Age of Ancient Greek History
• The Genre of Epic Literature and Poetry
• Who Was Andromache?

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Editorial and production teams, the mast project, picturing homer as a cult hero.

2024.05.28, rewritten from Classical Inquiries 2016.03.03 | By Gregory Nagy

This pre-edited standalone essay, rewritten for online publication in Classical Continuum , originally appeared in Classical Inquiries 2016.03.03. My rewritten version here supersedes the original version, partly because my online contributions to Classical Inquiries , extending from 2015.02.14 to 2021.10.13, are currently not being curated by the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Introduction

§0.1. This essay centers on a bronze statue of a head, dated somewhere between 227 and 221 BCE. The bronze head was on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the context of a grand exhibition at the National Gallery, titled “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” and extending from December 13, 2015, to March 20, 2016. Together with Gloria Ferrari Pinney and Faya Causey, I was involved as a co-organizer of two public events focusing on two aspects of the exhibition. These events were panel discussions of two topics:

February 18, 2016: “A priestess or a goddess: The problem of identity in some female Hellenistic sculptures.”

February 25, 2016: “A poet or a god: The iconography of certain bearded male bronzes.”

About these two events I refer to overall reports, originally published in Classical Inquiries , by Keith DeStone, and now rewritten by him here:

https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/harvards-center-for-hellenic-studies-and-the-national-gallery-of-art-collaborate-to-shine-light-on-ancient-greek-bronzes-part-1-ed1/

https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/harvards-center-for-hellenic-studies-and-the-national-gallery-of-art-collaborate-to-shine-light-on-ancient-greek-bronzes-part-2-ed2/

At the second of the two events cited here, my friend Gloria Ferrari Pinney—hereafter I refer to her, in honor of our friendship, simply as Gloria—argued that the bronze head on loan from Houston is a representation of Homer. At the same event, I too offered supporting arguments, which were first published in my original essay of 2016.03.03 in Classical Inquires . As I now rewrite my essay, I must start by noting, with deep regret, the untimely death of Gloria in 2023.09.18, which now leaves me with the sad task of trying to sustain the essence of her argumentation without the benefit of any further consultation with her. I fear I can do no better than restate, as faithfully as possible, my memories of what Gloria had said about the bronze head in 2016.02.25. Taking my lead from what she did say, I will argue here that this bronze Homer—if indeed he is Homer, as I think he must be—is in this case imagined not only as the greatest of all poets but also as a cult hero.

§0.2. An essential aspect of GFP’s argument is the fact that the Houston bronze head resembles closely the head of the god Zeus himself as represented in statues and coins. In terms of this argument, Homer is figured as the greatest poet of the ancient Greeks just as Zeus is figured as their greatest god.

§0.3. There is further evidence, as Gloria shows, for the artistic construct of such a resemblance between Homer and Zeus. A most telling example is a marble monument known as the Arkhelaos Relief, conventionally dated to the second century BCE. The lower zone of the relief sculpture shows an enthroned Homer receiving sacrificial offerings while the upper zone shows Zeus himself, holding a scepter. Similarly, Homer holds a scepter, which is in his left hand. Also, he holds a scroll in his right hand. There is no mistake about the identification of Homer here, since the Arkhelaos Relief features adjacent lettering that reads ΟΜΗΡΟΣ ( Homēros ). We see comparable representations of an enthroned Homer as pictured on two coins, one from the city-state of Smyrna, reputed to be the place where he was born, and another from the island-state of Ios, where he was supposedly conceived—and where he died.

Smyrna, 190-130 BCE. Pictured is the poet Homer, seated and holding a staff and a scroll. ΣΜΥΡΝΑΙΩΝ = ‘of the people of Smyrna’. Named is a magistrate, AXIΛΛHTOΣ [A]XIΛΛHTO[Υ] = ‘Akhilletos, son of Akhilletos’. Pictured on the other side of the coin is the laureate head of Apollo. Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com

Ios, 4th century BCE. British Museum number 1951,1007.8. Obverse: pictured is the bearded head of Homer, bound with a fillet; inscription OMHPOY = ‘of Homer’. Reverse: g arland; inscription IHTΩN = ‘of the people of Ios’.

Picturing Homer as blind or as sighted

§1. As Gloria Pinney argues, the artistic construct of such a resemblance between Homer and Zeus comes with a requirement: Homer must be pictured as sighted, not blind. If Homer is to be compared to Zeus, he cannot be deformed by blindness, since the greatest of all gods must surely be exempt from such deformity.

§2. But there are well-known examples of an alternative artistic construct that features Homer as blind, and this construct is amply attested in the visual arts. Further, such an artistic construct of a blind Homer matches what we read in the stories produced by the verbal arts of mythmaking about Homer’s life. In those stories as I analyzed them in an essay dated 2016.02.25 and, in an earlier essay dated 2016.02.18 , Homer in various different ways becomes a blind man in the course of his life. So, the question arises: what is the difference between a blind Homer and a sighted Homer?

§3. If we follow the logic of the artistic construct that we see at work in the Arkhelaos Relief, the enthroned Homer as pictured in that relief must surely be situated in a state of existence that follows his death. In other words, Homer now exists in an afterlife. That is why the Arkhelaos Relief has been thought to represent what is called the “apotheosis” of Homer: it is as if the greatest of poets had now become a theos or ‘god’, just as Zeus is a god. [1] And, in this transcendent state, Homer regains his vision. Here is a close-up of this transcendent Homer as represented in the Arkhelaos relief:

§4. I argue, however, that Homer in such a state of afterlife is not so much a god as he is a cult hero who looks like a god. Here I find it most useful to consult a book by W. H. D. Rouse on the iconography of votive offerings. [2] He collects images of cult heroes in the afterlife who are pictured as enthroned or reclining or engaged in other such poses. [3] In each case, as Rouse shows, the pose is matched by gods who are similarly engaged: in one particular case, Rouse describes the picturing of a reclining hero “with face approaching that of Zeus or Hades.” [4]

§5. Just as the enthroned Homer in the Arkhelaos relief receives sacrificial offerings from his worshippers, so also the enthroned cult heroes in the collection put together by Rouse are seen in the act of receiving offerings from their worshippers. Here is an example:

Bibliography Clay, D. 2004. Archilochos Heros: The Cult of Poets in the Greek Polis . Hellenic Studies 6. Cambridge, MA, and Washington, DC. H24H . See Nagy 2013. Nagy, G. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours . Cambridge, MA. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Ancient_Greek_Hero_in_24_Hours.2013 . Rouse, W. H. D. 1902. Greek Votive Offerings: An Essay in the History of Greek Religion . Cambridge.

Notes [1] For a brief history of this terminology, which also inspired the painting “L’Apothéose d’Homère” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1827), see Clay 2004:1. [2] Rouse 1902. [3] Rouse 1902:20, 34 (heroes enthroned); 22 (heroes reclining). [4] Rouse 1902:22.

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Archilochus, poet and cult hero.

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Picturing Archilochus as a cult hero

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On this coin, minted in the city-state of Smyrna, we see Homer seated on a throne, in the pose of…

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The ci poetry project, a question of “reception”: how could homer ever outlive his own moments of performance.

By Gregory Nagy

§0. In the cover illustration for this essay, a painter is picturing Homer at a moment of performance. Or, I could even say that we see Homer here in—not just at—a moment of performance. Homer sings, accompanying himself on his lyre. Viewing him and listening to him most attentively, in the imagination of our painter, are poets from Homer’s future “reception.” Most visible is old Dante himself, and, further away, we can spot a middle-aged Shakespeare, and, off to the side, a youngish Goethe is looking on. But these three canonical poets, representing the “reception” of Homer in future times far removed from the Homeric past, are not reading Homer here. No, they are pictured as actually hearing and even seeing that poet in a very special moment: they are witnessing Homer in the very act of his creating his own poetry. And that is actually how the ancient Greeks, in earlier periods of their prehistory and history, imagined Homer’s very own moments of poetic creation. In such earlier periods, Homer’s poetry-in-the-making was not a written text that was meant to be read. No, his poetry was an oral performance that was meant to be heard—and seen as well. In other words, the very idea of Homer in earlier periods of the ancient Greek world was linked to Homer’s oral performance, which was imagined as a composition-in-performance. But how could such a Homeric performance, as imagined in the ancient Greek world, outlive the life and times of a prototypical Homer? Or, to ask the question in a more fanciful way, how could Homer ever outlive his own moments of performance?

§1. Before I attempt to answer such a question, I must emphasize that the “reception” of Homer, grounded in the realities of ancient Greek history, was different from what is usually also called the “reception” of Homer in later times, when the poetry of Homer was no longer heard in oral performance. Contradicting the fantasy pictured by our painter, where canonical poets who lived in far later times could still get a chance to hear and to see an exquisite moment of composition-in-performance by Homer himself, the grim reality of Homeric “reception” in the poetic worlds of a Dante or a Shakespeare or a Goethe was a simple historical fact: the oral tradition of Homeric poetry was dead, and had been dead for a long time. In fact, Homeric oral poetry was already dying in the later periods of ancient Greek history. And, for the longest time by now, Homeric poetry has survived only as a written text to be read by its readers—sometimes in the original or, in most cases, in translations or in paraphrases. And here I return to my fanciful question: how, then, could Homer ever outlive his moments of in-person performance?

§2. Such a question, as I just posed it, can best be answered, I suggest, if we rethink the term “reception,” which I have so far been treating with indifference, isolating it within quotation-marks. As I have already suggested, however, a distinction needs to be made. For me, there are two different kinds of reception, and I will focus on the earlier kind. The later kind is all too familiar, corresponding to the use of the term reception in conventional literary criticism today, where it refers to the responses of readers to the written text of a given literary production. But here I introduce a different and defamiliarizing use of the term, focusing on an earlier kind of reception , referring to a “literary” production that is oral . In any given oral tradition of verbal art, the reception of this tradition by its audience—or, to say it better, by the society in which the oral tradition was generated—is not just incidental. It is essential. The reception of a textual tradition, if it gets neglected over time or even if it dies altogether, can still be brought back to life—however imperfectly—if any texts have survived. By contrast, death for the reception of an oral tradition signals death for such a tradition. An oral tradition cannot survive without reception. Even if some transcript of oral traditional performance survives, such a text cannot, of and by itself, bring back to life the structural realities of the oral tradition, and any new reception of such a text could now become simply a textual reception, even if the text imitates an oral performance or, better, serves as a script for such a would-be oral performance.

§3. With this distinction between oral and textual reception in place, I am ready to restate more clearly, I hope, an obvious historical fact: the oral reception of Homeric poetry is dead, and it died a very long time ago. But how long ago? It is difficult to give a precise answer, since only the textual reception survives, and it is only by studying the history of that reception that we have any hope of reconstructing, at least in broad outlines, the history of an earlier oral reception. 

§4. In two twin books I have produced on the subject of Homeric poetry, Homer the Classic (2009|2008) and Homer the Preclassic (2010|2009), I have attempted to reconstruct the overall reception of this poetry, going backward in time, and thus showing that the relatively later phases of Homeric reception became merely textual, while the earlier phases were still oral.

§5. In two earlier twin books on the same subject of Homeric poetry, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (1996a) and Homeric Questions (1996b), I had attempted a different kind of reconstruction, going forward as well as backward in time. This kind of two-way reconstructing was an exercise in describing the periodizations of Homeric poetry by way of applying modes of diachronic as well as synchronic analysis. When I say “synchronic” and “diachronic” here, I am following the terminology of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916:117), and I draw special attention to the fact that, for Saussure, “diachronic” was synonymous with “evolutionary.” Accordingly, in my two earlier twin-books, I referred to my reconstruction of Homeric periodizations as an “evolutionary model” for explaining the textual destiny of Homeric poetry.

§6. As I look back on my “evolutionary model” as outlined in Poetry as Performance (1996:110) and in Homeric Questions (1996b:42), I now see that some clarification is needed with regard to my thinking about what I call “period 3,” a time-frame that extends, by my reckoning, from the middle of the sixth century BCE to the later part of the fourth. In my overall reconstruction, covering five “periods” in the evolution of Homeric poetry, I view this “period 3” as transitional—to the extent that my model allows for the possibility that scribes within this time-frame could and perhaps did make copies or “transcripts” of Homeric poetry. But I emphasized, in this context, that the existence of such “transcripts” would not have killed the oral reception of this poetry.

§7. And here is where I need to make a more specific clarification, since my use of this word “transcript” in this context has been criticized as inconsistent. The criticism is made in a book by Jonathan L. Ready (2019), with whose work on Homeric poetry I generally agree. But here I must engage in some friendly disagreement concerning his relevant criticism (especially at his p. 178). Although I state, at one point ( Homeric Questions p. 65), that a transcript could be used “to record any given composition and to control the circumstances of any given performance ,” this statement does not contradict a more general statement I make at a later point ( Homeric Questions p. 67), where I speak not about a transcript used as a “control” but simply as “an aid to performance.” I see no inconsistency here, since my point all along (starting at Homeric Questions p. 65) was that a transcript could potentially be used as an aid to performance—but not necessarily so. As for the “aid,” it could take the form of actual “control” over content, but that kind of “aid” would be an extreme case, and I left room for an opposite extreme, that is, in cases where a transcript, even if it exists, is not used at all as any kind of “aid” for performance. Accordingly, I also see no inconsistency in another relevant statement I made in another publication (Nagy 2014:100), where I say that my use of the term transcript “makes it clear that a transcript has no influence on performance.” If this statement (as quoted by Ready p. 178) is taken out of context, then, yes, I would have to restate by saying “a transcript does not necessarily have any influence on performance,” but this same statement, if it were to be read in context, would make such a restatement unnecessary. When I was saying that a transcript, of and by itself, has “no influence” on performance, I was responding to a mis-statement of my views in the work of another Homerist, Minna Skafte Jensen (2011:217), with whom I otherwise also generally agree. In this case, I disagree with her claim that “Nagy’s hypothesis attributes to the written transmission features that are characteristic of oral composition and transmission.” Contesting this mis-statement, I went on to say (Nagy 2014:100): “In fact, my point is just the opposite: period 3 is a time of oral transmission, not written transmission, and that is why I use the word transcript with reference to any possibility of existing texts.” In the same context, Jensen (2011:217) refers to “the dogma concerning the interaction between the two media [that is, the medium of oral performance and the medium of writing a text].” I quote again from my response (Nagy 2014:100): “But I posit no such ‘interaction’, and that is the point of my using the term ‘transcript’.” Also, just as a “transcript” in period 3 does not necessarily influence the oral reception, the same can be said even about a “script,” in the later “period 4,” which I dated as extending from the later part of the fourth century BCE to the middle of the second. Even a “script,” though it could potentially exert more control over a given performance, would not necessarily interfere with the oral reception of Homeric poetry—at least, not in the long run.

§8. In terms of my evolutionary model of Homeric poetry, then, oral reception cannot be equated with textual reception. This model, however, is not all that far removed from a theory developed by researchers who share my interest in studying oral traditions by combining the disciplines of linguistics and anthropology. The theory can be summarized this way: oral performance can become an “oral text.” The very idea of such an “oral text”—which, to my mind at least, is simply a metaphor—is perhaps best expressed in the cross-cultural formulation of Karin Barber (2007:1–2), who describes such an “oral text” as an oral performance that is “woven together in order to attract attention and outlast the moment.” The theory of such an “oral text,” which Barber (again, pp. 1–2) describes as a process of “entextualization” (as an example of other such formulations, I cite Bauman and Briggs 1990:73), has been re-applied in a lengthy book by Jonathan L. Ready (2019) on Homeric “orality” and “textuality.” In this work of Ready, I highlight one particular formulation of his (p. 18): “So performers make an oral text: they impart textuality, the attributes of an utterance capable of outliving the moment, to a verbal act.” This formulation comes close to what I think is happening in Homeric reception: such reception, to borrow the wording of Ready, is “capable of outliving the moment.”  

§9. Such a mentality of “outliving the moment” in Homeric performance is encoded, I think, in the mythological framework of a literary form that I have described in earlier work as “Life of Homer” narratives. In the text of such “Lives” of Homer, Homeric poetry as oral performance is alive because Homer, the performer, is still alive. But how does such performance stay alive when Homer’s poetry is no longer performed by Homer? The answer, I think, is to be found in what the “Lives” actually narrate about Homer’s moments of performance.

§10. In a detailed article where I sum up my overall work on the “Lives” of Homer (Nagy 2015.12.18, linked here ), I offer a formula that can help explain why the genre of these “Lives” can keep Homer himself “alive” as the ultimate master of oral performance, just as the Provençal genre of the vida , as I showed in my previous essay for Classical Inquiries (2021.08.23, linked here ), can at least help keep alive the lives and times of a generic troubadour. In what follows, I epitomize the first ten paragraphs of the detailed article of mine that I have just cited, while leaving out the details that I have collected there:

§10.1. The article centers on the surviving texts of “Life of Homer” narrative traditions, to which I will refer hereafter simply as Lives of Homer:

I offer the following system for referring to these Lives, as printed by Allen 1912:

V1        = Vita Herodotea,  pp. 192–218 V2        =  Certamen,  pp. 225–238 V3a      = Plutarchean Vita,  pp. 238–244 V3b      = Plutarchean  Vita,  pp. 244–245 V4        =  Vita quarta,  pp. 245–246 V5        =  Vita quinta,  pp. 247–250 V6        =  Vita sexta  (the ‘Roman Life’), pp. 250–253 V7        =  Vita septima , by way of Eustathius, pp. 253–254 V8        =  Vita  by way of Tzetzes, pp. 254–255 V9        =  Vita  by way of Eustathius ( Iliad  IV17), p. 255 V10      =  Vita  by way of the  Suda,  pp. 256–268 V11      = Vita  by way of Proclus, pp. 99–102

These Lives, I argue, can be read as sources of historical information about the reception of Homeric poetry. The information is varied and layered, requiring diachronic as well as synchronic analysis (as always, I use these terms as defined by Saussure 1916:117).

§10.2. The Lives portray the reception of Homeric poetry by narrating a series of events featuring “live” performances by Homer himself. In the narratives of the Lives, Homeric composition is consistently being situated in contexts of oral performance. In effect, the Lives explore the shaping power of positive and even negative responses by the audiences of Homeric poetry in ad hoc situations of oral performance.

§10.3. The narrative strategy of each of the Lives can be described as a staging of Homer’s reception. This staging takes the form of narrating a wide variety of occasions for Homeric performance. A premier occasion, as we shall see, is what can best be described as a pan-Hellenic festival.

§10.4. The Lives of Homer, especially as represented by the Herodotean  Vita  (= ‘V1’) and by the  Certamen  (‘The Contest of Homer and Hesiod’ = ‘V2’), highlight the performances of Homer at pan-Hellenic festivals. The background for such highlighting is the overall pan-Hellenic significance of performing Homeric poetry. To appreciate more fully this significance, I concentrate on the testimony of the Lives concerning the reception of Homer in two areas: (1) the Aeolic and Ionic cities of Asia Minor and outlying islands, and (2) the island of Delos, retrospectively figured as the notional center of the future Athenian Empire.

§10.5. The reception of Homer in these two areas has to be understood in the context of the festivals where Homeric poetry was performed. Here I introduce the term “aetiology” as a way of backing up the point I have just made about these pan-Hellenic festivals as the premier occasion of Homeric performance. By “aetiology,” I mean a myth that directly motivates a ritual (Nagy 1999:279). And two most relevant examples of ritual in this case are (1) the very idea of a festival and (2) the more basic idea of a sacrifice.  Both ideas, sacrifice  and  festival , are conveyed by the Greek word  thusia , which means not only ‘sacrifice’ but also, metonymically, ‘festival’. The second meaning is clearly attested in Plato  Timaeus  26e, where  thusia actually refers to a pan-Hellenic festival: in this case, the referent is none other than the premier festival of Athens, the Panathenaia (Nagy 2002:83). In the days of Plato, it was on this occasion, the Feast of the Panathenaia, that the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey were  formally performed in Athens (Nagy 2002:9–22). I signal from the start the relevance of the Panathenaia and, more generally, of the word  thusia , to my overall argument.

§10.6. I argue that the Lives of Homer functioned as aetiologies for festive occasions where Homeric poetry was seasonally performed and that they must be viewed as myths, not historical facts, about Homer. To say that we are dealing with myths, however, is not at all to say that there is no history to be learned from the Lives. Even though the various Homers of the various Lives are evidently mythical constructs, the actual constructing of myths about Homer can be seen as historical fact (Nagy 1999:ix paragraph 7, with note). The claims made about Homer in the Lives can be analyzed as evidence for the various different ways in which Homeric poetry was appropriated by various different cultural and political centers throughout the ancient Greek-speaking world.

§10.7. Here I need to highlight again my main point about the Lives: all the claims about Homer, in all their varieties, specifically picture Homeric poetry as a medium of oral performance, featuring Homer himself as the master performer.

§10.8. For analyzing diachronically as well as synchronically the reception of Homer as reflected in the Lives, I propose to build a model for the periodization of this reception. Such a model needs to account for the accretive layering of narrative traditions contained within the final textual versions of these Lives. I posit three periods of ongoing reception: pre-Panathenaic, Panathenaic, and post-Panathenaic. By ‘post-Panathenaic’, I mean a period of Homeric reception marked by the usage of  graphein  ‘write’ in referring to Homer as an author. This usage needs to be distinguished from the usage of the Panathenaic and pre-Panathenaic periods, when Homer is said to  poieîn  ‘make’ whatever he composes, not to  graphein  ‘write’ it.

§10.9. The post-Panathenaic period is exemplified by sources like Plutarch and Pausanias, in whose writings Homer is already seen as an author who ‘writes’,  graphei , whatever he composes. I cite a few examples: Plutarch  De amore prolis  496d,  Quaestiones convivales  668d; Pausanias 3.24.11, 8.29.2. The Panathenaic period, by contrast, is exemplified by Plato and Aristotle, in whose writings we still see Homer as an artisan who ‘makes’,  poieî , and who is never pictured as one who ‘writes’,  graphei . For examples of expressions involving ‘Homer’ as the subject and  poieîn  as the verb of that subject, I start with Aristotle De anima 404a, Nicomachean Ethics 3.1116a and 7.1145a, De generatione animalium 785a, Poetics 1448a, Politics 3.1278a and 8.1338a, Rhetoric 1.1370b. I cite also Plato Phaedo 94d, Hippias Minor 371a, Republic 2.378d, Ion 531c–d. I note with special interest the usage, here in the Ion and elsewhere, of poiēsis as the inner object of poieîn . Of related interest are collocations of poieîn with generic ho poiētēs ‘the maker’ (= the Poet) as subject, referring by default to Homer: the many examples include Plato Republic 3.392e (ὁ ποιητής φησι) and Aristotle  De mundo  400a (ὥσπερ ἔφη καὶ ὁ ποιητής).

§10.10. I translate  poieîn  as ‘make’ in order to underline the fact that the direct object of this verb is not restricted to any particular product to be made by the subject—if the subject of the verb refers to an artisan. In other words, poieîn can convey the producing of any artifact as the product of any artisan. It is not restricted to the concept of the song / poem as artifact or of the songmaker / poet as artisan. To cite an early example: in Iliad 7.222, the artisan Tukhios epoiēsen ‘made’ the shield of Ajax. By contrast with the verb poieîn , the derivative nouns poiētēs and poiēsis are restricted, already in the earliest attestations, to the production of songs / poems. I stress the exclusion of artifacts other than songs / poems or of artisans other than songmakers / poets. The noun poiēma has likewise been restricted, though not completely; in the usage of Herodotus, for example, poiēma still designates artifacts other than song / poetry (1.25.1, 2.135.3, 4.5.3, 7.85.1). As for the compound noun formant ‑ poios , it is not at all restricted to song or to poetry.

§11. This Greek word poiēma , the earlier meaning of which is ‘artifact’ and the later meaning of which is simply ‘poem’, brings me back to the description, by Karin Barber (2007:1–2), of an “oral text” as an oral performance that is “woven together in order to attract attention and outlast the moment.” Barber’s metaphor, “woven together,” reminds me of the etymology of the word “text,” the metaphorical meaning of which is a “web” that is “woven” (Latin textus )—an artifact that is ever attracting attention, ever outlasting the moment.

Bibliography

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Nagy, G. 1979.  The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry.  Baltimore.  http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/nagy/BofATL/toc.html . Revised ed. with new introduction 1999,  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Best_of_the_Achaeans.1999 .

Nagy, G. 1990.  Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past . Baltimore.  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Pindars_Homer.1990 .

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Nagy, G. 2009. “Hesiod and the Ancient Biographical Traditions.”  The Brill Companion to Hesiod , ed. F. Montanari, A. Rengakos, and Ch. Tsagalis, 271–311. Leiden.  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Hesiod_and_the_Ancient_Biographical_Traditions.2009 .

Nagy, G. 2009|2008. Printed | Online version.  Homer the Classic . Hellenic Studies 36. Cambridge, MA, and Washington, DC.  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Classic.2008 .

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Nagy, G. 2010|2009. Printed | Online version.  Homer the Preclassic . Berkeley and Los Angeles.  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Preclassic.2009 .

Nagy, G. 2011a. “Diachrony and the Case of Aesop.”  Classics@ 9: Defense Mechanisms in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Classical Studies and Beyond.  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Diachrony_and_the_Case_of_Aesop.2011 .

Nagy, G. 2011b. “The Aeolic Component of Homeric Diction.”  Proceedings of the 22nd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference , ed. S. W. Jamison, H. C. Melchert, and B. Vine, 133–179. Bremen. In Nagy 2012 v1.  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.The_Aeolic_Component_of_Homeric_Diction.2011 .

Nagy, G. 2013.  The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours . Cambridge, MA.  http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Ancient_Greek_Hero_in_24_Hours.2013 .

Nagy, G. 2014. Review of Jensen 2011. Gnomon 86:97–101.

Nagy, G. 2015.12.18. “The Lives of Homer as Aetiologies for Homeric Poetry.” Classical Inquiries . https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/life-of-homer-myths-as-evidence-for-the-reception-of-homer/ .

Nagy, G. 2016| 2015.  Masterpieces of Metonymy: From Ancient Greek Times to Now . Hellenic Studies 72. Cambridge, MA, and Washington, DC.   http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Masterpieces_of_Metonymy.2015 .

Nagy, G. 2016.11.03. “Some jottings on the pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle.”  Classical Inquiries .  https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/some-jottings-on-the-pronouncements-of-the-delphic-oracle/ .

Nagy, G. 2021.08.23. “Jaufré Rudel, his ‘distant love’, and the death of the distant lover in his vida .” Classical Inquiries . https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/jaufre-rudel-his-distant-love-and-the-death-of-the-distant-lover-in-his-vida/ .

PP . See Nagy 1996a.

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Pickens, R. T. 1977. “Jaufre Rudel et la poétique de la mouvance.”  Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale  20:323–337.

Pickens, R. T, ed. 1978. The Songs of Jaufré Rudel . Toronto.

Pickens, R. T. 1978b. “La Poétique de Marie de France d’après les Prologues des Lais.”  Les Lettres Romanes  32:367–384.

Pickens, R. T. 1994. “‘Old’ Philology and the Crisis of the ‘New’.” In  The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s , ed. W. D. Paden, 53–86. Gainesville, FL.

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Saussure, F. de. 1916.  Cours de linguistique générale . Paris. Critical ed. 1972 by T. de Mauro.

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Mast@chs – summer seminar 2021 (friday, july 23): summaries of presentations and discussion, to zeus, by carol rumens, the god and the goat, by rowan ricardo phillips.

Nine Essays on Homer

Michael nagler , university of california, berkeley.

If one did not know that the authors of these varied essays were graduate students, one would assume from their uniformly high quality that one were reading the work of distinguished scholars with whose names one were somehow unfamiliar. The genesis of the collection is an interdisciplinary seminar at Harvard University presided over by Gregory Nagy and Emily Vermeule, with Charles Segal keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings. Those three must be as proud of this volume as of their own distinguished contributions to Homer studies.

The articles are from different perspectives but share a set of historical and critical assumptions and each one of them manages to reveal resonances of meaning in the rich thought-world of epic performance that have hitherto escaped us. That shared set of assumptions is not in itself surprising: excising supposed interpolations, for example, is out of tune with these times and in particular with the work of these students, who, like this reviewer, have been influenced by Prof. Nagy’s view of ‘Homer’ as diachronic process. The approaches are not ‘trendy,’ however, in the sense of being overly concerned with theory (either deconstructive or oral) or very strongly ideological: Andrea Kouklanakis is well aware that Thersites and his various ineptitudes “can be seen as a linguistic metaphor for the Homeric construction of rebellion” (45; though Thalmann’s work on Thersites is not mentioned in this essay), but she does not reduce the epic to a tract on social control systems or contort the overlay of Thersites’s social and speech-performative handicaps into some kind of post-modern theory that would deflect attention from any reality beyond the text itself. Though I, for one, found myself more often in disagreement with this essay than with most of the others, it is, like them, as balanced as it is revealing.

The collection is ‘interdisciplinary’ in the sense that it reflects the ample range of disciplines in which Profs. Nagy and Vermeule have worked, and then some, but the end result is not the kind of book where an archeologist would only read one part and a literary person another: an interesting coherence has emerged. Anyone interested in seeing more deeply into how Homer worked (what- or whoever one takes ‘Homer’ to be) will likely read it with uniform interest from cover to cover. In the introduction, Editors Carlisle and Levaniouk articulate a number of sound methodological principles which characterize the essays: etymologies, for example, “can be abused by being applied arbitrarily, but they can also become relevant when they have demonstrably poetic associations and cohere with other elements of the narrative”; and “if an etymology is “confirmed” by the context, it becomes a powerful tool for uncovering a diachronic depth of associations that enrich our understanding of Homeric poetry” (xv and xix). This is ‘clarifying Homer from Homer’ in the best sense, and all nine of these writers demonstrate that repeatedly, not only in connection with etymology (around which two of the essays revolve) but in other ways as well.

One is tempted to get into a detailed engagement with all nine of these studies, but perhaps it would be more practical to highlight a few points in a some of them — a hard enough choice since, as mentioned, they are uniformly rewarding.

Olga Levaniouk’s essay on Penelope, beginning with the “complex interactions between the pênelops of poetry and mythology and the pênelops of natural history” (96), systematically, and with admirable sensitivity, traces the idea of the weeping bird in Greek (and I might add, Indian) poetic associations through the meandering, branching and reconnecting synapses of the mythology, that lead — as mythological associations ultimately do when pursued with due tenacity — to ‘first things’, in this case the solar mythology of the Odyssey with which we are most familiar from the work of Douglas Frame. Today we tend to be most interested in the social relevance of these ‘cosmic’ themes, and Levaniouk in fact treats the liminal status of Penelope with great empathy. Again, what is noteworthy is the balance of all these dimensions, and L. treats them as an organic whole, which is exactly what they are, for poetry, myth and the tensions of human social interaction gain richness of association from each other at every point. The essay gives us exactly what we would want from good criticism and searching scholarship: recovery of lost associations, a great gain in our appreciation of ‘the poet’s’ richness. It would have been admirable enough as a mature piece of research that leaves no reference unturned (as far as I can see); but it is also full of nuanced observations. To cite just one: “The expression οἴκτρ’ ὀλοφυρομένη ‘piteously weeping’, used here about Penelope … is a metrical doublet of παῖδ’ ὀλοφυρομένη ‘bewailing her child’ used to describe the nightingale in Book 19″ (109), a topos brought into constant association with the state of Penelope as a woman caught by conflicting loyalties and uncertain future, and a ‘reading’ of that state.

Yet, as L. points out, Penelope’s halcyon / nightingale / pênelops identity has other dimensions, and there are resonances with other bird ‘species’ (or topoi) which broaden the protectiveness of birds toward their young in a way that is equally relevant to Penelope’s typology in the Odyssey. Here one is reminded that geese (one of the birds brought into resonance with Penelope) were known in antiquity not only for “guarding their nest” (97) but for guarding cities: most famously Rome. This is much later than the Greek sources relevant to Homer, of course, but the fact is that Penelope and Odysseus together ‘save’ not only their well-built home and its holdings (taking the text’s viewpoint, or one of them, that the suitors are disruptive interlopers): in doing so they emblematically save the world-order itself.

Several of the essays deal with animals and birds. John Watrous (“Artemis and the Lion: Two similes in Odyssey 6,” 165-177) argues, intriguingly, that Circe’s theriomorphic transformation of Odysseus’s men brings into the ‘tenor’ of the narrative line what is elsewhere always left in the ‘vehicle’ of simile (a reversal, one might add, that is typical of the mirror-world of the Adventures), so that “the spells of the goddess threaten to collapse” these poetic worlds and “It is only through the timely intervention of the master shape-changer Hermes that Odysseus is able to resist Circe’s spells and force the goddess to restore tenor and vehicle to their rightful places by returning his men to their human forms” (175).

Brian Breed (“Odysseus Back Home and Back From the Dead,” 137-164) shows that the returned hero’s apparently harsh and unnecessary test of Laertes which has bothered critics for millenia is mandated by the demands of a partly-concealed theme, the dreaded alternative ‘return’ of Odysseus as avenging hero. Thomas E. Jenkins (“Homêros ekainopoiêse: Theseus, Aithra and Variation in Homeric Myth-Making”, 207-226) shows that Iliad 3.144 cannot be excised from the Teichoscopia because it is part of a ring-composition by means of which Helen summons up what is a poignantly impossible story in this context: her rescue from abduction by her Tyndareid brothers. Jenkins is doing much more than saving one line from the athetizer’s dagger, he serves up eye-opening repercussions for our understanding of the handling of myth and even more generally ‘innovation’ in oral epic composition, and of the way the skilled performer can invoke themes into a subtext which plays against the main (selected, ‘true’) narrative without being fully realized in it.

These are only examples of the rich work offered by every one of the nine contributors to this volume. Outside of a very few tiny mistranslations ( ἔχω , on p. 3, is probably subjunctive; φίλος, φίλη is the ‘inalienable possession marker’, not ‘dear’) this is fine, mature work. One would indeed have liked to be a fly on the wall in that seminar room. But for those of us who did not enjoy that privileged coign of vantage, this book will do nicely.

Tomorrow, When the War Began

John marsden, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions, homer quotes in tomorrow, when the war began.

I went for a walk back up the track, to the last of Satan’s Steps. The sun had already warmed the great granite wall and I leaned against it with my eyes half shut, thinking about our hike, and the path and the man who’d built it, and this place called Hell. “Why did people call it Hell?” I wondered. All those cliffs and rocks, and that vegetation, it did look wild. But wild wasn’t Hell. Wild was fascinating, difficult, wonderful. No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It’s the people calling it Hell, that’s the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying “Housing Commission” or “private school” or “church” or “mosque” or “synagogue.” They stopped looking once they saw those signs.

Robyn took over. “We’ve got to think, guys. I know we all want to rush off, but this is one time we can’t afford to give in to feelings. There could be a lot at stake here. Lives even. We’ve got to assume that something really bad is happening, something quite evil. If we’re wrong, then we can laugh about it later, but we’ve got to assume that they’re not down the pub or gone on a holiday.”

“Maybe all my mother’s stories made me think of it before you guys. And like Robyn said before, if we’re wrong,” he was struggling to get the words out, his face twisting like someone having a stroke, “if we’re wrong you can laugh as long and loud as you want. But for now, for now, let’s say it’s true. Let’s say we’ve been invaded. I think there might be a war.”

Homer was becoming more surprising with every passing hour. It was getting hard to remember that this fast-thinking guy, who’d just spent fifteen minutes getting us laughing and talking and feeling good again, wasn’t even trusted to hand out the books at school.

We’ve got to stick together, that’s all I know. We all drive each other crazy at times, but I don’t want to end up here alone, like the Hermit. Then this really would be Hell. Humans do such terrible things to each other that sometimes my brain tells me they must be evil. But my heart still isn’t convinced. I just hope we can survive.

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Winslow homer (1836–1910).

Boys in a Dory

Winslow Homer

Prisoners from the Front

Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide)

A Basket of Clams

The Veteran in a New Field

Inside the Bar

Northeaster

Flower Garden and Bungalow, Bermuda

Snap the Whip

The Gulf Stream

Fishing Boats, Key West

Dressing for the Carnival

H. Barbara Weinberg Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is regarded by many as the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century. Born in Boston and raised in rural Cambridge, he began his career as a commercial printmaker , first in Boston and then in New York, where he settled in 1859. He briefly studied oil painting in the spring of 1861. In October of the same year, he was sent to the front in Virginia as an artist-correspondent for the new illustrated journal  Harper’s Weekly . Homer’s earliest Civil War paintings, dating from about 1863, are anecdotal, like his prints. As the war drew to a close, however, such canvases as The Veteran in a New Field ( 67.187.131 ) and Prisoners from the Front ( 22.207 ) reflect a more profound understanding of the war’s impact and meaning.

For Homer, the late 1860s and the 1870s were a time of artistic experimentation and prolific and varied output. He resided in New York City, making his living chiefly by designing magazine illustrations and building his reputation as a painter, but he found his subjects in the increasingly popular seaside resorts in Massachusetts and New Jersey, and in the Adirondacks, rural New York State, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Late in 1866, motivated probably by the chance to see two of his Civil War paintings at the Exposition Universelle, Homer had begun a ten-month sojourn in Paris and the French countryside. While there is little likelihood of influence from members of the French avant-garde, Homer shared their subject interests, their fascination with serial imagery, and their desire to incorporate into their works outdoor light, flat and simple forms (reinforced by their appreciation of Japanese design principles ), and free brushwork.

Women at leisure and children at play or simply preoccupied by their own concerns were regular subjects for the artist in the 1870s. In addition to expanding his mastery of oil paint during that decade, Homer began to create watercolors, and their success enabled him to give up his work as a freelance illustrator by 1875. He had been in Virginia during the war , and he returned there at least once during the mid-1870s, apparently to observe and portray what had happened to the lives of former slaves during the first decade of Emancipation.

In the early 1880s, Homer came increasingly to desire solitude, and his art took on a new intensity. In 1881, he traveled to England on his second and final trip abroad. After passing briefly through London, he settled in Cullercoats, a village near Tynemouth on the North Sea, remaining there from the spring of 1881 to November 1882. He became sensitive to the strenuous and courageous lives of its inhabitants, particularly the women, whom he depicted hauling and cleaning fish, mending nets, and, most poignantly, standing at the water’s edge, awaiting the return of their men. When the artist returned to New York, both he and his art were greatly changed.

In the summer of 1883, Homer moved from New York to Prouts Neck, Maine, a peninsula ten miles south of Portland. Except for vacation trips to the Adirondacks, Canada, Florida, and the Caribbean, where he produced dazzling watercolors , Homer lived at Prouts Neck until his death. He enjoyed isolation and was inspired by privacy and silence to paint the great themes of his career: the struggle of people against the sea and the relationship of fragile, transient human life to the timelessness of nature. In ambitious works of the 1880s, men challenge the ocean’s power with their own strength and cunning or respond to the ocean’s overwhelming force in scenes of dramatic rescue. By about 1890, however, Homer left narrative behind to concentrate on the beauty, force, and drama of the sea itself. In their dynamic compositions and richly textured passages, his late seascapes capture the look and feel (and even suggest the sound) of masses of onrushing and receding water. For Homer’s contemporaries, these were the most extravagantly admired of all his works. They remain among his most famous today, appreciated for their virtuoso brushwork, depth of feeling, and hints of modernist abstraction.

Weinberg, H. Barbara. “Winslow Homer (1836–1910).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/homr/hd_homr.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr., and Franklin Kelly. Winslow Homer . Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Additional Essays by H. Barbara Weinberg

• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) .” (July 2011)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ American Impressionism .” (October 2004)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) .” (October 2004)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ American Scenes of Everyday Life, 1840–1910 .” (September 2009)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 .” (October 2006)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ Childe Hassam (1859–1935) .” (October 2004)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) .” (April 2010)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844–1926) .” (October 2004)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): Painting .” (October 2004)
• Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ The Ashcan School .” (April 2010)

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Online Features

• 82nd & Fifth: “Sea Change” by H. Barbara Weinberg
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Biography of Homer

Beyond a few fragments of information, historians and classicists can only speculate about the life of the man who composed  The Iliad  and  The Odyssey . The details are few. We do not even know the century in which he lived, and it is difficult to say with absolute certainty that the same poet composed both works. The Greeks attributed both of the epics to the same man, and we have little hard evidence that would make us doubt the ancient authorities, but uncertainty is a constant feature of scholarly work dealing with Homer's era of Greek history.

The Greeks hailed him as their greatest poet, as well as their first. Although the Greeks recognized other poets who composed in Greek before Homer, no texts from these earlier poets survived. Perhaps they were lost, or perhaps they were never written down; Homer himself was probably on the cusp between the tradition of oral poetry and the new invention of written language. Texts of The Iliad and The Odyssey existed from at least the sixth century BC, and probably for a considerable span of time before that. These two great epic poems also had a life in performance: through the centuries, professional artists made their living by reciting Homer, performing the great epics for audiences that often know great parts of the poem by heart.

It is impossible to pin down with any certainty when Homer lived. Eratosthenes gives the traditional date of 1184 BC for the end of the Trojan War, the semi-mythical event that forms the basis for the Iliad. The great Greek historian Herodotus put the date at 1250 BC. These dates were arrived at in a very approximate manner; Greek historians usually used genealogy and estimation when trying to find the dates for events in the distant past. But Greek historians were far less certain about the dates for Homer's life. Some said he was a contemporary of the events of The Iliad , while others placed him sixty or a hundred or several hundred years afterward. Herodotus estimated that Homer lived and wrote in the ninth century BC. He almost certainly lived in one of the Greek city-states in Asia Minor. All of the traditional sources say that he was blind.

Over the course of millennia of scholarly speculation, prevailing theories about Homer and his relationship to his work have had time to change and change again. At various times over the centuries, scholars have suggested that he was only a transmitter, or that he never existed, and the epics attributed to him were the patchwork effort of generations of bards. Modern scholars, however, tend to accept that The Iliad and The Odyssey are more than amalgams handed down from antiquity, and that there was in fact a great poet who had a hand in creating these epics in the forms we know today. Current scholarship holds that Homer was a great bard who lived between the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Although there is little doubt that Homer inherited a massive amount of material from generations of bards before him, most scholars believe now that Homer was an innovator and an original artist as well as a transmitter. Writing probably played a role in the composition of his great poems. Current theories depict Homer as a master of oral poetry who used the new invention of writing to aid him in composing epics on a grander scale than had ever been done before. There are signs in The Iliad that might suggest unfinished revision; these massive projects may have been reworked again and again over the course of the poet's whole life. A performer as well as a poet, Homer may have composed the poems through a mixture of utilizing old material, writing and revising, and oral improvisation.

Little can be known with certainty. But even though the details of Homer's life remain -- and probably will always remain -- an enigma, his great epics come down to us intact. His works have formed a foundation for all the Western literature that has followed, and his characters and stories have had an impact on three thousand years' worth of readers. Facts about the poet's life can do little to add to that legacy. Legend says that as a child, Alexander the Great slept with a copy of The Iliad under his pillow; the fact that Alexander was neither the first nor the last boy to do so says more about Homer's genius than any biography could, no matter how detailed or complete.

Study Guides on Works by Homer

Iliad homer.

Consisting of 15,693 lines of verse, the Iliad has been hailed as the greatest epic of Western civilization. Although we know little about the time period when it was composed and still less about the epic's composer, the Iliad's influence on...

• Study Guide
• Lesson Plan

The Odyssey Homer

Most likely written between 750 and 650 B.C., The Odyssey is an epic poem about the wanderings of the Greek hero Odysseus following his victory in the Trojan War (which, if it did indeed take place, occurred in the 12th-century B.C. in Mycenaean...

essays by Thomas Van Nortwick, notes by Rob Hardy

Book 12 Essays

By Thomas Van Nortwick

Odysseus and his crew return to Circe’s island and bury Elpenor. Odysseus recounts his adventures to Circe.

Bringing his hero back from Hades, the poet faces some challenges. After the extraordinary encounters with the dead, there might well be a letdown in dramatic tension and thus in the audience’s attention. We suspect that Ithaka cannot be too far in the distance at this point, and we might be getting eager to move on to the showdown with the suitors, which Homer has been dangling before us since Zeus’s reply to Athena in Book Five:

My child, what is this word that has escaped your teeth? Is this not your plan, as you have counseled it, that Odysseus will return and take revenge on those men?

Odyssey 5.21–23

We also know that this poet likes nothing better than to delay fulfilling expectations he has stirred in us, keeping us engaged. So perhaps the homecoming is on the horizon, but probably not right away. Meanwhile, when Odysseus reaches Calypso’s island, he is alone. And we learned in the first few verses of the poem that Helios did away with the rest of the crew because they ate his sacred cattle. We have yet to discover how that happened.

The book begins with the soothing rhythms of familiar traditional language, as if to mark a return to the comfort of the human world as Odysseus and the crew left it when they went into the Underworld:

‘αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ ποταμοῖο λίπεν ῥόον Ὠκεανοῖο νηῦς, ἀπὸ δ᾽ ἵκετο κῦμα θαλάσσης εὐρυπόροιο νῆσόν τ᾽ Αἰαίην, ὅθι τ᾽ Ἠοῦς ἠριγενείης οἰκία καὶ χοροί εἰσι καὶ ἀντολαὶ Ἠελίοιο, νῆα μὲν ἔνθ᾽ ἐλθόντες ἐκέλσαμεν ἐν ψαμάθοισιν, ἐκ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ βῆμεν ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσης: ἔνθα δ᾽ ἀποβρίξαντες ἐμείναμεν Ἠῶ δῖαν. ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς...

But when the ship left the streams of the Ocean, and came to the waves of the wide-running sea and the island of Aiaia, where lie the house of early Dawn and her dancing spaces and the rising of Helios, we landed there and drove the ship up on the sand and jumped out on the edge of the sea, drifting off to sleep to await bright Dawn. But when early born, rosy fingered Dawn appeared…

Odyssey 12.1–8

Odysseus sends his men back to the “house of Circe” to retrieve the body of Elpenor (9) and we note the closing of the circle that began with the first ill-fated visit in Book Ten (10.203–243). Circe reappears as a boundary figure like Siduri the barkeep on the edge of the “waters of death” in The Epic of Gilgamesh , with each figure marking the entrance to and exit from the Underworld.

The next six verses cover the funeral and burial of Elpenor, a swift conclusion to that bifurcated episode. The poet seems intent on moving on, leaving the grim darkness behind, speeding toward the next part of the story. Vergil’s version of this episode in the Aeneid , the burial of Misenus, covers fifty verses ( Aen. 6.156–182; 212–235), a somber recollection of the dead man’s life, followed by a meticulous account of the rites themselves. Comparing the two passages is a lesson in how tone and structure can influence our perception of character. While he is expansive in other descriptions of burial ( Il. 23.108–153; 24.788–804; Od. 24.43–97), Homer’s style here is relatively spare and workmanlike: weeping, the crew members gather wood, burn the body, then heap up the funeral mound and plant an oar on top. Vergil’s style is much more lyrical, softening the stark reality of the death that occasions it. His full description of the rites adds a solemn air to the passage, while situating the burial in the Italian landscape. We get the impression that Homer is not interested in Elpenor, except as an example of the perils of low self-control. By bringing him back to our attention, however briefly, the poet tunes our ears for the crew’s much more catastrophic failure of self-control with the cattle of the sun and, with the final image of the oar, Odysseus’s own death far in the future. Vergil’s Misenus, on the other hand, comes alive for us in the affectionate biography that precedes his burial. The event itself celebrates the Trojans’ final arrival—after may false starts—at their new homeland and ends by focusing on the landscape again. Homer’s aims are structural and thematic, the man and his burial fixed economically in our minds by the planting of the oar. Vergil’s passage is all about tone and atmosphere, inviting us to admire the beautiful new land, which forms a poignant backdrop for the final celebration of a worthy man.

Circe arrives, laden with food and wine. Her greeting certifies the central fact of the katabasis :

σχέτλιοι, οἳ ζώοντες ὑπήλθετε δῶμ᾽ Ἀίδαο, δισθανέες, ὅτε τ᾽ ἄλλοι ἅπαξ θνῄσκουσ᾽ ἄνθρωποι.

Hard men, you went down to the house of Hades alive, Dying twice, when all others die only once.

Odyssey 12.21–22

As she did after her magic failed in Book Ten, she urges the Greeks to feast all day. Then at dawn they will sail for home. Any fears they may have had about Circe are quickly dispelled: This is the benign witch they left when they went to the Underworld. The soothing rhythm of familiar traditional language again helps us to see them gliding gratefully into the evening:

ὣς ἔφαθ᾽, ἡμῖν δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ ἐπεπείθετο θυμὸς ἀγήνωρ. ὣς τότε μὲν πρόπαν ἦμαρ ἐς ἠέλιον καταδύντα ἥμεθα δαινύμενοι κρέα τ᾽ ἄσπετα καὶ μέθυ ἡδύ: ἦμος δ᾽ ἠέλιος κατέδυ καὶ ἐπὶ κνέφας ἦλθεν, οἱ μὲν κοιμήσαντο παρὰ πρυμνήσια νηός…

So she spoke and our hearts were persuaded. Then all day until the setting of the sun we sat feasting on abundant meat and sweet wine. And when the sun went down and dusk came on, they laid down to sleep alongside the stern cables of the ship…

Odyssey 12.28–32

The men put safely to bed, Circe takes Odysseus by the hand and they go off by themselves so Odysseus can report. No sex this time, apparently, just business. The poem’s portrait of the crew as immature is reinforced here as Odysseus and Circe assume the role of parents to their sleeping children. That immaturity is about to cost them all dearly.

Further Reading

Edwards, M.W. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad , 55–60. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

____________. 2002. Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry , 1–37. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Morrison, J. 2003. A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey , 111–113. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Tracy, S. 1990. The Story of the Odyssey , 74–77. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Circe gives Odysseus advice about how to get back to Ithaca, describing the Sirens and the Wandering Rocks.

The Sirens will be Odysseus’s next challenge. Seductive singers who lure sailors to their doom appear frequently in folktales about the sea. Such creatures are bound to be useful to this poet and in fact their appearance here is the distilled essence of a pervasive motif in the story. Singing is a gendered pursuit in the Odyssey (see above on 9.161–192). Male bards, Phemios in Ithaka, Demodokos and Odysseus himself in the royal palace on Scheria, tell of the heroism and suffering of the Greeks returning from Troy. By their narratives they record the kleos that will preserve the nobility of the warriors for generations to come, models for masculine behavior. Female singers have quite a different function, inviting heroes to abandon their missions, to give in and rest. If they compose with words, we rarely hear them. Instead the music is usually mysteriously seductive, surrounding the hero with amorphous sound.

Homer describes the power of the Sirens with θέλγω , “to charm, enchant,” (40, 44). As we might expect, Calypso too can enchant ( Od. 1.57), as can Penelope ( Od. 18.282). But the verb is not used only of beguiling females in the poem. Male gods have that power, of course: Hermes uses his magic wand to charm the eyes of humans ( Od 5.47; 24.3) and Telemachus imagines that some god may have bewitched him into believing the ragged stranger before him is his father ( Od. 16.195). But an artful human storyteller can also weave a spell with his words, like the duplicitous bard who leads Clytemnestra astray in her husband’s absence ( Od. 3.264) or, of course, the most accomplished raconteur in the poem, Odysseus himself ( Od. 17.514). It is among the many tantalizing ironies in the poem that the hero, who is constantly fighting against the seductive female forces that would keep him from his home, practices his own kind of enchantment.

After the Sirens comes a somewhat confusing passage which describes the way past two different threats to the crew’s survival. Circe says that she will not tell Odysseus which of two courses he should pursue. She will describe each and he must choose, either to try sailing by the “wave of dark blue Amphitrite” (60), which drives ships against overhanging rocks, called the Πλάγκται (Clashing Rocks, 61) by the gods, or threading their way between Skylla, a monster with six heads who eats sailors, and Charybdis, a whirlpool that sucks ships down (73–110). The first alternative gets a much briefer treatment and we get the sense that Homer is struggling to juggle two separate mythical traditions here. Homer’s mention of the Argo’s mission (69–72) has prompted scholars to suggest that the Wandering Rocks may be from a version of the story of Jason and the Argonauts, earlier than the Odyssey and now lost. These moving rocks are apparently lethal to birds, crunching them as they fly over. One small detail prompts further thought: Every time one of the doves bringing ambrosia to Zeus perishes, the god replaces it, so that the total number of doves remains constant. As he did with the Elpenor episode, so here the poet seems to be introducing themes that will reappear in the cattle of the sun episode, which he has already singled out as particularly important (1.6–9). The cattle of Helios, we will be told, are divided into seven herds of fifty each and their number is neither increased by new births nor diminished by death. The total number (350) suggested to Aristotle that the cattle might correspond to the days of the year (appropriately for the sun god’s herd), in which case to kill any of the cows would be to attack time itself. No wonder the crew has to pay with their own lives.

Dimock, G. 1989. The Unity of the Odyssey , 163–166. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Edwards, M.W. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad , 23–28. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Heubeck, A. and Hoekstra, A. ed. 1989. A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. II, Books IX–XVI , 118-121. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morrison, J. 2003. A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey , 113. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Page, D. 1973. Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey , 85–90. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Further predictions. Scylla and Charybdis. Circe tells Odysseus he must sacrifice six men to escape Scylla.

As Odysseus approaches the ultimate test in Ithaka, he encounters challenges that have threatened his return ever since he left Troy, but in a highly concentrated, sometimes symbolic form. Circe’s predictions about Skylla and Charybdis check off most of the boxes: smothering clouds that cut off the sun, a dark cave, amorphous enveloping water, a powerful female force beyond human control. Behind all of these is the threat of complete oblivion, creating the need to sacrifice some of the crew to ensure the survival of the rest.

Circe’s description of Skylla and her lair is resonant with telling associations. Like the entrance to Hades, the peaks where Skylla lives in her cave are perpetually dark in all seasons, shrouded by clouds. The epithet for her cave is ἠεροειδές , is used three times elsewhere in the poem of caves, three times with ζόφον , “gloom,” especially the darkness of Hades—as in the verse following—and eleven times of the sea. She is a female πέλωρ , “monster,” like Polyphemus and Circe’s enchanted animals, barks like a dog, waves twelve feet in the air, has six necks, each with its own head, and in the mouth of each holds not one row of teeth, but three, πλεῖοι μέλανος θανάτοιο , “full of black death” (92). She eats fish, large and small, but will gladly gobble up humans, one with each head. The image of enveloping darkness is repeated four times, in the clouds, the cave, her mouths, and finally, in her lower body inside the cave. The unlucky sailors she catches seem to recede further and further into a single devouring darkness, ending in her female genitalia, swallowed up by everything that threatens the male hero. If the sexual overtones of all this imagery were not clear enough, Circe insists that Odysseus could not shoot an arrow into that dark cave (84).

The name Skylla seems to come from σκύλαξ, “puppy,” and the poet makes the most of this etymology. Though she is an evil monster, Skylla’s bark is like a σκύλακος νεογιλῆς , “new-born puppy,” a particularly creepy juxtaposition. Not only does she devour sailors, but we imagine her doing so with a playful, yipping delight. (Do we also see a faint trace of spiders? All those legs…) Dogs appear frequently in the Odyssey and often reveal something about their masters. Telemachus, when he sets out to discipline the suitors, is accompanied by two dogs:

οὐκ οἶος, ἅμα τῷ γε δύω κύνες ἀργοὶ ἕποντο.

(He went) not alone, but two dogs followed with him.

Odyssey 2.11

The phrasing here is a variation on a more common motif, when a Homeric man or woman goes out in public, accompanied by two henchmen for the man or two handmaidens for the woman. In either case, the accompaniment signals that the principal is in his/her proper role or status. Men are accompanied when they in their rightful authority, women when they display the proper modesty or chastity. That Telemachus has not men but dogs signals that he is not quite ready to assume the full duties of masculine leadership (cf., 16.62; 20.145). The magical golden dogs outside the Phaeacian royal palace reflect the liminal status of the civilization on Scheria, not quite divine, but removed from the grittier aspects of ordinary human life (7.91). Eumaeus has fierce guard dogs, a projection of his own zealous guarding of his master’s herds (14.21). Finally, there is the splendid Argos, Odysseus’s longsuffering hound, who hangs onto life long enough to be the first to recognize Odysseus in Ithaka, a survivor like his master (17.290–323). Skylla seems to be a grotesque parody of these faithful canine companions. She is like a watchdog, barking when anyone comes too close. Odysseus feeds her but unwillingly, offering six of his crew to make his way past the cave.

The alternate way forward offers an even more dismal prospect. Charybdis (“the swallower”) belches up “black water” (104) three times a day, then sucks it back down three times. While Skylla comes to life for us in her grotesquerie, flapping feet, snapping mouths, barking like a puppy, Charybdis gets no characterization beyond her function as a kind of divine disposal, embodying economically the essence of fearful female power: dark, suffocating water, sucking sailors down. In any event, Skylla is the lesser of two evils, requiring the sacrifice of only six crewmen, whereas Charybdis will swallow everything, ship, crew, and captain.

Dimock, G. 1989. The Unity of the Odyssey , 166–170. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Heubeck, A. and Hoekstra, A. ed. 1989. A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. II, Books IX–XVI , 122. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morrison, J. 2003. A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey , 113–114. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Reinhardt, K. 1942. “The Adventures in the Odyssey .” In Schein, S. 1996. Reading the Odyssey . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 99-102.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey , 68–69. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Circe warns Odysseus about harming the Cattle of the Sun, then sends the Greeks on their way. Odysseus is not inclined to take Circe’s advice and resign himself to losing six of his crew. Couldn’t Circe tell him how to avoid Charybdis while keeping Skylla from killing any of his men? As she did when exclaiming over the return of the crew from Hades, Circe calls Odysseus σχέτλιε (116; cf., 12.21), the meaning of which ranges from “cruel” to “stubborn,” “enduring.” As Circe uses it here, the word seems to signal disapproval mixed with a certain grudging admiration.

Despite Athena’s description of him as “sweet” ( 5.9, 12 ), when we see him at work in the story, Odysseus is seldom kind. What sparks admiration in others is rather his fierce determination to survive, to never give up. The tone of Circe’s response here is affectionate: “you won’t even back down from gods, you stubborn rascal.” Athena will sound the same way when she confronts him on Ithaka, admiring the way he lies to her (13.288–295). In both cases, the goddesses exhibit feelings toward Odysseus that smack of a mother’s exasperated love for her difficult son. This role for Athena is not new in the poem, but we note that Circe has come some distance from the would-be dominatrix of Book Ten. Though Antikleia is dead, others step forward to look after the hero. (We may include Calypso in this category. She takes the same tone with Odysseus after he refuses her offer of immortality, though using different adjectives [5.180–183].)

Thrinakia will be next, another test of the crew’s self-control. We have known since the poem’s opening verses that they will fail:

πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν, ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων. ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ: αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο, νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.

Many pains he suffered in his heart on the sea, trying to protect his own life and the homecoming of his companions. But he could not save his comrades, though he tried: for they perished through their own blind folly, fools, who ate the cattle of Helios, Hyperion’s son; and he took away their homecoming day.

Odyssey 1.4–9

No suspense about the outcome of this encounter then, but the details of the episode signal its place in the larger plan of the poem. The first thing to notice is that the herd of cattle, at least, is all cows ( πολλαὶ…βόες , 127–128) and their shepherds are also female. (The flocks of sheep do not figure in this recurring motif. The Greek sailors will eat only cattle.) Once again, we see the poet building his story by drawing on a recurring narrative pattern: Odysseus penetrating a feminized milieu and effecting his own rebirth from oblivion, in this case a place characterized by timeless immortality, like Ogygia. The series begins on Calypso’s island with Hermes in the role of male visitor, but thereafter Odysseus takes over, on Scheria, in the cave of Polyphemus, in the lair of Circe, and finally, in his own palace. The feminized nature of each place is marked variously, but the pattern remains the same.

The obvious sexual imagery implied in the motif will be particularly resonant in this episode. The herds of Helios, we’re told, never vary in number. Circe tells Odysseus to sail on by Thrinakia and no wonder: no births—or rebirths—allowed. Ithaka will present a yet more intense version of this potential conflict between generation and stasis. Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, will penetrate the precincts of his own palace, which is without the guidance of masculine authority and subject to the awakening intelligence of Penelope, then eventually effect his own rebirth as king, husband, father, and son. At the same time, it becomes clear that the kingdom Athena wants to restore in Ithaka is one founded on the insistence that everything that existed before Odysseus left for Troy can be brought back again. Odysseus can rule in his family and his kingdom just as he once did. But the pressures for change are also powerful, Telemachus’ growth into manhood and maybe even Penelope’s taking of a new husband. The tension from these competing movements permeates the last six books of the poem.

Dawn comes and Circe leaves with no apparent ceremony. The rest of the episode features familiar traditional language, as Odysseus and crew launch their ship and head out to sea. This seems a remarkably quiet end to the momentous interlude that began in Book Ten. Circe’s last gesture is from afar:

ἡμῖν δ᾽ αὖ κατόπισθε νεὸς κυανοπρῴροιο ἴκμενον οὖρον ἵει πλησίστιον, ἐσθλὸν ἑταῖρον, Κίρκη ἐυπλόκαμος, δεινὴ θεὸς αὐδήεσσα.

But for us from behind the dark-prowed ship Circe with lovely hair, dread goddess with human speech, sent a following wind, an excellent companion, filling the sails.

Odyssey 12. 148–150

These verses repeat verbatim the send-off Circe gives to the crew when they head for Hades (11.5–7), marking the boundaries of the katabasis .

Circe will not appear again, and we should pause to admire the way the poet has used her mysterious presence to enliven and structure this part of his story. In creating his Circe, Homer modulates deftly through a series of mythical archetypes. When we first meet her, she exudes the dangerous, unchecked female sexuality that we have seen in Calypso. Her transformation of the first scouting party into pigs makes concrete the threats associated with the nymph in Book Five: emasculation, loss of personal autonomy and identity, subservience to female power. After the intervention of Hermes, she turns from a frightening witch into both a willing but subservient sexual partner and a nurturing, almost maternal presence. From then on, she plays the role of a boundary figure like Siduri in the Epic of Gilgamesh , marking the crew’s entrance and exit from the Underworld. By advising Odysseus about what awaits him in Hades, she resonates with what in a tragic narrative would be an anima figure, a female guide to the mysterious darkness awaiting the Greeks, a figure realized more fully in the Sibyl of Book Six of Vergil’s Aeneid . We trace the various sources for the character of Circe by thumbing through our mythological dictionaries and scholarly commentaries. That the poet of the Odyssey could marshal this rich and varied tradition so seamlessly to tell his story is one measure of the unfathomable mystery of the poem’s creative power.

Dimock, G. 1989. The Unity of the Odyssey , 171–174. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press./p>

Morrison, J. 2003. A Companion to Homer’s Odyssey , 115–116. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Page, D. 1973. Folktales in Homer’s Odyssey , 78–83. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey , 61–62. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

The Greeks encounter the Sirens.

As they approach the dreaded Sirens, Odysseus decides to level with the crew about Circe’s instructions. It is not right for only one or two to know them; he and crew are in this together and will either escape or all die together. This newfound team spirit soon rings slightly hollow, however, since what the witch in fact urged was for only Odysseus to listen to the seductive voices. In one sense, this episode echoes others in Books Nine through Twelve where Odysseus’ restless curiosity, his desire to know things, was potentially perilous for the crew. There was no good reason for the Greeks to explore the island of the Cyclopes, but Odysseus insists because he wants to find out what kind of people live there ( 9.72–76 ); likewise, it is the captain’s urge to explore Circe’s island that puts his crew in danger ( 10.189–202 ).

Here it will be useful to think about the two competing urges we see in Odysseus all the way through the poem, the centripetal drive for which he is best known, the relentless quest to return home to his accustomed roles in Ithaka and the centrifugal forces fueled by his restless curiosity and determination to know the world. The poem’s dominant rhetoric points us toward accepting the need for Odysseus to become himself again in Ithaka and reassume his glorious heroic ascendancy, the product of his fame. Anything that impedes that mission is fair game, not only monsters and alluring woman, but also the suitors and even, as it happens, his crew. On the other hand, sometimes not being known proves to be an advantage to the hero as he makes his way home. Knowledge is power in the Odyssey and knowing more about others than they know about you gives you leverage. When Odysseus arrives as an anonymous stranger at a new place, he does not immediately reveal his name, but bides his time while scouting the local scene and building trust with the inhabitants. The eventual revelation of his name, by him or others, is always a dramatic high point, marking his “return” to his former heroic self. The pattern persists from Scheria to the cave of the Cyclops, to Circe’s lair, coming to a triumphant crescendo after the slaughter of the suitors. The tension between the drive to reclaim his kleos , primarily associated with the centripetal hero, and the use of anonymity in the pursuit of knowledge and thus power, characteristic of the centrifugal adventurer, is a source of energy in the story from beginning to end. (See Introduction, para. 11-19 )

In the encounter with the Sirens, these distinctions begin to blur. He will be able submit himself to the seductive powers of the Sirens and experience their dangerous knowledge (answering the call of the centrifugal urge to seek knowledge), but without anyone having to pay the price (the centripetal drive for home will not be sabotaged). The Sirens scramble other distinctions as well. Elsewhere, female singers are dangerous to men because their music surrounds them, blurring the boundaries affirmed in narrative songs that make meaning in a masculine world. The Sirens’ music, however subversive, is delivered in words and they promise Odysseus precisely the kind of knowledge that male bards deliver elsewhere in the poem. He who listens to them will gain special knowledge:

ἀλλ᾽ ὅ γε τερψάμενος νεῖται καὶ πλείονα εἰδώς. ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ᾽ ὅσ᾽ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ εὐρείῃ Ἀργεῖοι Τρῶές τε θεῶν ἰότητι μόγησαν, ἴδμεν δ᾽, ὅσσα γένηται ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ

Well pleased, he (who listens to them) goes on, knowing more than he ever did. For we know everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered in wide Troy, by the gods’ will; we know everything that happens on the generous earth.

Odyssey 12.188–191

With her advice, Circe offers Odysseus an antidote to the ruinous power of the Sirens, a way of experiencing their power without penalty. In this way, the entire episode recalls the beginning of the Circe episode in Book Ten, where Hermes’s intervention gives Odysseus immunity from the magic of the witch, so he can enjoy her hospitality without being stranded, and perhaps the katabasis , where he can visit the land of the dead without paying the usual price of admission. As the adventures in Books Nine through Twelve progress, the gods or their agents sometimes seem to take a more active role in protecting Odysseus from the perils toward which that his curious nature might draw him. As his centripetal drive brings him ever closer to Ithaka, he is allowed to indulge his centrifugal urges without the usual consequences. He will survive the next adventures, but at great cost to his crew.

Escape from the Sirens. Odysseus makes a speech to encourage his crew.

A dramatic struggle ensues as the ship passes the Sirens. Odysseus, as Circe foresaw, is unable to resist the seductive allure of the Sirens’ voices. He strains to escape his bonds, signaling frantically with his eyebrows. (Am I the only person who immediately thinks of Groucho Marx?). But his trusted crewmen follow orders and tighten the ropes until the ship is out of range of the Sirens’ song.

As is characteristic of these final adventures, recurring motifs we have seen earlier return in yet more vivid form. The image of Odysseus ravished by the voices of powerful women brings to a crescendo the series of threats that runs through Books Five through Twelve, in his encounters with Calypso, Nausicaa, and Circe. On Ogygia, he was restrained by magic; here, he is literally tied up. Nausicaa coyly hints at marriage in the future; the Sirens want him right now. Circe’s magic links men’s animal nature with sexual enslavement, equating the crew’s submission to her with the relinquishing of human form; an encounter with the Sirens can lead to death. Through all these episodes runs the dynamic of restraint and release, with a submerged sexual component. Homeric poetry is reticent about overt sexuality, but the associations implicit in this recurring motif are clear enough. A part of every man, it seems to suggest, secretly wants to submit to the power of women, to give up control. (James Joyce understood this feature of the Odyssean male psyche and brought it to life in Leopold Bloom.) Through this lens, power is sexy and sex is always about power. As in the katabasis , so here, Odysseus does what no ordinary person can do. He experiences total submission to the sexual power of women and emerges unscathed.

Having pulled away safely from the Sirens, the Greeks come immediately to their next challenge, Skylla and Charybdis. As the roar of the waves surrounds them, the sailors drop their oars, and once again the ship is becalmed. Odysseus bucks up his men with a pep talk:

ὦ φίλοι, οὐ γάρ πώ τι κακῶν ἀδαήμονές εἰμεν: οὐ μὲν δὴ τόδε μεῖζον ἕπει κακόν, ἢ ὅτε Κύκλωψ εἴλει ἐνὶ σπῆι γλαφυρῷ κρατερῆφι βίηφιν: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἔνθεν ἐμῇ ἀρετῇ, βουλῇ τε νόῳ τε, ἐκφύγομεν, καί που τῶνδε μνήσεσθαι ὀίω.

Friends, we are hardly without knowledge of evil. Surely this is no greater evil than when the Cyclops trapped us in a hollow cave with his mighty strength. But by my courage and counsel and intelligence we escaped and I think these things will be remembered too.

Odyssey 12. 208–212

This is just the speech we would expect from Odysseus, proud of his powers, confident that he can pull them all through again. These verses have a vivid afterlife in one of the most famous passages in Vergil’s Aeneid :

"O socii—neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum— O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem. Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopea saxa experti: revocate animos, maestumque timorem mittite: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

Friends, we have surely known evils before. We’ve suffered worse things and the god will grant an end to these, too. You have weathered mad Scylla and approached the roaring rocks within and the Cyclopean boulders. Recall your courage and put aside gloomy fear. Perhaps one day it will be pleasing to remember even these things.

Aeneid 1.198–207

Aeneas is speaking to his men after they have washed ashore in Libya, on their way to Carthage and the kingdom of Dido. Vergil’s hero is much less buoyant than his Homeric antecedent. When he finishes his speech, the Roman poet appends two telling verses:

Talia voce refert, curisque ingentibus aeger spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem.

Such were his words, but sick with huge cares he feigned hope on his face and pressed the sorrow deep in his heart.

Aeneid 1.208–210

The split between outward confidence and inner doubt is not typical of epic heroes, who may show anger, fear, disbelief, or doubt, but always genuinely. To feign in this way is new to the tradition. The thrust of Vergil’s coda to the speech is to suggest that though Aeneas has grasped the substance of what is required of him as a leader, he is not being true to his own nature: he is in the right place but is the wrong man. This incongruity is at the heart of Vergil’s complex realization of the traditional male hero. Looking back at Odysseus through Aeneas throws light on the Greek hero’s supreme confidence but also perhaps the extraordinary opacity of his inner self, coldly calculating and available only to him: He will win every battle, whatever it takes, whoever has to suffer for it.

That persona is on display in the next few verses. Odysseus, as he tells us, chooses not to alert his crew to the perils that loom, afraid that they will abandon their oars and cower below deck. His lack of confidence in his crew is nothing we haven’t seen before and reaffirms his chilly emotional detachment from his companions as men with ordinary human frailties: When the pressure is on, they will not come through. The rhetoric of the story urges us to see them this way, inferior creatures whose shortcomings will be costly to them, in need of managing by their superior captain. As if to underscore that point, Odysseus tells us he “forgot” Circe’s warning about opposing Skylla. The last picture we have before disaster strikes is of him, armed and standing in the prow of the ship, defying danger with his spears at the ready.

Reinhardt, K. 1942. “The Adventures in the Odyssey .” In Schein, S. 1996. Reading the Odyssey . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 69–76.

Escape from Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus tells the crew they must avoid the island of Thrinakia.

The ship enters the channel between Skylla and Charybdis. We’ve already had a full rehearsal of all the frightening features of this place, but the poet dwells a bit longer. The sexual overtones of the space persist: the ship enters a “narrow passage” leading into the heart of female danger; when Charybdis, “The Swallower,” erupts, foam covers the rocks above; when she sucks the water down, the blue-black hole in the sea awaits. The extended description of Charybdis diverts our attention and, as it happens, that of Odysseus and his crew. By the time Odysseus looks back, it is too late. It is almost as if the two monsters work as a team, Charybdis drawing attention to herself, while Skylla snatches six sailors. There follow two grotesque images, the dangling feet of the sailors and the fishing simile.

As the captured sailors ascend toward death, we see only their hands and feet, slowly disappearing into the darkness of the cave. The perspective is striking, reducing the men to their helpless, writhing limbs, while recalling the earlier description of Skylla’s twelve feet waving in the air while she yips like a newborn puppy. The poet folds that disturbing tableau immediately into a gruesome analogue, comparing the dying sailors to fish on the hook. Two other versions of this simile appear in the Iliad :

                         ὃ δὲ Θέστορα Ἤνοπος υἱὸν δεύτερον ὁρμηθείς: ὃ μὲν εὐξέστῳ ἐνὶ δίφρῳ ἧστο ἀλείς: ἐκ γὰρ πλήγη φρένας, ἐκ δ᾽ ἄρα χειρῶν ἡνία ἠΐχθησαν: ὃ δ᾽ ἔγχεϊ νύξε παραστὰς γναθμὸν δεξιτερόν, διὰ δ᾽ αὐτοῦ πεῖρεν ὀδόντων, ἕλκε δὲ δουρὸς ἑλὼν ὑπὲρ ἄντυγος, ὡς ὅτε τις φὼς πέτρῃ ἔπι προβλῆτι καθήμενος ἱερὸν ἰχθὺν ἐκ πόντοιο θύραζε λίνῳ καὶ ἤνοπι χαλκῷ: ὣς ἕλκ᾽ ἐκ δίφροιο κεχηνότα δουρὶ φαεινῷ, κὰδ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐπὶ στόμ᾽ ἔωσε: πεσόντα δέ μιν λίπε θυμός.

                         He (Patroclus) next rushed Thestor, son of Enops, who sat in his polished chariot, cowering, stunned, and the reins slipped from his hands. Patroclus came close and with his sword stabbed through the right side of his jaw, driving through the teeth, then hooked and dragged him over the chariot rail, as a fisherman sitting on a jutting rock snags a fish out of the sea with his line and gleaming hook. So Patroclus dragged him gaping from the chariot with his shining spear and let him fall facedown; the soul left him when he fell.

Iliad 16. 401-410

ὣς ἔφατ᾽, ὦρτο δὲ Ἶρις ἀελλόπος ἀγγελέουσα, μεσσηγὺς δὲ Σάμου τε καὶ Ἴμβρου παιπαλοέσσης ἔνθορε μείλανι πόντῳ: ἐπεστονάχησε δὲ λίμνη. ἣ δὲ μολυβδαίνῃ ἰκέλη ἐς βυσσὸν ὄρουσεν, ἥ τε κατ᾽ ἀγραύλοιο βοὸς κέρας ἐμβεβαυῖα ἔρχεται ὠμηστῇσιν ἐπ᾽ ἰχθύσι κῆρα φέρουσα.

So (Zeus) spoke, and storm-footed Iris sprang forth with the message; and in the black sea she plunged between Samos and sandy Imbros and the sea groaned about her. She dove into the deep like a lead sinker that rides the horn of a field-dwelling ox and comes bearing death for the flesh-eating fish.

Iliad 24.77–82

The arresting image of fishing in such disparate passages repays attention. Similes in the Iliad afford the poet a chance to expand the tightly focused lens of the battlefield, often conjuring the everyday activities of a world at peace, farmers ploughing, ants marching, shepherds watching their flocks. Lifted for the moment from the caldron of blood and death, we can take a breath and remember that there are other things in the world besides fear and adrenaline-fueled fury.

The two passages above take the technique one step further, inviting that relief then diving abruptly back toward death. Patroclus becomes a bloodthirsty angler, while Thestor is reduced to a helpless, gasping creature. The tone of the scene is especially grotesque, as the fisherman’s calm skill and practiced technique is laid over the brutal disposal of a warrior’s body. The description in Book Twenty-Four, comparing Iris to a “sinker,” a lead weight that pulls the fisherman’s hook down to the fish, seems less dark at first, but a small detail is intriguing. The disguised hook brings death for the “flesh-eating” fish. The adjective ὠμηστής is striking here, as it usually describes animals or men, not fish, suggesting an unusual blurring of the boundaries between the two worlds of the simile. Iris’s mission will bring Thetis to Olympus, where she will be convinced to let go of the desire to keep Achilles from death, resulting in the release of Hector’s corpse and his subsequent burial, leading in turn to Achilles’ death outside the scope of the poem’s story ( 24.97–140 ). Iris, like the sinker, brings death.

All three similes might well be versions of a “type scene,” part of the poet’s repertoire of traditional material, though the small number of examples make generalizations risky. In any event, comparing the Iliadic similes to our passage affords some insight into how this version of the figure functions. The initial dissonance between the peaceful world of the fisherman and the horrors of the battlefield is not part of our passage, which offers not a contrast but a grim parallel, the gasping fish echoing the gasping sailors. The ox horn sheathing the hook, also mentioned in the simile from Iliad 24, has a special resonance here. Once again, as we have seen earlier, the poet seems to preview the cattle of the sun episode, where eating the καλαὶ βόες εὐρυμέτωποι (12.262) will bring death for the sailors.

The Greeks sail on, finally reaching Thrinakia, where the cattle and sheep of Helios, previously unmolested, live under the protection of their two female shepherds. As this final deadly adventure, previewed in the poem’s seventh verse, finally comes into view again, the poet brings several recurring motifs to a climax. First, we notice that Odysseus hears the animals before seeing them:

δὴ τότ᾽ ἐγὼν ἔτι πόντῳ ἐὼν ἐν νηὶ μελαίνῃ μυκηθμοῦ τ᾽ ἤκουσα βοῶν αὐλιζομενάων οἰῶν τε βληχήν:

Then, while still on the water and in the dark ship, I heard the mooing of the cattle in their pens and the beating sheep.

Odyssey 12.264–266

Dangerous female voices beckon once again. Odysseus recalls the warnings of Teiresias and Circe, urging him to sail on by the island, and repeats them to the crew. The tension between centripetal and centrifugal impulses in Odysseus resurfaces, with the former holding sway. In contrast to the Cyclops and Circe episodes, Odysseus seems intent now on seeking home, not satisfying his curiosity and need to master the world through knowledge. This preference will hold from now until the suitors are dead, when the old yearning will reappear in the royal couple’s postcoital chat:

ὦ γύναι, ἤδη μὲν πολέων κεκορήμεθ᾽ ἀέθλων ἀμφοτέρω, σὺ μὲν ἐνθάδ᾽ ἐμὸν πολυκηδέα νόστον κλαίουσ᾽. αὐτὰρ ἐμὲ Ζεὺς ἄλγεσι καὶ θεοὶ ἄλλοι ἱέμενον πεδάασκον ἐμῆς ἀπὸ πατρίδος αἴης: νῦν δ᾽ ἐπεὶ ἀμφοτέρω πολυήρατον ἱκόμεθ᾽ εὐνήν, κτήματα μὲν τά μοι ἔστι, κομιζέμεν ἐν μεγάροισι,355 μῆλα δ᾽ ἅ μοι μνηστῆρες ὑπερφίαλοι κατέκειραν, πολλὰ μὲν αὐτὸς ἐγὼ ληΐσσομαι, ἄλλα δ᾽ Ἀχαιοὶ δώσουσ᾽, εἰς ὅ κε πάντας ἐνιπλήσωσιν ἐπαύλους.

My dear, already we both are sated with many trials, you weeping here over my homecoming, fraught with troubles, while Zeus and the other gods held me in pain as I longed for my fatherland. But now, since we both have returned to our beloved marriage bed, you take care of my possessions here in the palace; but as for my flocks, which the arrogant suitors have used up, many of them I will replace by raiding, and others the Achaeans will give me, until they fill all the pens.

Odyssey 23.350–358

The inner struggle, it seems, will never end.

Edwards, M.W. 1987. Homer: Poet of the Iliad , 71–77. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Reinhardt, K. 1942. “The Adventures in the Odyssey .” In Schein, S. 1996. Reading the Odyssey . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 102–104.

Eurylochus convinces Odysseus to let the crew land on Thrinakia. Odysseus makes the crew swear an oath not to eat the cattle of Helios.

Odysseus reports to the crew about the advice from Teiresias and Circe and it breaks their hearts, as it did when he told them they would have to explore Circe’s island and travel to the Underworld (12.277 = 10.193 , 566 ). As usual, Eurylochus speaks for the sailors. Odysseus is σχέτλιός , his “iron” limbs never wear out (279–280). The adjective once again signals amazement (see 12.116 with essay), but affectionate tone it carries when coming from one of the hero’s female protectors is decidedly absent.

The adjective σιδήρεα (280) typically describes a hard, unbending heart or will in Homeric epic. Like σχέτλιός, its tone can vary according to the context. Priam’s determination to retrieve his son from Achilles earns this epithet from both Hekabe and Achilles ( Il. 24.205 , 521 ). His wife is frustrated by his stubborn insistence on putting himself in danger; his enemy can only wonder at the frail old man’s courage. When Penelope refuses to acknowledge Odysseus immediately after he has dispatched the suitors ( 23.172 ), his use of the adjective to describe her heart carries the rich and subtle crosscurrents of emotion that underlie their first meeting in twenty years, frustration, even anger, but also a grudging admiration for his wife, who like him has endured and suffered, who refuses to be fooled.

The threats that Eurylochus foresees if the crew cannot land are familiar. Instead of a meal and rest, they will have to sail through the night on the dark sea, where winds and waves will overwhelm the ship. Odysseus sees the hand of a malevolent deity at work. His will overrode the qualms of the men earlier in the journey, but now he gives in. He acquiesces in Eurylochus’s plan to land on shore at Thrinakia but extracts an oath from the crew that they will abstain from eating any cattle or sheep they encounter. After they land the ship, eat dinner, and grieve for their companions, Zeus brings on the stormy dark anyway:

ὦρσεν ἔπι ζαῆν ἄνεμον νεφεληγερέτα Ζεὺς λαίλαπι θεσπεσίῃ, σὺν δὲ νεφέεσσι κάλυψε γαῖαν ὁμοῦ καὶ πόντον: ὀρώρει δ᾽ οὐρανόθεν νύξ.

Cloud-gathering Zeus stirred the stormy wind with a supernatural gale, and smothered land and sea. Night sprang from the heavens.

Odyssey 12.313–315

Threatened with drowning, eclipsed (Calypso-ed?) by clouds and darkness, the Greeks face what Odysseus will next encounter on Ogygia, the oblivion that has chased them across the sea.

The next morning Odysseus speaks again to the crew about eating from the local herds, this time raising the ante by mentioning for the first time that the cattle belong to Helios, who “sees all and hears all” (323). As he comes ever closer to the decisive event mentioned all the way back in the seventh verse of the poem, the poet draws out the action, slowing things down to make us wait. The perspective in this last adventure shifts, insofar as we have been told specifically that the destruction of the crew is near. Now all each meal, described with the familiar traditional phrases, might also be the crew’s last and the shadow of death creeps over these remaining scenes. The Odyssey is a comic story, driven by the need for restoration (See Introduction, para. 5 ). All will be well, we are told over and over, when Odysseus gets back home and kills the suitors. The lives of the other crew members, at the same time, are less important. Their deaths are certainly not welcome, but after all, they have brought destruction on themselves by failing to control their impulses. What seeps in here at the end of the adventures is a tragic undercurrent like the one that dominates the Iliad , nudging us toward a recognition that death finally defines the meaning of mortal life—for all mortals, even the weak-willed crew.

Adverse winds strand the Greeks on Thrinakia for a month. Odysseus goes to pray to the gods and falls asleep. Eurylochus convinces the crew to slaughter some cattle to eat.

The wrong winds blow for a month, food from the ship runs out, and the crew is forced to subsist on birds and fish. Enforced stasis never brings out the best in Homeric heroes (See Aulis ), but trouble with winds evokes another, closer parallel. As we hear how the disastrous month plays out, a familiar rhythm surfaces: the Greeks are given a divine imperative, the ignoring of which will be fatal; having warned them sternly, Odysseus eventually falls asleep, leaving his crew on their own; they fail to control themselves; storms at sea and the death of many crew members follow.

This pattern appears earlier, in the Aeolus episode just before the Greeks arrive at Circe’s island (10.1–79). Other similarities repay attention: like Thrinakia, the island of Aeolus has a magical quality, reflecting the inhabitants’ special status with the gods. Aeolus controls the winds as an agent for Zeus, while divine nymphs look after the herds for Helios. And in both cases, the transgressions of the Greeks interfere with elemental forces in the universe.

Aeolus’s outburst, when Odysseus asks for help a second time, seems somewhat harsh in the circumstances:

ἔρρ᾽ ἐκ νήσου θᾶσσον, ἐλέγχιστε ζωόντων: οὐ γάρ μοι θέμις ἐστὶ κομιζέμεν οὐδ᾽ ἀποπέμπειν ἄνδρα τόν, ὅς κε θεοῖσιν ἀπέχθηται μακάρεσσιν: ἔρρε, ἐπεὶ ἄρα θεοῖσιν ἀπεχθόμενος τόδ᾽ ἱκάνεις.

Away quickly from this island, most shameful creature! It is not sanctioned for me to help on his way a man who is so hated by the blessed gods. Away, I say! This return means you are hateful to the gods!

Odyssey 10.72–75

That the crew gave in to the ordinary human failings of envy and resentment does not seem to merit this condemnation of their captain. But the stakes here transcend the ethical realm of human behavior. By unleashing the winds and creating chaos, the sailors disturb something in the regular processes of nature, undermining Aeolus’s divinely sanctioned role as guardian of order on the sea. All the Greek sailors except those on Odysseus’ ship then die at the hands of the Laestrygonians. The disaster on Thrinakia disturbs another kind of order. There are 350 cattle and 350 sheep in the herds, numbers that are never supposed to be changed, by birth or death. The animals are sacred to the deity whose journeys across the sky measure out the days and months, and as we have noted, thinkers as early as Aristotle have seen the number of animals in each herd as reflecting the days of the year. The crew’s attack, then, could be seen as an attack on time itself and as a consequence everyone but Odysseus dies. In each episode, the price for Odysseus falling asleep and failing to control his crew triggers a descent into chaos on a potentially cosmic scale. We will revisit the implications of these parallel events for the overall structure of Books Five through Twelve in a broader discussion below.

Convinced by Eurylochus, who declares that he would rather drown than starve (350–351), the crew raids the cattle of Helios. The preparations that precede the meal include familiar language (359–361), but the crew’s dire situation forces some creativity in the ritual gestures that usually accompany a feast: instead of sprinkling grain over the meat, they drape leaves; for wine, they substitute water. While these changes seem reasonable enough in a naturalistic sense, symbolically they mark yet again the dangerously transgressive nature of the feast.

The ill-omened sacrifice of divine cattle had a second life in early Greek literature, in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes , a poem from the Sixth Century BCE. On the day of his birth in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Central Greece, Hermes displays his astounding divine powers by inventing both the lyre and the method—known to future Boy and Girl Scouts—for starting a fire with friction, then stealing the cattle sacred to his big brother Apollo. The work is one of four longer extant hexameter poems probably composed between 700 and 550 BCE, each with a story or stories about a particular Olympian deity. The style of all these poems resembles that of the Iliad and Odyssey to varying degrees, but each closely enough to suggest that these works were part of a tradition of hexameter poetry that spread across the mainland of Greece and the coast of is what now Turkey between the Eighth and the Sixth Centuries BCE. The Hermes hymn is the latest of these narratives, perhaps dating to sometime in the early to mid-Sixth Century.

To what in the Odyssey might the hymn poet have been responding? The central act of transgression has an entirely humorous tone in this later work. The baby god uses clever tricks to escape being caught in the act of cattle theft, walking the herd backwards, wearing reversed sandals of his own invention. Though he does sacrifice twelve head of cattle, unlike the crew members in the Odyssey he does not eat any of them. (The ritual meaning of the sacrifice is obscure, though killing twelve from the herd as part of a plan to gain recognition among the Olympian gods seems significant.) Divine retribution in the hymn takes the form of Apollo tracking the baby down in his cave on Mount Cyllene and hauling him off to Olympus. The exchanges between Hermes and Apollo, in the cave and later on Olympus, highlight the precocity of the infant as opposed to his stolid big brother. Zeus finds the baby amusing and declares a truce, which in reality is a triumph for Hermes, who has had as his goal to gain recognition his father Zeus on Olympus for himself and his mother, who have been languishing in obscurity in Arcadia.

The most significant traits that Odysseus himself shares with Hermes are those of the trickster, a figure found in folktales from all over the world. We will learn in Book Nineteen that Odysseus is the maternal grandson of Autolycus, famous for his skill in thievery and clever oaths, qualities that the god Hermes bestowed on him (19.395–398). Later tradition makes Autolycus the son of Hermes, tying Odysseus yet more closely to the god. Certain features of the trickster paradigm are especially relevant to Odysseus in the Odyssey . The trickster is always an outsider, always transgressive in some way and usually a subversive force. Hermes is a typical trickster in that, as the god of boundaries, he is necessarily transgressive. In Greek literature and myth, he is the guide of souls to the Underworld, the agent for crossing the most permanent of thresholds. In the hymn, he crosses over all kinds of boundaries, from childhood to mature mastery in one day, from Arcadia to Olympus. He drags the divine cattle of Apollo out of their pasture and by killing twelve of them, brings them across the boundary between immortal and mortal.

The trickster always has the potential for effecting change by penetrating worlds usually closed to him and shaking up the regular order of things. Hermes, by entering the magical world of Calypso in Book Five, thwarts the nymph’s plan to keep Odysseus with her, out of human time. Likewise, Odysseus, every time he enters a new place as an anonymous stranger—including Ithaka, where he gets inside the palace disguised as an old beggar—carries the potential for change. In fact, we could say that he is the principal agent of permanent change in the poem. When the Phaeacians return Odysseus to Ithaka on their ship, they are punished by Poseidon, who turns the ship to stone in the harbor and threatens to bury their city under a mountain (13.128–187). Polyphemus, who had been living a settled life on his own, is rendered helpless when Odysseus blinds him (9.407–414).

In general, we would expect the trickster to show up when the centrifugal elements of Odysseus’s character are prominent, the restless, rootless wanderer who seeks out new experiences. In the cattle of the sun episode, this alignment is altered. It is the crew, who by transgressing against the injunction of Helios, imperils the return to Ithaka. Odysseus, by trying to enforce the divine imperative, appears in his centripetal persona, working to get back home.

Austin, N. 1975. Archery at the Dark of the Moon , 137. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brown, N. 1948. Hermes the Thief . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Hyde, L. 1998. Trickster Makes This World , 203–225. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Reinhardt, K. 1942. “The Adventures in the Odyssey .” In Schein, S. 1996. Reading the Odyssey . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 99–102.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey , 83–90. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Odysseus is awakened by the smell of cooking meat. Lampetia tells her father Helios of the Greeks’ transgression. He complains to Zeus, who promises punishment for the crew.

Awake from his nap, Odysseus heads back to the ship, only to encounter yet another dangerously seductive fragrance. The temptation that overwhelmed his crew seems to be carried by the savor of cooking cattle. These are female cows (καλαὶ βόες,12.262), tended by nymphs. The savor “surrounds” Odysseus, like the female voices (θῆλυς ἀυτή, 6.121) that swirl around him on the beach at Scheria. Once more before the final destruction of his ship and crew, a seductive female force wafts around him, threatening to blur the clear outlines of his heroic resolve.

The nymph shepherdess Lampetia, “Sunny,” tattles to Helios, who complains to Zeus, threatening to move his sunshine to the land of the dead, another cosmic dislocation that the crew’s transgression could bring on. Zeus assures Helios that he will take care of the situation. In his role as sky god, he will unleash yet another destructive storm on the hapless sailors. The exchange takes us back once more to the beginning of the poem, where the crew’s folly and consequent destruction are announced (1.7). As we near the end of Odysseus’s story, the poet circles back to its beginnings. Homer has not drawn attention to any of the inconsistencies, from a naturalistic point of view, that pop up in the course of Odysseus recounting of the adventures in 9–12—for instance how he knows what Eurylochus says to the crew when he (Odysseus) is sleeping—so it is somewhat surprising that Odysseus fastidiously tells his audience that he knows of the conversation between Zeus and Helios because Calypso told him later. As the story of Odysseus’s adventures ends, Homer gently reminds us that there are layers of narrators guiding us and that the present storyteller will relinquish control to the poet again soon.

Once discovered by their captain, the crew members blame each other halfheartedly, but there is no remedy now. A resigned mood seems to hang over their feasting, as if they know these will be their last meals together. Distortion of the natural order continues as the gods send creepy portents, rippling flesh on the spits, bellowing like the mooing of cows.

Segal, C. 1992. “Divine Justice in the Odyssey : Poseidon, Cyclops, and Helios.” In Schein, S. 1996. Reading the Odyssey . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 191–199.

The crew feasts for six days, the weather changes and they set sail for home. Zeus sends a storm that destroys the ships and all the crew drowns. Odysseus survives by lashing the keel and mast together and riding them in the sea.

After six days of gloomy dining, the crew sets sail and darkness envelopes them one more time (403–406). The next eight verses cover in great detail the destruction of the ship: forestays snapped, mast flattened, the helmsman’s head crushed as he goes overboard like an acrobat—this last a variation on the earlier gruesome simile of the crew yanked out of the ship by Skylla like fish on the hook (12.251–256). Then Zeus finishes them off, leaving all but Odysseus to die, bobbing like crows in the sea.

The long, exciting journey home ends for the crew with this grim simile. As the poem’s opening lines foretold, their lack of self-control finally catches up with them. Odysseus notes their fate but expresses no particular sadness over it, even though we might see reasons for him to feel some remorse for the times when his curiosity cost lives. Odysseus is the right hero for this story, emotionally closed off from others, relentlessly self-disciplined, ready to lie at any time to anyone if it will give him leverage over others. The rhetoric of the poem always urges us to valorize any act, no matter how callous, that ensures the survival of its hero. Emotional entanglements are only a hindrance in this perspective and the crew members become interchangeable with the suitors, immature men who are unable to control their impulses and die for it at Odysseus’s hands. We may think of the Iliad , with its many violent, graphic deaths, its heroes vaunting cruelly over their victims, as the darker of the two Homeric epics. But that poem, for all its violence, bends finally toward forgiveness, compassion, and healing, forces rarely present in the Odyssey or its hero.

We might be surprised to find that part of this dramatic shipwreck, with all its vivid relevance to the particular place in the story, appears again, almost verbatim, in a false tale that Odysseus delivers in Book Fourteen to Eumaeus, describing a shipwreck off Crete:

ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ Κρήτην μὲν ἐλείπομεν, οὐδέ τις ἄλλη φαίνετο γαιάων, ἀλλ᾽ οὐρανὸς ἠδὲ θάλασσα, δὴ τότε κυανέην νεφέλην ἔστησε Κρονίων νηὸς ὕπερ γλαφυρῆς, ἤχλυσε δὲ πόντος ὑπ᾽ αὐτῆς. Ζεὺς δ᾽ ἄμυδις βρόντησε καὶ ἔμβαλε νηῒ κεραυνόν: ἡ δ᾽ ἐλελίχθη πᾶσα Διὸς πληγεῖσα κεραυνῷ, ἐν δὲ θεείου πλῆτο: πέσον δ᾽ ἐκ νηὸς ἅπαντες. οἱ δὲ κορώνῃσιν ἴκελοι περὶ νῆα μέλαιναν κύμασιν ἐμφορέοντο: θεὸς δ᾽ ἀποαίνυτο νόστον

Odyssey 14.301-309

Lines 301–304 replicate 403–406 in our passage verbatim, with one small change: Κρήτην μὲν (14.301) replaces τὴν νῆσον (12.403). The next eight verses in Book Twelve, describing in detail how the ship is destroyed, do not appear in Book Fourteen. Then the parallels resume, with 14.305–309 echoing 12.415–419, again with one small change to accommodate the differing circumstances: ἅπαντες (14.307) replaces ἑταῖροι —the shipmates in the beggar’s false tale are not his companions, only fellow travelers.

Comparing these two passages offers a window into the mysterious creative process whereby Homer builds his story, using repeated traditional words, phrases, or larger narrative units to compose scenes that are unfailingly fresh in their context. In Book Twelve, we witness the final obliteration of Odysseus’s crew, men who have been with him since Troy. The horrific events in 12.407–415 vividly mark this terrible conclusion. In Book Fourteen, such detail is not necessary for the story to be exciting to the beggar’s audience of one. Likewise, the identical language in the two passages has a different impact in each. The darkness that falls on Odysseus and his crew in Book Twelve is the crescendo of a long series of potentially obliterating events, stretching back as far as Odysseus’s suffocating existence on Calypso’s island in book Five. In the beggar’s tale, which we know is false, the story is merely entertainment to get the two men through the night. We do not care about the lost sailors because we’ve been told they are not real.

Alone again, Odysseus lashes together the keel and mast and floats onward in the storm. The South Wind picks up and he is carried back toward Skylla and Charybdis, establishing the circular rhythm of the story here, foreshadowing the “return” to Calypso. This time through, he avoids Skylla, but Charybdis swallows his makeshift boat, one last encounter with the dark, suffocating forces he has faced all along the way. He escapes that oblivion by clinging like a bat to a tree trunk jutting out over the whirlpool. The unusual simile Odysseus uses to measure how long he has to wait for the timbers to surface breaks through the magical folktale milieu we have been in for most of the adventures, perhaps signaling imminent the arrival back on Ithaka, a world far removed from sucking whirlpools and alluring Sirens.

Odysseus is carried back to Scylla and Charybdis. He barely escapes Charybdis and after ten days washes up on the shore of Calypso’s island, where his narrative to the Phaeacians concludes.

Conclusion: Repetition as Creativity

Book Twelve ends by circling back both to the beginning of Book Nine in the poem’s structure and at the same time to the beginning of Book Five in the chronology of the story. As if emerging from a dream, we suddenly remember that everything Odysseus has told us in Books Nine through Twelve had already happened not only by the time he reaches Scheria but even before we first met him on Ogygia.

Calypso appears here as δεινὴ θεὸς αὐδήεσσα (449), the epithet that ties her to Circe and Ino as a liminal figure on the boundary between human and divine (see above on 10.133–177 ). When we last heard of Calypso, she was sending Odysseus off to sea from her timeless world to the island of the Phaeacians, itself home to an ultra-refined civilization that serves to mediate between the nymph’s non-human realm and the entirely human world of Ithaka. Her reappearance at the end of Book Twelve reminds us that we in fact stand on several overlapping boundaries in the poem, which mark not only differing modes of existence but also the temporal elisions that the poem’s structure creates. We have emerged with Odysseus from the nightmarish gauntlets that punctuate his first years after leaving Troy, full of monsters and dangerous female forces, yet that journey had already happened before the events in Book Five, so we are simultaneously back in the past and on the cusp of the future in Ithaka.

These circles within circles in the poem’s structure serve Homer’s methods as a storyteller, as we have seen. Though Circe comes first in the chronology of the story, in the poem’s structure we learn about her after we have encountered Calypso, Nausicaa, and Arete, the commanding queen of the Phaeacians. The danger she represents is already well-defined by Book Ten, not only embodied in those four different versions of the feminine, but even by Polyphemus, whose peculiar mode of existence resonates in various ways with the witch’s world. By the time Odysseus meets the Sirens, the threat they embody for him is immediately resonant and carefully defined. Likewise, the imagery of the Skylla and Charybdis episodes, on the surface all about monstrous creatures, is powered by the undercurrents of sexual threat. Finally, when the crew encounter the cattle of the Sun, their transgression—cosmic in its reach like the earlier releasing of the winds—is freighted with all their previous failures.

The complex structure of the Odyssey challenges us to keep track of where Odysseus—and we—are in the story at any given time. We might ask ourselves what the poet gains by this elaborate circular architecture. Character in Homeric epic is always a product of analogies generated by parallels between different figures. Repetition, what critics in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries saw as a sign of multiple authorship, is in fact the backbone of the poetry’s meaning. The full significance of Penelope’s character and actions when Odysseus returns in disguise to Ithaka only emerges if we see her as the sum of all the female figures, human and divine, in the story. Odysseus himself emerges from his exile in oblivion with Calypso and evolves in our understanding as against many other male characters, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax—even Telemachus, whose adventures in Pylos and Sparta show him anticipating traits we later see in his father.

In our Odyssey , when Odysseus finishes his story, we are likely thinking ahead to Ithaka. But suppose that Homer had created a linear narrative—as some modern adaptations have done—with the adventures of Books Nine through Twelve coming first, in the third person voice, then Calypso and the Phaeacians, then back to Ithaka? Calypso’s relatively benign affection for Odysseus and Nausicaa’s youthful, charming naivete would appear against the backdrop of life-threatening encounters and would be colored by a much darker undertone. Both of these early episodes are appealing precisely because the poet uses a lighter emotional palette to create Odysseus’ potential paramours. Likewise, the Phaeacians’ warm hospitality would be much more suspect in the wake of the adventures with the dangerous hosts of Book Nine and Ten. When Odysseus wakes up on Ithaka, the emotional weight of the harrowing adventures in Books Nine through Twelve would be distant in our memories, altering our perception of the hero’s eventual triumph.

The implied contrasts between Odysseus and the dead heroes in the Underworld point to the unique qualities that carry him through the dangers of the journey home. Of the heroes returning from Troy, only Odysseus has the requisite intelligence and self-control to survive. The loss of the entire crew foreshadows the death of the suitors, both groups conspicuous for their inability to rein in their impulses. Odysseus himself will need these qualities in abundance once he reaches Ithaka, where he will endure insults, verbal and physical, from the suitors and their allies. The darker aspects of his character have also emerged, his emotional isolation and estrangement from his crew, his insistence on pursuing knowledge and experience not strictly necessary to the success of the mission, which puts his crew in danger, costing many of them their lives. His survival is of paramount importance; theirs, it sometimes seems, is not.

All of these traits, positive and negative, come to a crescendo in the most charged and important encounter of the poem, Odysseus’ campaign to win Penelope back. The dark paradigm of Clytemnestra, which hovers over the entire poem, beginning in Book One and reinforced in the Underworld, seems to inform Odysseus’ decision—backed by Athena’s machinations—to stay undercover and leave Penelope in the dark as he plans his revenge on the suitors. He cannot trust her to keep his secrets. But in fact, her intelligence and self-control are a match for his, as we observe the delicate course of action she pursues in Books Eighteen through Twenty-Three. It is never clear—perhaps not even to her— whether she has decided to give up and choose a new husband or keep waiting for Odysseus’ increasingly unlikely return. Even when the suitors are dead, she holds out, outsmarting Odysseus and making him lose his legendary self-control with the ruse of the bed, before finally giving in and acknowledging his identity as her husband. Their joyous reunion, which they and we have looked forward to for so long, is enriched by the continuing presence, reinforced by the poet’s use of repeated patterns of character and action, of all the characters who embody aspects of them both: Calypso, Nausicaa, Arete, Circe, Menelaus, Telemachus, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax. There is only one Penelope, only one Odysseus, but they come into being before us as the richly layered and deeply human creations of a poet working within a thoroughly traditional medium.

Thalman, W. 1992. The Odyssey: An Epic of Return , 65–69. New York: Twayne Publishers

Thomas Van Nortwick and Rob Hardy, Homer: Odyssey 5–12 . Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-947822-17-7.

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• Importance of the Book “Odyssey” by Homer Genre: Research paper Words: 866 Focused on: Father-son relationships, the role of women, the themes of hospitality and disguise Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Athena
• Examples of Hospitality in the “Odyssey” [Hospitality Theme Essay] Genre: Research Paper Words: 2463 Focused on: The theme and examples of hospitality in The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Zeus, Baucis, Philemon, Calypso, Circe, Poseidon, Phaeacians, Penelope, Athena
• Father-son relationship In The Odyssey by Homer Genre: Essay Words: 825 Focused on: The relationship between Odysseus and Telemachus Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Telemachus
• “Odyssey”: The Relationship between the monstrous and the human Response Essay Genre: Response Essay Words: 579 Focused on: The relationship between monsters and people Characters mentioned: Odysseys, Polyphemus, Circe, Calypso, the Lotus-eaters
• “The Odyssey” by Homer Genre: Essay Words: 605 Focused on: Comparison between Telemachus and Odysseus Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Telemachus
• The Ghosts in Homer’s Odyssey Genre: Essay Words: 565 Focused on: The role and behavior of the ghosts in The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Elpenor, Tiresias, Anticleia
• The Meaning and Impact of the Closing Book of The Odyssey Genre: Essay Words: 1878 Focused on: The ending of The Odyssey according to different critics Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Agamemnon, Laertes, Circe, Achilles
• The Expression of Sarcasm in the Odyssey Genre: Analytical Essay Words: 849 Focused on: Humor and sarcasm in particular in The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Laodamas, Euryalos, Antinoos, Eumaios, Telemachos, Eurymachos, Ktesippos, Theoklymenos, suitors
• Disguise in the “Odyssey”: Character Development & Athena’s Impact Genre: Critical Essay Words: 1152 Focused on: Theme of deception and disguise Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, King Alcinous, Telemachus, Penelope, Eurykleia, Antinous
• Homer’s “The Odyssey” Genre: Essay Words: 1169 Focused on: Hospitality in the Greek society and other related themes Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, Athena, Antinous, Nestor, Menelaus, Eteoneus, Peisistratos
• Analysis of Job’s and Odysseus Genre: Essay Words: 822 Focused on: Comparison of the main characters of The Odyssey and The Story of Job Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Job, Calypso, Polyphemus, Athena, and other gods
• Monstrous and human relationship in “Odyssey” Genre: Response Essay Words: 578 Focused on: The relationships between people and monsters Characters mentioned: Odysseus, cyclops and Polyphemus, Laestrygonians, suitors, Circe
• Role of Fate and Divine Intervention in Oedipus and Odyssey Essay Genre: Essay Words: 1163 Focused on: Comparison of the themes from The Odyssey and Oedipus Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Oedipus, Calypso, Zeus, Penelope, Athena, suitors
• The Odyssey by Homer Genre: Essay Words: 1255 Focused on: Honor and deception in The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Polyphemus, Penelope
• Greek/Roman Humanities: Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey Genre: Essay Words: 920 Focused on: Comparison of two epics: The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Gilgamesh
• Divine Comedy and the Odyssey as Epics Compare and Contrast Essay Genre: Compare and Contrast Essay Words: 1378 Focused on: Comparison of Divine Comedy and The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Dante
• Gilgamesh and Odysseus: A comparison Genre: Essay Words: 1373 Focused on: Comparison of the heroes: Gilgamesh and Odysseus Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Gilgamesh
• The Role of Hospitality in the Homeric World-Odyssey Genre: Essay Words: 1203 Focused on: Theme of hospitality Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Athena, Penelope, Telemachus, Nestor, Pisistratus, Menelaus, Eteoneus
• Penelope Is a Real Hero Genre: Research Paper Words: 1901 Focused on: The role of Penelope in the story and her heroic qualities Characters mentioned: Penelope, Odysseus, Telemachus, suitors, Athena
• Human Potential in Rig Veda, Genesis and Homer’s Odyssey Genre: Essay Words: 1655 Focused on: Humanity and human potential in three stories: Rig Veda, Genesis, and The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus
• Odysseus as Husband Genre: Essay Words: 1895 Focused on: Odusseus’ loyalty and love towards his wife Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Penelope, Poseidon, Polyphemus, Calypso
• Comparison of the Men of the 21st century to Dushyanta and Odysseus Genre: Essay Words: 1490 Focused on: Comparison between the male cultures of Odysseus and Dushyanta to the contemporary one Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Achilles, Calypso, Penelope
• Penelope Is the Determining Moral Agent Genre: Essay Words: 621 Focused on: The role of Penelope as the embodiment of rightfulness of The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Penelope, Odysseus, suitors
• The Beggar King of Ithaca Genre : Essay Words: 586 Focused on: Odysseus as a ruler and individual Characters mentioned: Odysseus
• Importance of Knowing Yourself and Your Enemy Genre: Essay Words: 1368 Focused on: Understanding yourself and becoming a winner as explored in The Odyssey, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Gospel of Mark Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Polyphemus
• The Issue of “Man’s Relationship with the Divine” in Greek Mythology Genre: Essay Words: 1115 Focused on : Man’s relationship with the divine in The Iliad, The Odyssey, Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Agamemnon, Achilles, Zeus, Athena
• Odysseus Heroism Genre : Essay Words: 2331 Focused on: Odysseus as a hero Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Penelope, Poseidon, Eurycleia, Athena, Telemachus, Antinous
• Odysseus and Athena Comparison as Liars Genre: Term Paper Words: 1156 Focused on: Comparison of Athena’s and Odysseus’ deception Characters mentioned: Athena, Odysseus, Telemachus, Polyphemos, Eumaeus, Penelope
• Hero in “The Odysseus” and “The Epic of Gilgamesh” Genre: Essay Words: 558 Focused on: Comparison of Odysseus and Gilgamesh as heroes Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Cyclops
• Odysseus and Creon Comparison Genre: Essay Words: 1118 Focused on: Comparison of Odysseus and Creon as leaders Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Creon, Poseidon, Calypso, Athena
• Homer’s Poem “Odyssey” Genre: Essay Words: 3094 Focused on: Odysseus qualities throughout the epic Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Polyphemus, Athena, Penelope, Eumaios, Philoitios, Calypso, Cyclops, Poseidon, Circe, Cicones, Odysseus’ crew, Penelope’s suitors
• Rama and Odysseus as Eastern and Western Heroes Genre: Term Paper Words: 1191 Focused on: Comparison of Rama and Odysseus as heroes Characters mentioned: Rama, Odysseus, Zeus, Circe
• ‘Homer’s The Odyssey’ by Bernhard Frank Genre: Essay Words: 874 Focused on: Analysis of Frank Bernhard’s book on The Odyssey’s non-chronological structure Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Argos, Penelope, Polyphemus
• “The Odyssey” by Homer Discussion Genre: Essay Words: 1124 Focused on: Penelope as a Greek heroine Characters mentioned: Penelope, Odysseus, Telemachus, suitors
• Concept of Home in “The Odyssey” and “Harry Potter” Genre: Essay Words: 1117 Focused on: Comparison: the concept of home is The Odyssey by Homer and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by Rowling Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Harry Potter, Poseidon, Calypso, Athena, Zeus
• Themes in Books VIII-XI of Homer’s “The Odyssey” Genre: Research Paper Words: 2276 Focused on: Themes of fate, prophecy, and death in Books 8-11 of The Odyssey and Odysseus’ narration Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Polyphemus, Penelope, Poseidon, suitors, Tiresias, Hades, Persephone, Circe, Achilles, Ajax
• Roles of Women in “The Odyssey” by Homer Genre: Essay Words: 1693 Focused on: The roles women could take in the Ancient Greek society, according to The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Penelope, Calypso, Circe, Athena, Helen
• Gender Role Expectations in “The Odyssey” by Homer Genre: Essay Words: 556 Focused on: The role of gender and associated expectations in the epic Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Calypso, Circe, Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis
• Varying Moral Worlds in Odyssey and Aeneid Genre: Essay Words: 1761 Focused on: Comparison of the themes in The Aeneid and The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Odysseus, Aeneas, Penelope, Calypso, Cyclops
• Telemachus Journey from Boyhood to Hero: Homer’s Odyssey Genre: Essay Words: 698 Focused on: How Telemachus became a hero Characters mentioned: Telemachus, Odysseus, Penelope, Menelaus
• Women in Literature: Oedipus the King and The Odyssey Genre: Essay Words: 1190 Focused on: Comparison of women’s roles in Oedipus the King and The Odyssey Characters mentioned: Oedipus, Odysseus, Penelope, Helen, Arete and Nausicaa

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Homer versus Virgil

Sign up for Joseph Pearce’s course on Classical Epic and Tragedy this Fall: https://rosary.college/applicant-registration/

As Homer tells us in the opening lines of The Iliad , its theme is the pride and anger of Achilles and the destructive and devastating consequences of such prideful anger. In other words, on the most basic level, pride precedes a fall. Yet Homer goes much deeper than this. He illustrates that pride destroys and devastates the lives of the innocent. It is not merely the sinner who suffers the consequences of sin, he also inflicts suffering on others with every prideful act. Pride does not merely precede a fall, it claims innocent victims. And Homer goes deeper still. He tells us at the very beginning of The Iliad , immediately after informing us that his theme is Achilles’ pride and its destructive consequences, that the will of Zeus is accomplished. In other words, the hand of providence ultimately triumphs over pride in the way in which God punishes the sinner with the consequences of his sin. But what are we to make of the innocent victims? Is it God’s will that they suffer the effects of the sins of others?

These questions are addressed in Homer’s other epic, The Odyssey . At the beginning of this epic, Zeus states that men are always blaming the gods for the suffering in their lives, whereas suffering is caused by their own recklessness, with the exception of that suffering which is “given”. In other words, suffering can be caused by sin or it can be a gift. The remainder of The Odyssey is a playing out of Homer’s exposition of the mystery of suffering, or what C. S. Lewis called “the problem of pain”. Odysseus and his men suffer greatly from the consequences of their own recklessness but, in Odysseus’ case, he learns that suffering is a gift which must be accepted and even embraced as a means of growing in wisdom and humility.

Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid , was written twenty to thirty years before the birth of Christ and about 800 years after Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey . Unlike the works of Homer, which address perennial truths transcending the fads and fashions of the age in which they were written, Virgil was apparently doing the bidding of his political masters, especially the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus. The Aeneid is a patriotic poem, eulogizing the glories of imperial Rome. It is, therefore, a child of the epoch in which it was written to a degree that is much less the case with the Homeric epics. It was unfinished at the time of Virgil’s death and his last wish was that the poem should be destroyed. It would seem, therefore, that Virgil was unhappy with it.

Why was this?

It is, of course, difficult to know the answer to this enigmatic question. One possible answer is that Virgil was uncomfortable serving as the de facto poet laureate of imperial Rome. Perhaps he felt that he was betraying his Muse in the writing of a patriotic work, presumably at the behest of Caesar, which glorified Rome as the dominant imperial power in the world.

Although we cannot know the reasons for Virgil’s apparent dislike of his own epic, we can at least be happy that his final wish was not carried out. We can thank Caesar himself for preserving The Aeneid for posterity, since it was he who forbade its destruction and ordered its publication. In doing so, he gave us the fruits of Virgil’s genius. Without his timely intervention, we would be bereft of Virgil’s depiction of the tragic passion of Aeneas and Dido, the “prisoners of lust” who forsook their responsibilities to indulge in erotic self-gratification. We would also be bereft of the vision of the after-life, in which Virgil adds flesh, or at least shades of colour, to Homer’s theological musings on the judgment of the dead. Such musings would inspire Dante’s own epic, The Divine Comedy , without which we would all be so much the poorer.

Returning to our original questions, we can conclude that Homer’s epics tell us less about the epoch in which they were written than does Virgil’s, the latter of which is very much a product of its own time? To that extent, insofar as Homer’s works are less the children of their own time, and insofar as they transcend the expression of any particular zeitgeist, shining forth perennial truths, it is tempting to judge Homer to be Virgil’s superior. Since, however, all three epics are not for an age but for all ages, it would be a foolhardy judge who succumbed to the temptation to pass judgment. Since the present author is not foolish enough to rush in where wiser judges fear to tread, he will simply confess the temptation without succumbing to it.

This essay was first published here in December 2021. 

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The featured image is “The Parnassus” (detail), painted between between 1509 and 1510, by Raphael, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons .

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I think that it is an interesting reflection about the three epic stories. It would have been interesting to include Gil Gamesh in this article. Although it is a bit different of the Illiad, Oddissey and Eneid. I love that in his spiritual biography Knox entitled spiritual Eneid.

I think you are under valuing Virgil’s epic here. The timeless value as the central theme of The Aeneid is pious, sacrificial duty. Aeneas could be seen as the opposite of the self-centered Achilles, who with his ego brings devastating consequences. Aeneas’ sacrificial piety does the very opposite, it brings the building of a great empire and civilization. This is not just a nationalistic poem, though it is that too. But Homer’s two epics are nationalistic poems too.

In literary tradition of India, a poet must serve Truth and not kings and princes. Perhaps Virgil, awakening to his vocation, came to realise that he has been a servant of his master and not of Muses.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Odyssey — Exploring Female Characters in Homer’s Odyssey

Exploring Female Characters in Homer's Odyssey

• Categories: Homer The Odyssey

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Published: Sep 1, 2023

Words: 742 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

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Penelope: the paragon of faithfulness, circe: enchantment and transformation, athena: wisdom and strategic guidance.

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