| Books 1-4 focus upon Odysseus’ son,
Telemachos, his efforts to expel the suitors of his mother, Penelope,
from their house, and his journey to Pylos and Sparta in search of news
of his father. |
| THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE ILIAD AND THE
ODYSSEY: A moral order? In the opening lines, the poet describes the fate of Odysseus' companions: "...he could not save his companions, hard though he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness. fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God." (Odyssey 1.6-8/Lattimore translation) -Compare this emphasis on the folly of the men - and its consequences - with the emphasis on the "will of Zeus" and the protagonism of Apollo in the opening lines of the Iliad. Zeus comments on the fate of Agamemnon's murderer, Aigisthos, who was killed by Agamemnon's son, Orestes: "Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say that we devise their misery. But they themselves - in their depravity - design griefs greater than the griefs that fate assigns. So did Aigisthos act when he transgressed the boundaries that fate and reason set" (Odyssey 1.32-35/Mandelbaum translation) -Compare Zeus' remarks with Achilleus' story of the urns of Zeus in which he ascribes human suffering to the whimsical action of Zeus. |
| THE DIALOGUE
BETWEEN THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY: Two poems, true and false tales Helen and Menelaos tell Telemachos back-to-back stories of his father's exploits at Troy. Helen describes Odysseus's secret expedition, disguised as a beggar, into the city of Troy; Menelaos tells how Odysseus maintained the troops' discipline as they waited inside the Trojan horse. While both stories portray Odysseus as a bold, strong, and crafty hero, they present sharply contrasting views of Helen. Helen recalls her own feelings of joy when Odysseus slaughtered many Trojans before leaving the city: "The Trojan women raised a cry - but my heart sang - for I had come round, long before, to dreams of sailing home, and I repented the mad day Aphrodite drew me away from my dear fatherland, forsaking all - child, bridal bed, and husband - a man without defect in form or mind." (Odyssey 4.259-64/Fitzgerald translation) Menelaos, by contrast, described how Helen circled the Trojan horse with her second husband, Deiphobos, imitating the voices of the wives of the Greek warriors, to determine whether the Greeks were hiding in the horse: "You must have been incited by some god who wanted to give glory to the Trojans. Handsome Deiphobos had followed you... ...you called upon the Danaan chieftains, naming each; you mimed in turn the voice of all the wives of Argives in that horse." (Odyssey 4. 274-79/Mandelbaum translation) |
| Books 5 -12 describe Odysseus’ release by
Kalypso, and his arrival and reception in the land of the Phaiakians,
an idealized kingdom. There he tells the story of his wanderings |
| THE DIALOGUE
BETWEEN THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY: Two heroes, two sets of values Threatened by shipwreck at sea, Odysseus wishes he had died at Troy, winning fame, on the day when he fought the Trojans for the body of slain Achilleus: "Three and four times more blessed were all the Greeks who died in the vast land of Troy to please the sons of Atreus. Would that I had met a death like theirs, had shared their destiny upon the day when crowds of Trojans cast bronze shafts at me, while battling around the body of Peleus' slaughtered son. I would have gained funeral rites; I would have earned much fame." (Odyssey 5.306-311/Mandelbaum translation) Ironically, Odysseus wins fame not by dying a glorious death, but by surviving to tell the story of his journeys and regain his wife, son, and household. In fact, he even visited the land of the dead, and, there, he reminded the shade of Achilleus of the honor he had while alive, and the authority he holds among the dead: "...Before, when you were alive, we Argives honored you as we did the gods, and now in this place you have great authority over the dead. Do not grieve, even in death, Achilleus." (Odyssey 11.484-486/Lattimore translation) Achilleus' sharp reply offers a final reflection on his struggle for immortality, and his decision to accept a short life with glory: "O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying. I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead." (Odyssey 11. 488-491/Lattimore translation) |
| THE ODYSSEY:
Order and chaos The Phaiakian court offers an idealized model of civilized behavior in which the guest is properly welcomed, the banquet is graced with song, and generous gifts are given. By contrast, Odysseus' wanderings take him through lands in which the practices of civilized life - as the early Greeks understood it - were unknown, ignored, or perverted. The land of the giant Cyclops, described in wholly negative terms, provides the most famous example: "That race is arrogant: they have no laws; and trusting in the never-dying gods, their hands plant nothing and they ply no plows... Nor do they meet in council, those Cyclops, nor hand down laws; they live on mountaintops, in deep caves; each one rules his wife and children, and every family ignores its neighbors... ...Elsewhere, across hilltops and woods, the hunters toil; but here they do not come. Nor are there sheep or cows; and that land always stays unsown, unplowed... The Cyclops have no ships with crimson bows, no shipwrights who might fashion sturdy hulls that answer to the call, that sail across to other peoples' towns that men might want to visit." (Odyssey 9.106-129/Mandelbaum translation) |
| THE DIALOGUE
BETWEEN THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY: Two poems, true and false tales The poet of the Odyssey explores the ways stories can be told from different points of view, like the images of Helen at Troy or the different versions of the story of Agamemnon's murder. With Odysseus' many tales and disguises, he offers examples of true and false stories, and challenges his audience to tell them apart. Surely, some of this fascination with the differences among stories arises from the poet's own efforts to establish his poem's independence from the Iliad, and to establish his own hero, Odysseus, with a different set of values from Achilleus. Occasionally, we may see more direct criticisms or comments upon the story of the Trojan War...and perhaps the Iliad. Nestor, never one to shy from a long story, begins to summarize the Trojan War for Telemachos, but gives up, exclaiming: "Other miseries, and many, we endured there. Could any mortal man tell the whole story? Not if you stayed five years or six to hear how hard it was for the flower of the Achaians; you'd go home weary, and the tale untold." (Odyssey 3.113-17/Fitzgerald translation) Later, Odysseus' describes the Song of the Sirens around whom lie "heaped bones and shriveled skin of putrefying men" (Odyssey 12.45-46/Mandelbaum translation): those who stopped to hear their song. Their dangerously seductive and destructive song turns out to be - like the Iliad - the tale of Troy: "...we know everything that the Argives and Trojans did and suffered in wide Troy through the gods' despite." (Odyssey 12.189-90) |
| In books 13 to 16, Odysseus and his son,
Telemachos, return separately to Ithaka; Odysseus reveals himself to
his son and plots revenge on the suitors before returning to his palace. |
| In books 17-23, Odysseus returns to his
palace, disguised as a beggar, and he is abused by the suitors.
His wife, Penelope,
proposes a contest with Odysseus’ bow to determine which of the suitors
she will marry, and, after all fail, the disguised Odysseus strings the
bow, shoots his mark, reveals himself, and attacks the suitors.
All
of the suitors are slaughtered, the disloyal servants are punished and
Odysseus
and Penelope are reunited. |
| BOOK 24 seems to some an odd appendix or
epilogue to the text. In it, the scene shifts to the underworld
as Hermes leads the shades of the suitors to the land of the dead.
There, Agamemnon and Achilleus are talking about each other's deaths,
and Agamemnon describes the funeral of Achilleus. The ghosts of the
suitors arrive and describe their fate to the heroes of Troy.
Agamemnon praises Odysseus' wife, Penelope, for her faithfulness, and
curses his own wife, Klytaimestra. Meanwhile, Odysseus goes to the farm
of his father, Laertes, and, after telling a
false story, reveals himself. The suitors' relatives plan
revenge. After one of them is killed, Athene
intervenes to make peace. |
| THE DIALOGUE
BETWEEN THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY: the last word It might seem odd that the shade of Agamemnon recalls the funeral of Achilleus near the end of the Iliad, but it is consistent with the effort in both the Iliad and the Odyssey to frame a particular story of one hero within the larger context of the Trojan War and its aftermath. In the Odyssey, this ending marks the last word in the poet's struggle with the Iliad: by describing Achilleus' death and funeral, the poet of the Odyssey "completes" the Iliad. That this final episode is told by the shade of Agamemnon to the shade of Achilleus, in the land of the dead, only underscores the contrast between Achilleus' choice of a short life and Odysseus' struggle to survive. Of course, we might also read a final tribute to the Iliad in the poet's description of the nine Muses singing a dirge over Achilleus' corpse. We may never be sure what the poet of the Odyssey's final verdict on the Iliad is, but that, after all, is the conclusion we should expect from an epic that invites us to compare different stories, to hear different voices, and to distinguish truth from lies. As Hesiod's Muses would say, "We know enough to make up lies which are convincing, but we also have the skill, when we've a mind, to speak the truth." (Theogony 26-28). With this, we look backwards to the world of the ever-changing oral epic, and forwards to the individual, named poets of the lyric age and their diverse personae. |