Introduction

________________________________________________

COMPOSITION AND PLOT OF THE ODYSSEY

The Odyssey is generally supposed to be somewhat the later

in date of the two most ancient Greek poems which are

concerned with the events and consequences of the Trojan

war. As to the actual history of that war, it may be said

that nothing is known. We may conjecture that some contest

between peoples of more or less kindred stocks, who

occupied the isles and the eastern and western shores of

the Aegean, left a strong impression on the popular fancy.

Round the memories of this contest would gather many older

legends, myths, and stories, not peculiarly Greek or even

'Aryan,' which previously floated unattached, or were

connected with heroes whose fame was swallowed up by that

of a newer generation. It would be the work of minstrels,

priests, and poets, as the national spirit grew conscious

of itself, to shape all these materials into a definite

body of tradition. This is the rule of development--first

scattered stories, then the union of these into a NATIONAL

legend. The growth of later national legends, which we are

able to trace, historically, has generally come about in

this fashion. To take the best known example, we are able

to compare the real history of Charlemagne with the old

epic poems on his life and exploits. In these poems we find

that facts are strangely exaggerated, and distorted; that

purely fanciful additions are made to the true records,

that the more striking events of earlier history are

crowded into the legend of Charles, that mere fairy tales,

current among African as well as European peoples, are

transmuted into false history, and that the anonymous

characters of fairy tales are converted into historical

personages. We can also watch the process by which feigned

genealogies were constructed, which connected the princely

houses of France with the imaginary heroes of the epics.

The conclusion is that the poetical history of Charlemagne

has only the faintest relations to the true history. And we

are justified in supposing that, quite as little of the

real history of events can be extracted from the tale of

Troy, as from the Chansons de Geste.

By the time the Odyssey was composed, it is certain that a

poet had before him a well-arranged mass of legends and

traditions from which he might select his materials. The

author of the Iliad has an extremely full and curiously

consistent knowledge of the local traditions of Greece, the

memories which were cherished by Thebans, Pylians, people

of Mycenae, of Argos, and so on. The Iliad and the Odyssey

assume this knowledge in the hearers of the poems, and take

for granted some acquaintance with other legends, as with

the story of the Argonautic Expedition. Now that story

itself is a tissue of popular tales,--still current in many

distant lands,--but all woven by the Greek genius into the

history of Iason.

The history of the return of Odysseus as told in the

Odyssey, is in the same way, a tissue of old marchen.

These must have existed for an unknown length of time

before they gravitated into the cycle of the tale of Troy.

The extraordinary artistic skill with which legends and

myths, originally unconnected with each other, are woven

into the plot of the Odyssey, so that the marvels of savage

and barbaric fancy become indispensable parts of an

artistic whole, is one of the chief proofs of the unity of

authorship of that poem. We now go on to sketch the plot,

which is a marvel of construction.

Odysseus was the King of Ithaca, a small and rugged island

on the western coast of Greece. When he was but lately

married to Penelope, and while his only son Telemachus was

still an infant, the Trojan war began. It is scarcely

necessary to say that the object of this war, as conceived

of by the poets, was to win back Helen, the wife of

Menelaus, from Paris, the son of Priam, King of Troy. As

Menelaus was the brother of Agamemnon, the Emperor, so to

speak, or recognised chief of the petty kingdoms of

'Greece, the whole force of these kingdoms was at his

disposal. No prince came to the leaguer of Troy from a home

more remote than that of Odysseus. When Troy was taken, in

the tenth year of the war, his homeward voyage was the

longest and most perilous.

The action of the Odyssey occupies but the last six weeks

of the ten years during which Odysseus was wandering. Two

nights in these six weeks are taken up, however, by his own

narrative of his adventures (to the Phaeacians, p. xx) in

the previous ten years. With this explanatory narrative we

must begin, before coming to the regular action of the

poem.

After the fall of Troy, Odysseus touched at Ismarus, the

city of a Thracian people, whom he attacked and plundered,

but by whom he was at last repulsed. The north wind then

carried his ships to Malea, the extreme southern point of

Greece. Had he doubled Malea safely, he would probably have

reached Ithaca in a few days, would have found Penelope

unvexed by wooers, and Telemachus a boy of ten years old.

But this was not to be.

The 'ruinous winds' drove Odysseus and his ships for ten

days, and on the tenth they touched the land of the Lotus-

Eaters, whose flowery food causes sweet forgetfulness.

Lotus-land was possibly in Western Libya, but it is more

probable that ten days' voyage from the southern point of

Greece, brought Odysseus into an unexplored region of

fairy-land. Egypt, of which Homer had some knowledge, was

but five days' sail from Crete.

Lotus-land, therefore, being ten days' sail from Malea, was

well over the limit of the discovered world. From this

country Odysseus went on till he reached the land of the

lawless Cyclopes, a pastoral people of giants. Later Greece

feigned that the Cyclopes dwelt near Mount Etna, in Sicily.

Homer leaves their place of abode in the vague. Among the

Cyclopes, Odysseus had the adventure on which his whole

fortunes hinged. He destroyed the eye of the cannibal

giant, Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon, the God of the Sea.

To avenge this act, Poseidon drove Odysseus wandering for

ten long years, and only suffered him to land in Ithaca,

'alone, in evil case, to find troubles in his house.' This

is a very remarkable point in the plot. The story of the

crafty adventurer and the blinding of the giant, with the

punning device by which the hero escaped, exists in the

shape of a detached marchen or fairy-tale among races who

never heard of Homer. And when we find the story among

Oghuzians, Esthonians, Basques, and Celts, it seems natural

to suppose that these people did not break a fragment out

of the Odyssey, but that the author of the Odyssey took

possession of a legend out of the great traditional store

of fiction. From the wide distribution of the tale, there

is reason to suppose that it is older than Homer, and that

it was not originally told of Odysseus, but was attached to

his legend, as floating jests of unknown authorship are

attributed to eminent wits. It has been remarked with truth

that in this episode Odysseus acts out of character, that

he is foolhardy as well as cunning. Yet the author of the

Odyssey, so far from merely dove-tailing this story at

random into his narrative, has made his whole plot turn on

the injury to the Cyclops. Had he not foolishly exposed

himself and his companions, by his visit to the Cyclops,

Odysseus would never have been driven wandering for ten

weary years. The prayers of the blinded Cyclops were heard

and fulfilled by Poseidon.

From the land of the Cyclops, Odysseus and his company

sailed to the Isle of Aeolus, the king of the winds. This

place too is undefined; we only learn that, even with the

most favourable gale, it was ten days' sail from Ithaca. In

the Isle of Aeolus Odysseus abode for a month, and then

received from the king a bag in which all the winds were

bound, except that which was to waft the hero to his home.

This sort of bag was probably not unfamiliar to

superstitious Greek sailors who had dealings with witches,

like the modern wise women of the Lapps. The companions of

the hero opened the bag when Ithaca was in sight, the winds

rushed out, the ships were borne back to the Aeolian Isle,

and thence the hero was roughly dismissed by Aeolus. Seven

days' sail brought him to Lamos, a city of the cannibal

Laestrygonians. Their country, too, is in No-man's-land,

and nothing can be inferred from the fact that their

fountain was called Artacia, and that there was an Artacia

in Cyzicus. In Lamos a very important adventure befel

Odysseus. The cannibals destroyed all his fleet, save one

ship, with which he made his escape to the Isle of Circe.

Here the enchantress turned part of the crew into swine,

but Odysseus, by aid of the god Hermes, redeemed them, and

became the lover of Circe. This adventure, like the story

of the Cyclops, is a fairy tale of great antiquity. Dr.

Gerland, in his Alt Griechische Marchen in der Odyssee, his

shown that the story makes part of the collection of

Somadeva, a store of Indian tales, of which 1200 A.D. is

the approximate date. Circe appears as a Yackshini, and is

conquered when an adventurer seizes her flute whose magic

music turns men into beasts. The Indian Circe had the habit

of eating the animals into which she transformed men.

We must suppose that the affairs with the Cicones, the

Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, Aeolus, and the Laestrygonians,

occupied most of the first year after the fall of Troy. A

year was then spent in the Isle of Circe, after which the

sailors were eager to make for home. Circe commanded them

to go down to Hades, to learn the homeward way from the

ghost of the Theban prophet Teiresias. The descent into

hell, for some similar purpose, is common in the epics of

other races, such as the Finns, and the South-Sea

Islanders. The narrative of Odysseus's visit to the dead

(book xi) is one of the most moving passages in the whole

poem.

From Teiresias Odysseus learned that, if he would bring his

companions home, he must avoid injuring the sacred cattle

of the Sun, which pastured in the Isle of Thrinacia. If

these were harmed, he would arrive in Ithaca alone, or in

the words of the Cyclops's prayer, I in evil plight, with

loss of all his company, on board the ship of strangers, to

find sorrow in his house.' On returning to the Isle Aeaean,

Odysseus was warned by Circe of the dangers he would

encounter. He and his friends set forth, escaped the Sirens

(a sort of mermaidens), evaded the Clashing Rocks, which

close on ships (a fable known to the Aztecs), passed Scylla

(the pieuvre of antiquity) with loss of some of the

company, and reached Thrinacia, the Isle of the Sun. Here

the company of Odysseus, constrained by hunger, devoured

the sacred kine of the Sun, for which offence they were

punished by a shipwreck, when all were lost save Odysseus.

He floated ten days on a raft, and then reached the isle of

the goddess Calypso, who kept him as her lover for eight

years.

The first two years after the fall of Troy are now

accounted for. They were occupied, as we have seen, by

adventures with the Cicones, the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops,

Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, by a year's residence with

Circe, by the descent into Hades, the encounters with the

Sirens, and Scylla, and the fatal sojourn in the isle of

Thrinacia. We leave Odysseus alone, for eight years,

consuming his own heart, in the island paradise of Calypso.

In Ithaca, the hero's home, things seem to have passed

smoothly till about the sixth year after the fall of Troy.

Then the men of the younger generation, the island chiefs,

began to woo Penelope, and to vex her son Telemachus.

Laertes, the father of Odysseus, was too old to help, and

Penelope only gained time by her famous device of weaving

and unweaving the web. The wooers began to put compulsion

on the Queen, quartering themselves upon her, devouring her

substance, and insulting her by their relations with her

handmaids. Thus Penelope pined at home, amidst her wasting

possessions. Telemachus fretted in vain, and Odysseus was

devoured by grief and home-sickness in the isle of Calypso.

When he had lain there for nigh eight years, the action of

the Odyssey begins, and occupies about six weeks.

DAY 1 (Book i).

The ordained time has now arrived, when by the counsels of

the Gods, Odysseus is to be brought home to free his house,

to avenge himself on the wooers, and recover his kingdom.

The chief agent in his restoration is Pallas Athene; the

first book opens with her prayer to Zeus that Odysseus may

be delivered. For this purpose Hermes is to be sent to

Calypso to bid her release Odysseus, while Pallas Athene in

the shape of Mentor, a friend of Odysseus, visits

Telemachus in Ithaca. She bids him call an assembly of the

people, dismiss the wooers to their homes, and his mother

to her father's house, and go in quest of his own father,

in Pylos, the city of Nestor, and Sparta, the home of

Menelaus. Telemachus recognises the Goddess, and the first

day closes.

DAY 2 (Book ii).

Telemachus assembles the people, but he has not the heart

to carry out Athene's advice. He cannot send the wooers

away, nor turn his mother out of her house. He rather

weakly appeals to the wooers' consciences, and announces

his intention of going to seek his father. They answer with

scorn, but are warned of their fate, which is even at the

doors, by Halitherses. His prophecy (first made when

Odysseus set out for Troy) tallies with the prophecy of

Teiresias, and the prayer of the Cyclops. The reader will

observe a series of portents, prophecies, and omens, which

grow more numerous and admonishing as their doom draws

nearer to the wooers. Their hearts, however, are hardened,

and they mock at Telemachus, who, after an interview with

Athene, borrows a ship and secretly sets out for Pylos.

Athene accompanies him, and his friends man his galley.

DAY 3 (Book iii).

They reach Pylos, and are kindly received by the aged

Nestor, who has no news about Odysseus. After sacrifice,

Athene disappears.

DAY 4 (Book iii).

The fourth day is occupied with sacrifice, and the talk of

Nestor. In the evening Telemachus (leaving his ship and

friends at Pylos) drives his chariot into Pherae, half way

to Sparta; Peisistratus, the soil of Nestor, accompanies

him.

DAY 5 (Book iv).

Telemachus and Peisistratus arrive at Sparta, where

Menelaus and Helen receive them kindly.

DAY 6 (Book iv).

Menelaus tells how he himself came home in the eighth year

after the fall of Troy. He had heard from Proteus, the Old

Man of the Sea, that Odysseus was alive, and a captive on

an island of the deep. Menelaus invites Telemachus to Stay

with him for eleven days or twelve, which Telemachus

declines to do. it will later appear that he made an even

longer stay at Sparta, though whether he changed his mind,

or whether we have here an inadvertence of the poet's it is

hard to determine. This blemish has been used as an

argument against the unity of authorship, but writers of

all ages have made graver mistakes.

On this same day (the sixth) the wooers in Ithaca learned

that Telemachus had really set out to I cruise after his

father.' They sent some of their number to lie in ambush

for him, in a certain strait which he was likely to pass on

his return to Ithaca. Penelope also heard of her son's

departure, but was consoled by a dream.

DAY 7 (Book v).

The seventh day finds us again in Olympus. Athene again

urges the release of Odysseus; and Hermes is sent to bid

Calypso let the hero go. Zeus prophecies that after twenty

days sailing, Odysseus will reach Scheria, and the

hospitable Phaeacians, a people akin to the Gods, who will

convey him to Ithaca. Hermes accomplishes the message to

Calypso.

DAYS 8-12-32 (Book v).

These days are occupied by Odysseus in making and launching

a raft; on the twelfth day from the beginning of the action

he leaves Calypso's isle. He sails for eighteen days, and

on the eighteenth day of his voyage (the twenty- ninth from

the beginning of the action), he sees Scheria. Poseidon

raises a storm against him, and it is not till the

thirty-second day from that in which Athene visited

Telemachus, that he lands in Scheria, the country of the

Phaeacians. Here be is again in fairy land. A rough, but

perfectly recognisable form of the Phaeacian myth, is found

in an Indian collection of marchen (already referred to) of

the twelfth century A.D. Here the Phaeacians are the

Vidyidhiris, and their old enemies the Cyclopes, are the

Rakshashas, a sort of giants. The Indian Odysseus, who

seeks the city of gold, passes by the home of an Indian

Aeolus, Satyavrata. His later adventures are confused, and

the Greek version retains only the more graceful fancies of

the marchen.

DAY 33 (Book vi).

Odysseus meets Nausicaa, daughter of Alcinous, the

Phaeacian King, and by her aid, and that of Athene, is

favourably received at the palace, and tells how he came

from Calypso's island. His name is still unknown to his

hosts.

DAY 34 (Books vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xii).

The Phaeacians and Odysseus display their skill in sports.

Nausicaa bids Odysseus farewell. Odysseus recounts to

Alcinous, and Arete, the Queen, those adventures in the two

years between the fall of Troy and his captivity in the

island of Calypso, which we have already described (pp.

xiii-xvii).

DAY 35 (Book xiii).

Odysseus is conveyed to Ithaca, in the evening, on one of

the magical barques of the Phaeacians.

DAY 36 (Books xiii, xiv, xv).

He wakens in Ithaca, which be does not at first recognise

He learns from Athene, for the first time, that the wooers

beset his house. She disguises him as an old man, and bids

him go to the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, who is loyal to

his absent lord. Athene then goes to Lacedaemon, to bring

back Telemachus, who bas now resided there for a month.

Odysseus won the heart of Eumaeus, who of course did not

recognise him, and slept in the swineherd's hut, while

Athene was waking Telemachus, in Lacedaemon, and bidding

him 'be mindful of his return.'

DAY 37 (Book xv).

Is spent by Odysseus in the swineherd's hut. Telemachus

reaches Pherae, half-way to Pylos.

DAY 38 (Book xv).

Telemachus reaches Pylos, but does not visit Nestor. To

save time he goes at once on board ship, taking with him an

unfortunate outlaw, Theoclymenus, a second-sighted man, or

the family of Melampus, in which the gift of prophecy was

hereditary. The ship passed the Elian coast at night, and

evaded the ambush of the wooers. Meanwhile Odysseus was

sitting up almost till dawn, listening to the history of

Eumaeus, the swineherd.

DAY 39 (Books xv, xvi).

Telemachus reaches the Isle of Ithaca, sends his ship to

the city, but himself, by advice of Athene, makes for the

hut of Eumaeus, where he meets, but naturally does not

recognise, his disguised father. He sends Eumaeus to

Penelope with news of his arrival, and then Athene reveals

Odysseus to Telemachus. The two plot the death of the

wooers. Odysseus bids Telemachus remove, on a favourable

opportunity, the arms which were disposed as trophies on

the walls of the hall at home. (There is a slight

discrepancy between the words of this advice and the manner

in which it is afterwards executed.) During this interview,

the ship of Telemachus, the wooers who had been in ambush,

and Eumaeus, all reached the town of Ithaca. In the evening

Eumaeus returned to his hut, where Athene had again

disguised Odysseus.

DAY 40 (Books xvii, xviii, xix, xx).

The story is now hastening to its close, and many events

are crowded into the fortieth day. Telemachus goes from the

swineherd's hut to the city, and calls his guest,

Theoclymenus, to the palace. The second-sighted man

prophesies of the near revenge of Odysseus. In the

afternoon, Odysseus (still disguised) and Eumaeus reach the

city, the dog Argos recognises the hero, and dies. Odysseus

goes begging through his own hall, and is struck by

Antinous, the proudest of the wooers. Late in the day

Eumaeus goes home, and Odysseus fights with the braggart

beggar Irus. Still later, Penelope appears among the

wooers, and receives presents from them. When the wooers

have withdrawn, Odysseus and Telemachus remove the weapons

from the hall to the armoury. Afterwards Odysseus has an

interview with Penelope (who does not recognise him), but

he is recognised by his old nurse Eurycleia. Penelope

mentions her purpose to wed the man who on the following

day, the feast of the Archer-god Apollo, shall draw the bow

of Odysseus, and send an arrow through the holes in twelve

axe-blades, set up in a row. Thus the poet shows that

Odysseus has arrived in Ithaca not a day too soon. Odysseus

is comforted by a vision of Athene, and

DAY 41 (Books xx, xxi, xxii, xxiii).

by the ominous prayer uttered by a weary woman grinding at

the mill. The swineherd and the disloyal Melanthius arrive

at the palace. The wooers defer the plot to kill

Telemachus, as the day is holy to Apollo. Odysseus is led

up from his seat near the door to a place beside Telemachus

at the chief 's table. The wooers mock Telemachus, and the

second- sighted Theoclymenus sees the ominous shroud of

death covering their bodies, and the walls dripping with

blood. He leaves the doomed company. In the trial of the

bow, none of the wooers can draw it; meanwhile Odysseus has

declared himself to the neatherd and the swineherd. The

former bars and fastens the outer gates of the court, the

latter bids Eurycleia bar the doors of the womens' chambers

which lead out of the hall. Odysseus now gets the bow into

his hands, strings it, sends the arrow through the

axe-blades, and then leaping on the threshold of stone,

deals his shafts among the wooers. Telemachus, the

neatherd, and Eumaeus, aiding him, he slaughters all the

crew, despite the treachery of Melanthius. The paramours of

the wooers are hanged, and Odysseus, after some delay, is

recognised by Penelope.

DAY 42 (Books xxiii, xxiv).

This day is occupied with the recognition of Odysseus by

his aged father Laertes, and with the futile attempt of the

kinsfolk of the wooers to avenge them on Odysseus. Athene

reconciles the feud, and the toils of Odysseus are

accomplished.

The reader has now before him a chronologically arranged

sketch of the action of the Odyssey. It is, perhaps,

apparent, even from this bare outline, that the composition

is elaborate and artistic, that the threads of the plot are

skilfully separated and combined. The germ of the whole

epic is probably the popular tale, known all over the

world, of the warrior who, on his return from a long

expedition, has great difficulty in making his prudent wife

recognise him. The incident occurs as a detached story in

China, and in most European countries it is told of a

crusader. 'We may suppose it to be older than the legend of

Troy, and to have gravitated into the cycle of that legend.

The years of the hero's absence are then filled up with

adventures (the Cyclops, Circe, the Phaeacians, the Sirens,

the descent into hell) which exist as scattered tales, or

are woven into the more elaborate epics of Gaels, Aztecs,

Hindoos, Tartars, South-Sea Islanders, Finns, Russians,

Scandinavians, and Eskimo. The whole is surrounded with the

atmosphere of the kingly age of Greece, and the result is

the Odyssey, with that unity of plot and variety of

character which must have been given by one masterly

constructive genius. The date at which the poet of the

Odyssey lived may be approximately determined by his

consistent descriptions of a peculiar and definite

condition of society, which had ceased to exist in the

ninth century B.C., and of a stage of art in which

Phoenician and Assyrian influences predominated. (Die Kunst

bei Homer. Brunn.) As to the mode of composition, it would

not be difficult to show that at least the a priori Wolfian

arguments against the early use of writing for literary

purposes have no longer the cogency which they were once

thought to possess. But this is matter for a separate

investigation.

Read next: Book I

Read previous: Preface

Table of content of Odyssey


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book