A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (6 page)

This division proposed and debated by scholars nevertheless can and should fade into relative unimportance for us as
readers
of either poem. What is important is to realize how the poet of
The Odyssey
depends on
The Iliad
and what differences obtain between the two.
The Odyssey
certainly presents itself as post-Iliadic, just as the story it relates is subsequent to the action of
The Iliad
. As the Commentary will frequently note, the characters and predicaments of
The Odyssey
are regularly presented against a backdrop we know best from
The Iliad
. (We can only speculate on the shape of many of the other epics then circulating.) The Helen of
The Odyssey
must be read against the Helen of
The Iliad
. The same goes for Akhilleus, whose appearance and words in Hades take their very point from their distance from those which characterized the hero of
The Iliad
. Scholars may or may not want to “separate” the author of
The Iliad
from that of
The Odyssey
, but, considering the cumulative and communal working of oral tradition and the intertextual relationships between the two poems (i.e., the allusions and references from one to the other), we are well advised to
read
them as the products of one Homer.
¹²

It is in light of the archeology of the Homeric poems that the archeological reader must approach the history and geography represented in them. History and archeology can tell us much about the worlds in which the poems took shape, but to go back from the world described in
The Iliad
or
The Odyssey
to reconstruct a coherent picture of Homer’s time is not possible. I noted earlier that Parry’s oral-formulaic theory outstripped the discoveries of archeologists as a source of insights into the world of Homer’s poems. These discoveries are real, but as our understanding of Minoan-Mycenaean and other first-and second-millennium
B.C.E
. Mediterranean civilizations has advanced, it has become clear that the relationship of the Homeric poems to the actual history and everyday reality of these cultures is one of fictional representation, indeed, layers of fictional representation not unlike the layers of an archeological site. Commentators occasionally still claim to find “memories of Mycenae” in the Homeric poems, in other words, references to artifacts such as a boar’s-tooth helmet or the Mycenaean features of a floor plan. Traces of distant memories they may be, but we must remember that for Homer and his poems they were in no sense “Mycenaean”: he and his audience had a generalized sense of the glories of their forebears, but this had not yet been given a specific time and locale through the work of archeologists and historical linguists.

Likewise, in an age when travel was difficult, and when no one had the bird’s-eye view of the Mediterranean we get easily today from maps and satellite photographs, none of those in Homer’s audience would have been able to say where Homeric geography diverged from that of the real world. Indeed, given the localization of knowledge which would characterize such a culture, audiences in different places would react differently to the representation of the world. To judge from the areas which are described fairly clearly, it would appear that the Homeric audience knew the Greek mainland and the Aegean basin, including the western littoral of what we
now call Turkey (parts of which were “Greek” into the present century—the evacuation of Smyrna/Izmir dates only to 1921, and possession of Cyprus, just outside the Aegean, is still hotly contested). West of the Greek mainland, the geography seems to have become uncertain very quickly. Even the precise assignment of Ithaka and its fellow islands in Homer to the actual landmasses northwest of Greece in the Ionian Sea engages scholars in controversy, and despite the clever arguments of many students of Homer, I have no confidence that “Homer” ever laid eyes on Ithaka. I am confident that most of his audience had not, and thus would not have cared about the “accuracy” of his descriptions of features of the Ithakan landscape (e.g., cave of the nymphs, bay) that frequently exercise commentators. Still less would they have striven to locate the land of the Kyklopês or the Laistrygônes; we must imagine that even the directions such places evoked in Homer’s audiences varied depending on whether they lived in Boiotia or in Pylos, to the north or to the south. By the same token, Homer’s audience would not have presumed that his geography was
not
accurate: the point is that accuracy measured by our standards was not and could not have been an issue. To a listener who had never left his mountain village in Arkadia, an accurate description of the currents in the Dardanelles might sound more fantastic than the most outlandish tale of gigantic shepherds living in what would otherwise be a familiar landscape.

Earlier I suggested an analogy between the layers of historical representation or memory in Homer and the multiple horizons of an archeological dig. In the poems, however, the layers are often mixed, unconsciously of course, to a degree that would give a professional archeologist nightmares. Homeric implements and weapons are at times bronze, at other times iron, simultaneous in Homer in a way that does not reflect the revolution in technology and warfare that the introduction of iron actually meant for Mediterranean cultures. The contradictory customs of bride-price and dowry coexist in a manner unparalleled in any culture known to
anthropologists. But while Aegean archeology and anthropology cannot explain such features, the archeology of the poems and the anthropology of their performance can. It is common to cite as a comparable case the rewriting of history which the events of 778
C.E
.—for which we have testimony in several contemporary or near-contemporary chronicles—underwent in the process of making the
Chanson de Roland
. Neither contemporary witnesses nor modern historians doubt that it was the (Christian) Basques who attacked the rearguard of Charlemagne’s Franks as they passed back into France after campaigning against the Moors in Spain. But for reasons of narrative economy, and even more clearly of ideology, the Old French epic has simplified the story, making the “infidel” Moslems responsible for this treachery.

It is important to recognize that casual anachronism and lack of concern for historical and topographical accuracy are by no means limited to prescientific cultures. We may again compare contemporary forms of popular entertainment, which in our world happily coexist with scrupulously historical academic studies widely available in bookstores and libraries. If two or three World War II movies were all that survived from the twentieth century, how accurately could the thirtieth century reconstruct the history of the war, much less all of twentieth-century history? Parts yes, but the reconstruction would be neither complete nor balanced. Such representations become even less reliable as the events or cultures they purport to depict recede into the past and the genre takes on a life of its own. How accurate a picture of the Old West do most westerns provide? Popular entertainment gives a greatly stylized view even of contemporary institutions, processed according to the narrative demands and internal logic of the genre. Police thrillers give a highly glamorized picture of actual police life. Likewise, from watching countless courtroom dramas on television one would not have a very good chance of reconstructing our judicial system with accuracy. How accurate a picture could members of a later culture hope to get?

Such comparisons are not intended to discourage students from research into Bronze or Iron Age archeology, or the study of ancient history or geography (see also Troy, in Who’s Who, p. 346). It is important to know as many certain details as possible so that we can better appreciate the complex way the Homeric poems exhibit traces of cultures from the fifteenth through eighth centuries
B.C.E.
Indeed, in some cases, yet older cultures are likely present in the shape of some inherited stories.
¹³
The poems “exhibit traces” only to the historically conscious archeological reader, for whom such texts are revealed as palimpsests. Strictly speaking, a palimpsest is a manuscript from which an original text was scraped away so that another, very different text could be written on the newly bare surface. For the bulk of the medieval tradition, it was usually a Classical text that made way for a Christian one. By the use of chemicals and now ultraviolet light we can often make out the words of the original text. Such artifacts are so suggestive of the impact history has on texts that the term palimpsest is currently popular among literary critics to describe a text (i.e., the content rather than the physical book itself) that exhibits multiple historical layers or thematizes the workings of history on the text. The Homeric poems are palimpsests in this sense, as are, by various interpretations, works as diverse as Petrarch’s lyric poetry, Shakespeare’s history plays, and Cervantes’
Don Quixote
. I do not object to so suggestive a usage, even though we know perfectly well that students of paleography, the field where the term is originally at home, are intent on deciphering two very different texts whose coincidence on one sheet of parchment is, as far as the reconstruction of the original texts goes, entirely accidental.

The final turn in our archeology, however, brings us to note that nothing in the Homeric poems suggests that the author or authors intended the audience or audiences to have any such multilayered sense of the past. For the poet and his audience, the texture of the heroic past is one seamless web, both separated from and linked to the poet’s and audience’s present: separate, in that the heroes of the
past were greater than the mortals of their own day (a vision of continuous human decline made even more explicit in the myth of the successive ages of humanity, starting with the gold age and descending to ever baser metals); and linked, in that humans of the poet’s day are supposed to be morally educable by the examples of the heroes of the past.

The heroes rather than the gods are the models of exemplary behavior. It is easier to say what Homer’s gods are not than what they are. Historically, the Olympians too are palimpsests and superregional composites. Each embodies traits attributed by local cults to various deities worshiped at different sites over centuries. As something like a pan-Hellenic culture was forged (and at the time Homer lived, this national culture was still at a relatively early stage of formation), traits were added so that Aphroditê, to take one example, combines elements of a graceful and pacific sky deity, traces of whose cult can be found on the island of Kythera, with those of a fertility goddess worshiped in Paphos on Cyprus. (Among her other eastern Mediterranean/Anatolian connections, note that she favors the Trojans in
The Iliad.
) Not as many of the Olympians have important roles to play in
The Odyssey
as in
The Iliad
. Athena, Poseidon, and Zeus are the only three gods who are important throughout
The Odyssey
. Hermês functions as messenger of the gods; as far as the machinery of the plot is required, we could do without the rest of the divinities. But they are there. Apollo and Artemis are invoked, and Hermês is also mentioned in his guise as the guide of souls to Hades. Hêra, Zeus’ consort, is relatively marginal in
The Odyssey
. Were it not for the amusing story of the dalliance of Aphrodite, goddess of love, with Ares, god of war, they, along with the aggrieved husband, Hephaistos, god of fire, would hardly appear at all.

Lesser gods and goddesses play important roles in
The Odyssey
, such as Leukothea, the sea nymph who helps Odysseus land among the Phaiákians, and Eidothea and her father, Proteus, with whom Meneláos has traffic. These may have been gods of local cults that were not internationalized in religious practice, but they achieve that wide renown, in mythology at least, thanks to Homer’s poems. Figures such as Kalypso and Kirkê were probably never actually worshiped as even minor divinities; in other versions of the homecoming narrative, the females who delay the hero’s return might be sorceresses or merely mortal temptresses.

It is important to note that despite the range and significance of roles the gods play in
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, the Homeric poems were never sacred texts in the way that the Jewish or Christian scriptures, or the Koran, were and are. Many of the gods’ quarrels and battles recall divine battles and interventions preserved in the Hindu Vedas and the ancient Near Eastern texts (in Babylonian, Akkadian, Sumerian), as well as in the myths of Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, and the European North. (Many scholars have found traces of such battles in early books of the Jewish Bible, but these are submerged as deeply as possible by the redactors and subsequent interpreters, for whom any implications of polytheism are distinctly heretical.)

Homer’s gods partake to some extent of the nature of these fierce and autonomous deities known from a wide range of cultures. Their battles may originally have represented the imagined wars of various natural forces (light and dark, land and sea). But they are also members of a polity not unlike an ideal monarchy (which is not to say that none of the other pantheons just mentioned exhibits a political structure). While each of the Olympians has rights over aspects of the lives of men and women everywhere, each has special privileges in his or her domains as well as favorites among mortals. Like a king ruling over his nobles, Zeus is the supreme god, who under ideal circumstances hopes to keep his nobles in line by persuasion but can also threaten the use of force. All the gods at one
time or another appeal to “justice” or what they perceive as justice (often a very self-serving view). But although he has his “private” favorites and interests, as ruler of the gods Zeus is expected to be held to, and in a certain sense to embody, justice. Hence, in
The Iliad
, no matter how many diversions he permits the other gods to introduce and how many delays their mortal subordinates may effect, Hektor must die and Akhilleus must surrender his body to Priam just as, ultimately (i.e., beyond the limits of
The Iliad
), Troy must fall and Helen return to Meneláos. In
The Odyssey
, while for offenses both old and new
¹⁴
Odysseus may be tested, detained, and stripped of his ships and comrades, Zeus wills that he return to Ithaka and recover wife, house, and status. Athena, Zeus’ daughter and Odysseus’ special champion, knows this, and when her doing everything she can is not enough, she reminds Zeus and has him renew his promise. Poseidon may interfere, but only within limits.