An Introduction to Homer's Odyssey

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Foreign. Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

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And I'm Juan Davalos. And we're back on a special episode. If you remember, last week we did Homer's Iliad, and this week we're doing Homer's Odyssey.

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These are both lectures from our Great Books 101 course, one of the original online courses, one of the foundations for our program. And we're doing them because of a big Hollywood movie coming out about the Odyssey. We want to teach people who are interested in that story. In addition, we ourselves are producing two courses, one on the Iliad, one on the Odyssey. Twelve lectures each that will really dive into the story. The Odyssey is a story of homecoming. It's the story of prioritizing family and statesmanship over mere glory on the battlefield, and it deserves a lengthy retelling. This lecture, again from Our Great Books 101 course is an outstanding introduction. It is taught by the father of our forthcoming course. Professor, this is David Whelan, and you will later this summer see and hear from his son, Ben Whalen.

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So now let's turn to Dr. Whelan on Homer's Odyssey.

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Homer's Odyssey Sing to me of the man Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. But we have to stop right there, don't we? Sing to me of the man Muse itself. The opening of this poem is arresting. It's arresting because we wonder why he says sing instead of tell. We wonder why he's asking the help of something called a muse to begin with. Sing to me of the man Muse. So begins the poem, but also begins Western civilization. We'll come back to that in just a moment. But let's look at this invocation, this famous invocation of the muse. At the beginning of the poem,

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of all, the poet asks for help, divine help from a goddess, a muse. The help is necessary because it's understood that the poem is not simply an evening's entertainment, although it's certainly that. The poem is not simply a story, though it certainly is that. Or maybe I should say it is a story. But we tend to give stories too little credit for the amount of work they do in our ability to understand the world. So Homer begins with a request, a prayer, asking the muse to assist him in telling this story and singing this song. And it's appropriate that it's a prayer, because the burden of poetry is not, as I say, merely entertainment, but rather an attempt to penetrate to cut through the chaos, the randomness, the clutter of everyday life and everyday experience in order to discern meaning, in order to penetrate through to mystery. Now, mystery may sound like it is the opposite of meaning, but there's a great deal of human experience which, if you consult your own experience, you can confirm at once that is understood but difficult to articulate, that is grasped but difficult to drop into some convenient propositional form. That's the kind of mystery that attaches to the very deepest things in human experience. Love, mortality, war, home, family. Those are real, evident, immediate things. And none of us can claim to understand them fully. We understand them but mysteriously. And the burden and the weight of that kind of understanding does seem to be a little bit beyond the ordinary man or woman's grasp, beyond our ability to simply do or discuss with the easy grace with which we approach, what do we have for dinner? Or what is the price of gasoline this week? So it's appropriate that it begins. The poem begins with a prayer and a request for help. Though it comes many, many years later. Another poet by name, Robert Browning, has one of his poetic creations. Say this. The world's no blot for us, nor blank. It means intensely and means good. To find its meaning is my meat and drink. That's put a little, not harshly, but crudely. It's put a little bluntly and directly, but that really is the work of poetry itself. And Homer is doing the work of poetry itself to find the world's meaning. That's Homer's meat and drink. It is Homer's prayer. But I also said this is the beginning of Western civilization. That's something we should dwell upon for just a moment as well. It's the start of Western civilization precisely because this poem and its companion, the Iliad, this poem has furnished, has filled, but you might think furnished the Western imagination since its composition in the 9th century B.C. this poem filled the minds and imaginations of all those great Greeks in the classic 5th century BC the Greeks who gave us so much poetry, drama, philosophy, history, politics, that Athens, that launched Western civilization was educated by and in Homer, even when they repudiated Homer or Homeric things, even when they stepped aside or developed or said, we're going to do something a little bit different from our great forebearer, Homer. Homer. He was the context, as it were, within which they worked. So it sounds melodramatic, but it isn't. It's really true that this poem, this poet is very seriously the father of Western civilization. Well, I want to say something about this Muse, too, this divinity, which we understand, I hope a little bit, why we might have to pray to a divinity to assist us carry the burden of this mysterious inquiry, or inquiry into the mysteriousness of human experience. Sure, but what about a muse in particular? Why not Zeus? Why not Apollo? Why not Athena? She's the goddess of wisdom, right? Well, the muses. The muses don't get a lot of press. They're not talked about a great deal. You might expect that the word is etymologically related to our word music or amusing or muse. Also, it seems to be related to words like mute, which is even more mysterious. But we don't have time to explore that relation or connection. But it's worth noting that the museum or the muses were nine daughters. They're all female. They're daughters of Zeus, so they have some important Olympian parentage. But their mother. The mother is the key here. The mother of the muses is a goddess named Mnemasne. Mnemasne. Now, the neat thing about mnemosyne is that the. Those of you who picked up the mne etymology know that that has to do with memory. She's the goddess of memory. So what we have are these muses, little minor deities given the responsibility to endow or to inspire people with understanding things that are generally beyond our ken, understanding things that are generally beyond our ability to understand readily. Especially things that are framed in what we would call beauty. The beauty could be astronomical. There is a muse of astronomy. The beauty could be epic poetry. The beauty could be lyric poetry. There was even a muse of history. But the point is these muses are to inspire us so that we can do the work of this form of understanding and their mother's memory. Now, this doesn't mean the muses are memory tricks or. I'm not suggesting that the muses are related to memory by way of here's a nifty way to remember this or that tidbit. Rather, if you think about Homer's humility before his subject matter. If you think about Homer's I need divine help. I can't do this on my own. I'm going to have to begin with, frankly, a prayer. If you think about that, what is clear is that the memory transcends mere individual retention. What Homer is appealing to by invoking the help of a muse is the ability of man, both individual and a culture, to preserve, to maintain its identity. I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? Think about it. Without memory, we lose our identity as individuals. Without memory, a culture loses its identity, it loses itself. Homer seems to be aware of all of these things as he opens his poem. When I teach this in an ordinary class, I usually use the phrase, I adapt my translation somewhat, sing to me, muse. And we spend 50 minutes on that alone. So this condensed introduction will have to suffice us here. But I emphasize the point that in such little things as that is all the burden and the weight of great beauty, the great beauty of this poem, but also the great meaning and the import for individual readers. And for, as I say, Western civilization is itself so. Homer's Odyssey. The muse assists Homer in telling the story of this man, Odysseus, this great chieftain who fought with the Achaians at Troy. Odysseus is known as the wily one, the clever one, the trickster, the great tactician. He, of course, is great and mighty in combat as well, but he is credited with having devised the. The scheme of the Trojan horse. In the main, however, we should understand that Odysseus, in terms of the epithet he is given the first time his name is mentioned in the poem, and that is Odysseus Polytropos, which means man of many turnings. Polytropos. When I teach this in an ordinary class, students will sometimes stop thinking while they're taking notes and just turn into transcriptionists. At that moment, I'll do something like tell them that polytropos means poly plastic, tropos means teeth, so it's Odysseus, the man with dentures. If they inscribe that into their notes, then I know we're in trouble and we're going to have to start all over. It's important to think with the professor as the subject is undertaken, and rather than just transcribe these words. But Polytropos, man of many turnings, is an echo of his own name, which is man of pain or son of suffering. Many turnings means clever, it means much experienced, it even means well traveled. But it applies especially to that capacity. Odysseus has to apply a kind of tactical wisdom that can extricate him from the difficulties in which he very often finds himself, often through his own fault, by the way. But this Odysseus, after having helped win the Trojan War, departs for home with his men and his ships. He is a chieftain, the king of Ithaca. Ten years later, when he finally steps onto Ithaca alone, having lost all of his men and all of his ships. And he is a somewhat chastened. But he's still a vigorous warrior, and he's still an ingenious tactician, this polytropos. It took 10 years to get home for a variety of reasons we can't detail here, but he has a series of adventures. Stories within stories occur to odysseus over that 10 year period, delaying him sometimes for years at a time, and eliminating ship after ship, man after man, until finally he arrives home alone. And at a certain point in that trip, in that journey home, Odysseus is asked to recount his adventures thus far. It's actually very close to his having to his returning home and he's asked to recount his adventures. And in fact the bulk of this poem is Odysseus speaking to. They're called the Phaeacians, King Alcinous and the Phaeacians who want to know his story. He actually tells the bulk of this story, but by the time he steps back onto his home island of Ithaca, his house is besieged by 108 suitors, all of whom have presumed, perhaps wishfully thinking, that Odysseus is dead. And they're courting, if you want to call it that, his wife. We'll come back to that a little bit later too. That's extremely important. They essentially have the house under siege. Odysseus returns, adopts a disguise with the help of Athena, and ends up in rather decisive fashion, killing them all. He even kills the waiting women who were in collusion with these suitors.

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The poem, as all of this story is underway, takes up many things that are of perennial importance, permanent things. It takes up the nature of home, ordered and disordered. It takes up the nature of hospitality, which in this poem is not simply being nice to people, being nice to strangers. It is a virtue looked out for by Zeus himself. It's taken extremely seriously. It is a kind of index of civilization itself. It's not going too far to say this is a poem about hospitality. I once knew a fellow who said, it's not going too far to say this is a poem about eating, since so much of it concerns meals, feasting, dining. But that is part of hospitality. In fact, this is a poem about fidelity. Odysseus Wife those 20 years he was gone, 10 at Troy, 10 coming home. Odysseus wife Penelope is loyal, faithful to him. Agamemnon, a colleague of Odysseus. Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, is compared to Penelope in this poem. She not only was unfaithful to her husband Agamemnon, but she killed him. She and her lover killed Agamemnon when he returned home from the Trojan War. At one point, Agamemnon, Odysseus ventures into the underworld and speaks to Agamemnon, the spirit of Agamemnon. And Agamemnon praises Penelope and says she would not behave as did Clytemnestra. So this is very much a poem about loyalty. One of the most famous characters in all of literature is a swineherd, Eumaeus Odysseus loyal swineherd. While so many other people on the island have, as it were, made their peace with the barbarous suitors, Eumaeus did not. Odysseus takes shelter with him initially on his return to Ithaca and enlists his help in taking back in repossessing his home. But the essential quality of mind I mentioned a minute ago, this thing that Homer describes as polytropos, the ability to overcome adversity through clever, quick, tactical thinking, is not always seen in adversarial situations. Homer depicts that quality of mind, that cleverness, in other ways as well. At one point in his journey, he's alone. Now Odysseus is beset by poseidon who for various reasons wants to thwart Odysseus intentions to return home. And he's alone on a raft. Poseidon kicks up a storm. Odysseus raft is smashed. He's thrown into the raging ocean. His clothes are ripped off. He swims for days and finally crawls. He's lost, he has no idea where he is. He crawls, exhausted, onto shore, naked, hungry, sleepless, exhausted, he crawls into an olive bush and falls asleep. He wakes up to the sound of young girls playing. They're actually playing ball. And the ball goes into the water. Odysseus wakes up, sees his condition and sees that these young teenage girls are his only hope for some kind of help. Now think. Think about the rhetorical situation, think about the challenge. You're a 40 odd year old man, very powerful in build, very strong, but naked, covered with brine from the sea, beaten up, you look like death warmed over. You look like a dangerous death warmed over. And you've got all these 14, 16 year old girls you need to enlist the help of. And I repeat, you're naked. How do you get out of that one? That takes some skill, Odysseus says when he wakes up. Man of misery, whose land have I lit on now? What are they here? Violent, savage, lawless, or friendly to strangers? God fearing men. Listen, shouting echoing around me. Women, girls, or the nymphs who haunt the rugged mountaintops and the river springs and the meadows lush with grass? Or am I really close to people who speak my language? Up with you. See how the land lies. See for yourself now. And he does, muttering so great. Odysseus crept out of the bushes, stripping off with his massive hand a leafy branch from the tangled olive growth to shield his body, hide his private parts. And out he stalked as a mountain lion, exultant in his power, strides through wind and rain, his eyes ablaze. And he charges sheep or oxen or chases wild deer. But his hunger drives him on to go for flocks, even to raid the best defended homestead. This violent hunting imagery is exactly the kind of association that Odysseus in this situation doesn't want to excite, right? He needs these girls to stay put and not feel threatened. So Odysseus moved out, about to mingle with all those lovely girls, naked now as he was, for need, drove him on a terrible sight, all crusted, caked with brine. They scatter, they run. But the king's daughter is there among them. Nausicaa is her name. The local king, Alcinous, has this teenage Daughter who's just beginning to think about marriage. She stands firm with Athena's help, she turns and faced Odysseus Tornausch. Odysseus has to think. There's a certain protocol if you're beseeching someone's help, the normal thing, the proper thing to do, the protocol is to run up and grab their knees. You embrace their knees, you reach around them and hold them. Should he fling his arms around her knees, the young beauty plead for help or stand back? Plead with a winning word, beg her to lead him to the town and lend him clothing. This was the better way he felt thought. Plead now with a subtle winning word and stand well back. Don't clasp her knees, the girl might bridle. Yes, he launched in at once endearing, sly and suave. What follows is a speech, a little bit, I hope we can read, that demonstrates Odysseus exquisite rhetorical skill. Now when people hear about rhetorical skill they often assume that means some kind of deception, some sort of sleight of verbal hand, as it were. But this is not the case at all. The cleverness, the tactical wisdom Odysseus has doesn't in this case move him to deception. Although he's perfectly happy to deceive when the need arises, he's got this horrible circumstance he's got to overcome. And the best way to do that is to put her at ease. Here I am at your mercy, princess. Are you a goddess or a mortal? Now everyone chuckles and says ho, isn't that flattering? Wow, look at this goddess. But remember, Odysseus has been spending a lot of time with goddesses and when he woke up said to himself, who are these women, girls or the nymphs who haunt the rugged mountaintops? So Odysseus actually doesn't know with whom he's dealing, but nevertheless he does know that if it's a goddess, one would not want to be mistaken for a mortal. If it's a mortal, one wouldn't mind being mistaken for a goddess. Here I am at your mercy, princess. Are you a goddess or a mortal? If one of the gods who rule the skies up there you're Artemis to the life, the daughter of mighty Zeus. I see her now. Just look at your build, your bearing, your life flowing grace. Now you might be thinking back away. Or does it? No, no, no, don't go there Odysseus, but just watch. He knows, he knows what he's doing. But if you're one of the mortals living here on earth three times blessed are your father Your queenly mother three times over, your brothers too. How often their hearts must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances. Such a bloom of beauty. True, but he is the one more blessed than all other men alive, that man who sways you with gifts and leads you home his bride. I have never laid eyes on anyone like you, neither man nor woman. I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me. Clearly by mentioning family things sacred, or at least very likely sacred to this young girl. Father, mother, future hope and husband, her brothers, home. All of these references that he makes are designed to signal to her. I think they're perfectly sincere, but they're designed to signal to her, you have nothing to fear. You have nothing to fear. If he had evil intentions, he would not be mentioning father and brothers and mother and marriage and home and those, the. Those grand staples of a stable family life. He then asks for her help. Athena gives her courage, and indeed she does help him, gives him a covering and some oil. He bathes, dresses himself, and she takes him to her father's court. And it is at that court that we get the bulk of the poem. So this ability that Odysseus has to extricate himself from difficult and complex situations isn't always just having a clever trick to deceive your enemy or a good right arm. It is also understanding human nature. What does a young girl who's just beginning to think about marriage, what does she regard as sacred, as valuable, as precious, as important for a good life? How can I appeal to that? How can I, as it were, move or navigate into that in order to get her to see my fundamental need and also her fundamental safety with him? Now, this reception that Odysseus receives here is in violent contrast with the reception that he receives in the famous, famous episode concerning the Cyclops. I won't read the passage. I hope you will. But the Cyclops episode is almost an archetypal presentation of everything barbaric, that is, how does man or monster get public social, common life wrong? And by public social, common life, I mean everything from family, home to community. The Cyclops is spoken of as lawless, as not having any community, is not having a council where people meet and deliberate. He rules his wife tyrannically, his wife and his children tyrannically. He lives in caves, not in real homes. He doesn't even cultivate the earth. He doesn't grow food, he's a shepherd, he keeps sheep. But he won't even, as it were, exercise the discipline necessary to cultivate a Crop. Okay, these are the things that Homer will point out often very rapidly, almost as an aside. But as you probably know, the cyclops encounter turns out very badly. Odysseus goes there with several men. The Cyclops, in, shall we say, a rather shocking breach of hospitality, eats them. Not all of them, but he takes one man in each hand, smashes their brains out on the floor and stuffs their bleeding bodies in his mouth. Swallows. Odysseus finally manages to work out an escape which involves, by the way, his playing on the barbarous intemperance of the cyclops. He manages to get him drunk and when drunk, injures the cyclops in a way that isn't fatal but does render him harmless to the remaining Ithacans with Odysseus. Well, this is a pattern you see over and over in the poem. You see the presentation of a proper kind of welcome or hospitality and reception and a barbarous welcome, absence of hospitality, non reception. You see it over and over again. And of course, most graphic, maybe that was the most graphic, but you see it very graphically when Odysseus gets home and his house is besieged by these suitors eventually. This is a very difficult poem to talk about in a summary fashion because the richness is so much not just in the plot but in the details. You really want to read the lines, the words, you want to notice all the details. Homer certainly notices them. But for our purposes, suffice this. When Odysseus returns disguised as a beggar, he is reunited with Telemachus. He, Telemachus and Eumaeus conspire together to trap the suitors in such a way that allows Odysseus to destroy them. This is successful. Penelope is unaware, or apparently unaware of Odysseus identity. Again, he's disguised as a beggar. The ruse that the scheme they devise is successful. They're all slain and Odysseus then presents himself as the long lost husband to Penelope. Now Penelope is a wife worthy of Odysseus. She's no fool. She's been putting those suitors off for many years by weaving this funeral shroud by day and unweaving it by night, promising that she'll make some choice of a future husband when she finishes the shroud. Well, she unweaves. She's finally caught out at that. So darn it all, she has to finish the shroud. But she is no fool. She knows that Odysseus has been gone a long time. She's inclined to think this must be Odysseus but she puts him to a test. And I think we have time to read a snippet of that test. She says, well, I think you might be Odysseus, but I'm not sure. We're going to wait and see. Going to hold off for a while. And Odysseus says, strange woman, so hard the gods of Olympus made you harder than any other woman in the world. What other wife could have a spirit so unbending, holding back from her husband, Home at last for her after bearing 20 years of brutal struggle. Come, nurse, make me a bed. I'll sleep alone. She has a heart of iron in her breast. She replies, strange man. Wary Penelope said, I'm not so proud, so scornful, nor am I overwhelmed by your quick change. You look how well I know the way he looked setting sail from Ithaca years ago aboard the long oared ship. Come, Euryklaya, move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber, that room the master built with his own hands. Take it out now, the sturdy bed that it is, and spread it deep with fleece blankets and lustrous throws to keep him warm. Odysseus. Homer then clues you in that this is a test. Putting her husband to the proof. But Odysseus blazed up in fury, lashing out at his loyal wife. Woman, your words cut me to the core. Who could move my bed? What we learn is that Odysseus made their marriage bed out of a living rooted olive tree, not lumber cut down a tree rooted into the earth. That tree he shaped into one of the posts of the bed, attached the rest of the bed, literally built the room and the house around that tree and around that bed. Clearly significant of the stability, the strength, the rootedness of family, of marriage, of man and wife, of home. This is clearly the perfect symbol for a home restored to order, strength and stability. This is the resolution, as it were, of the poem. That symbol, I think, sums it up perfectly. So this is very much a poem about family. It's very much a poem about the thing that gives rise, that gives birth to all social order, to all public peace. It can certainly, as we have seen, be a place of great disorder, disruption. But if there is going to be peace and harmony, it begins there, in families, in marriages, men and women, and in homes. Odysseus, you recall, had said to Nausicaa, and I will conclude with this, he said to Nausicaa, he offered her a blessing. I hope this for you. It's worth noting that the Odyssey concludes there actually is reference to one little journey he's going it's a big journey, but a journey he's going to have to take in addition. But that comes with a promise of peace and stability thereafter. So I say that the poem does conclude with Odysseus realizing, restoring in his own world, in his own family, that which he wished for, and blessed Nausicaa with that is again a husband and house and lasting harmony to no finer gift in the world than that when man and woman possess their home, Two minds, two hearts that work as one, despair to their enemies, a joy to all their friends, their own best claim to glory. Not Odysseus martial valor, not Odysseus tactical cleverness, not even Odysseus brute strength and force or rhetorical ability. His best glory is his home, his family, stability there. And with that, we'll conclude a very cursory, hopefully mildly tantalizing discussion of Homer's great poem the Odyssey.

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