1.1–43

The man will be πολύτροπον, a rare word used only four times in all of early Greek poetry, of Odysseus in this poem (1.1; 10.330) and Hermes in a later hymn to that god (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 13.439). While the adjective is usually understood to mean something like “versatile,” the poet of the Odyssey has more ambitious plans when creating his hero. He will not be simply a man who can say and do many different things, but—and this is central to the meaning of the entire poem—he can embody different men, live different lives, at the same time: glorious hero and nameless stranger; king and beggar; devoted husband and lover of nymphs and witches. These varied lives are the product of knowledge, πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον (3), and suffering, πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν (4). Odysseus is the first of many Greek heroes to embody what becomes a central tenet of ancient Greek culture, that knowledge comes through suffering, that pain endured brings special insight into the deepest truths of human existence.  

Though like most heroes Odysseus is isolated by his special gifts, he is not alone. Two groups of men act as foils for his extraordinary powers: his crew and the suitors who besiege his wife. He struggles in vain to bring the former home safely and slaughters the latter. The crew are his loyal friends, the suitors his enemies, yet the proem helps us to see how both groups share a crucial character defect, a lack of self-control: 

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.

But he could not save his companions, hard as he tried;
for they perished through their own reckless folly,
fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios, the Sun God,
and he took away their day of homecoming.

Odyssey 1.6–9¹

The suitors mirror this lack of restraint, devouring the household goods of Odysseus, and they too will never make it back home. Homer uses the word νήπιοι of the crew here, a word meaning “foolish,” “deluded,” often with the connotation of “childish.”  In the harsh light of the poet’s gaze, both the crew and the suitors are the moral equivalent of children, unable to control their appetites.  On the opposite end of the spectrum is Odysseus, whose supreme self-control is one of his most important heroic traits.

The Odyssey is the first extended example we have of a nostos, the story of a Greek warrior’s return home from the Trojan War. This was a popular subject in Greek poetry, prompting urgent questions that the storyteller could use to engage his audience and shape a narrative: What horrors did the hero see and endure? Will he make it back home? Does some god hold a grudge, keeping the hero from returning? What has happened at home in his absence? Did his wife remain faithful to him? Is his property intact? Are his children safe?  The nostos story can also be the third section of a three-part narrative pattern that informs many works of Greek poetry:

1. Withdrawal of the hero
2. Devastation in his absence
3. Return of the hero

The Iliad, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides’s Bacchae all draw on this dynamic. The storyteller could treat the whole pattern or focus on one or more of the parts. Achilles in the Iliad cycles through the entire pattern three times, withdrawing from the Greek army, then from Patroclus, then from all humanity, leaving destruction and suffering in the wake of each separation. His final return in Book 24 articulates a powerful thematic synthesis for the entire poem. The story of Agamemnon’s disastrous nostos serves as a paradigm in Odyssey, against which the actions of Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope play out.  In both Sophoclean plays, Oedipus is forced out of Thebes, leaving behind much suffering. In Oedipus Tyrannus, he returns not knowing his past connections to the city, a blindness that brings misery to his family and city.  In Oedipus at Colonus, the pattern seems to point toward the aged hero’s return to Thebes, but he chooses to end his life near Athens, breaking the deadly cycle of revenge that has shadowed the story. Euripides, in his last play, creates a particularly savage variation, when the god Dionysus returns to Thebes.

The Odyssey will focus on the last two elements of the pattern, the toll on the king’s family and property in his absence and his vengeful return. Immediately after the proem, a major theme in the poem surfaces, the threat to the hero’s progress posed by women, divine or mortal, who will try to keep him with them.  This figure appears frequently in hero stories, no surprise given the assumptions about power and gender that inform literature and myth of Greece and Rome. In this perspective, men impose their will, through physical force or intellectual structure, on the forces of nature, to create a product, human civilization. (ref. to Intro.?) Women are considered part of what must be controlled. Evidence of these fundamental assumptions about the place of human life in the larger order of the universe will appear throughout the poem. For now, we get a glimpse of a particularly vivid and complex example of the “detaining woman,” Calypso, the divine nymph who holds Odysseus back from returning to his family for seven years. The hero’s departure from her island and the subtle power dynamics that inform their parting in Book 5 will be the first extended portrait we have of Odysseus in action.

Significant events in Homeric epic are often prompted by divine initiative.  So here, we are transported to Olympus, where Zeus has assembled the gods. Poseidon, Odysseus’s principal tormentor, is conveniently away being fêted by the Ethiopians. In his absence, the rest of the Olympians will arrange for Calypso to release the hero, so that he can continue on his way home. Meanwhile, Zeus airs a complaint: 

ὢ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται: 
ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ᾽ ἔμμεναι, οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ 
σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε᾽ ἔχουσιν

Ah me, how mortals put blame on us, 
for they say that evils come from us, while they, 
from their own recklessness have sorrows beyond measure

Odyssey 1.32–34

It seems they warned Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin, not to seduce Clytemnestra while Agamemnon was away at Troy, but he went ahead anyway, even after the gods sent Hermes to warn him off, and then killed Agamemnon when the king returned from Troy. Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, then avenged his father’s death by killing Aegisthus (and Clytemnestra, though she is not mentioned here).

We might be tempted to see this speech as a reflection of divine justice in the poem. In fact, it is hard to demonstrate a consistent moral code that the Homeric gods enforce in the world of the Odyssey. Their attitudes and actions, however powerful their effect on the lives of humans, are portrayed as motivated by personal preferences, whether a mortal has offered appropriate sacrifices to the god in question or harmed another favored human. Athena’s love for Odysseus leads her to sanction all kinds of mayhem, as long as her favorite gets what he wants.  Characters in the poem may invoke a god as guarantor of a particular kind of behavior, e.g., Zeus as protector of guests, but we do not see much evidence of the gods enforcing an overarching system of morality.  

This is not to say that we cannot discern patterns of action in the story that reflect a particular attitude toward moral questions, only that the poet does not use the gods as the keepers of morality in the poem. Even Zeus’s musings here have a petulant tone, as if what bothers him is not that Aegisthus violated an important code of moral conduct, but that he, a mortal whom the gods were trying to help, had the audacity to ignore their advice. The gods in Homeric poetry are omniscient, omnipotent, and immortal. They do not need to behave according to any moral code, because nothing they do can permanently affect them or their world. They want what they want, and humans must do what they can in response. To put it another way, only the fact of mortality requires us to have virtues. The Homeric epics focus on the experience of humans, struggling to navigate a world full of powerful and often baffling forces. They, not the gods, are the agents of morality in the poems.

Footnotes

1. All translations of Greek or Latin are mine.

Further Reading

Felson, N. 1997. Regarding Penelope, 111–113. 2nd ed. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press.

Heubeck, A. and A. Hoekstra. 1989. A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. I, Books I–VIII. 51–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer, 131–166. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press. 

Tracy, S. 1990. The Story of the Odyssey, 3–6. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 6–7. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

——— 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 26–27. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wohl, V. 1993. “Standing by the Stathmos: The Creation of Sexual Ideology in the Odyssey. Arethusa 26: 24.