Odyssey Scholars Compiled

the 'fate and the will of Zeus are identical'

'Homer frees Odysseus of any responsibility over the deaths of his comrades'

'Odysseus comes from a close and affectionate human family, and his attitude to Penelope and Telemachus is that of a good husband and father'

Telemachus is 'weak and powerless in the beginning, only to have him slay one of his tormentors in the end.'

The story of the Odyssey is an example to Telemachus

'Athene's disguise as Mentor introduces the motif of 'disguised identity followed by significant revelation.'

'his [Odysseus'] disguises and deceptions are all a means to a justifiable and suitably heroic end'

'Penelope shares Odysseus' cunning'

'Odysseus' most heroic quality is his cunning [...] it is this quality of his that helps him to survive in the Odyssey'

'Homer wants us to realise above all interests Odysseus' desire is to get home to Ithaca'

Odysseus had 'One goal only- to return home'

'There is a conflict within Odysseus and within the Odyssey between the desire for novelty and exploration and the desire for the reassuringly familiar and secure'

The gods in the Odyssey are there 'to play a major role in shaping the plot'.

he argues that Athene is polyvalent and plays a variety of roles including the role of household goddess and goddess of war

Poseidon is 'the blocking force or obstacle to Odysseus' return'.

'The death of the suitors is clearly approved of by the gods and treated as a necessary victory of good over evil'

'The purpose of revenge is not just to express personal anger, but to restore honour and maintain social order’

'it [the scene] is meant to be a reestablishment of right order, but an orgy of blood vengeance peers through'.

xenia 'serves as a moral yardstick by which virtually all of the important events and characters are evaluated'

Xenia is one of the most important themes for structuring the entire poem. The suitors 'violate the rules of xenia', and that 'every single good example of xenia has been rewarded in some way, and every single bad example has been punished'

'the fidelity of Odysseus' wife is crucial to the story'

'Her (Penelope's) loyalty to Odysseus is never in doubt', 'her loyalty to Odysseus remains constant'

'Everything centres on the oikos. The ferocity of Odysseus' revenge is an index of the supreme value placed on the household. Eating up its food, seducing a few of its servants, and courting its widowed mistress do not seem like great enormities - offensive yes, beyond compensation? It would appear however that... an assault on the integrity of the oikos and even minor collaboration with its attackers are high crimes'.

'Odysseus tries as hard as he can to avoid death, wanting to win glory by being able to live to tell about his achievements'.

'Eumaeus has a keen sense of right and wrong... his simple piety and open generosity to the beggar Odysseus (although he is hardly the wealthiest of men) make us warm to him....Eumaeus and Eurycleia are, as Norman Austin says, "stalwart paradigms of order"... They represent what the palace used to be like-and will be again, when its master is restored.'

'Slavery is an abomination to us... Such a view would have been incomprehensible to Homer and his audience, for whom slavery was a condition of existence and the inevitable consequence of pirate raiding and defeat in war'

‘The actions of the Odyssey are motivated by the idea of a return to the “inner space… by the reassertion of identity and of ties with members of the household… by Odysseus’ reunion with Telemachus and Laertes,’

‘Reassertion of control in the palace in Ithaca and the reaffirmation of a natural sequence of generations is a crucial aspect of social order…’

‘Yet more prominent than all of these returns and reaffirmations is, of course, Odysseus’ reunion with Penelope, a union of male and female, which combines elements of identity, sexuality, economic well-being and social functions.’

‘the gods take on the role of moral agents, warning mortals against evil actions in the Odyssey,’

‘mortals in the Odyssey bring evil upon themselves and are punished for wrongdoing…’

‘This is an entirely personal motivation, and at first sight sits ill with a broader system of disinterested justice, since the Cyclops avers his indifference to Zeus in stark terms, and behaves in the crucial area of hospitality…as one of the worst hosts in the poem… Yet within the boundaries of fate Poseidon can pursue his feud against Odysseus as he wishes…’

‘That Zeus guarantees her (Athene’s) interventions at several points in the poem, reveals, as in the Iliad, his eventual responsibility for everything that happens on earth.’

‘This last ends up being their final error, though even here we could defend their actions, since the slaughter of Helios’s cattle is forced on them by potential starvation. Neither Helios nor Zeus take account of that: all that matters is the action, for which the latter blasts their ship with the thunderbolt.‘

‘the disregarded warning is a key signal of coming destruction, and it amounts to a very clear, almost painfully straightforward moral universe,’

‘Odysseus’s journey from Ogygia to Ithaca, to his kingdom, his house, his bedroom is also a journey from isolation towards an ever closer community,’

‘Odysseus’ girlfriends seem designed to portray a range of different female types and female style of affection, Nausicaa’s maidenly tendresse is in contrast to Calypso, the type of passionate woman, who contrasts again with Circe, a sort of divinized good-time girl, equally content to turn Odysseus into a pig, have an affair with him or speed him on his way when he wishes to leave. He also benefits from Athene’s sexless affection and Penelope’s wifely stoicism.’

‘The Odyssey, however, gives prominence even to slaves and beggars. Among those honoured to greet Odysseus in a scene of recognition are not only his wife, so and father, but Eumaeus, and the herdsman Philoetius, Eurycleia, a slave woman and even a dog…a whole society, in all its ranks welcomes Odysseus home, and even a hound has a place in this fellowship.’

Aegisthus has committed two crimes, adultery and murder, and these are the crimes which in effect the suitors are hoping to commit.’

‘The touchstone is above all the treatment of strangers and beggars, who are especially under the protection of Zeus. The xen- words come again and again in the poem. The test here is not…for aristocrats only, but one by which people of all kinds can be judged… The formulaic method brings out the social range of this morality,’

‘The Odyssey remains a deeply aristocratic poem in that loyalty is a supreme virtue in the lowly,’

‘The Odyssey, indeed, surrounds humble and domestic things with a kind of heroic seriousness. The nobility themselves perform everyday tasks: a princess does the washing, and Odysseus, rebuking an insulting suitor, implies that he is experienced at mowing and ploughing as well as in the arts of war,’

‘Conversely even slaves may be granted their own dignity

Eumaeus and Philoetius are described as a “leader of men”

Eumaeus is a noble swineherd

Eumaeus’s swine live in a kind of pig palace, built of quarried stone, in a place which commands a wide view, with a courtyard and the females penned apart from the boars (14.5) This is an example of the orderliness which is one of the poems ideals

He is not indeed, entirely an ordinary swineherd, for we learn that he is of royal birth, but was kidnapped by pirates as a child; however, that fact has its own significance. He is one more example of that doubleness in which the poem delights. Scheria was both a fairy tale kingdom and recognisable, ordinary society; Eumaeus is both prince and a slave. His noble ancestry represents that blend of the grand and the humble which is one of the poem’s charms.’

‘But for those who, in such a world, show themselves worthy to be trusted, the response is warmly emotional. The old nurse Eurycleia calls Odysseus her child, touchingly so in her first utterance on recognising him…The devoted servant feels both feudal loyalty and personal love. When Telemachus comes back from Sparta he goes straight to Eumaeus’ hut:

He came to meet his master, and kissed his head and both eyes and both hands: a big tear fell from him . As when a father embraces his son in love, his beloved only son, who is returning from a foreign land after ten years (16.14-21)

That is a remarkable simile.’

‘The Odyssey is....a defence and reaffirmation of the 'oikos' [the home] in the threat of erosion.’

‘The suitors are the cream of the populace. they are several times referred to as aristoi (the best).’

‘There are a substantial number of slaves and hired workers and also a sprinkling of beggars, bards, and artisans, none of whom appears to be included ordinarily in the concept of the 'people' (demos).These are the people who do not count... they are no part of the assembly or of any communal decision-making processes, and are no political force.’

He observes in the Odyssey ' an aristocratic upper stratum or nobility, with power and authority closely related to the size of their estates, and dependent in its turn on a servile stratum'... and nothing in between.

‘In Scheria, a highly civilised land, there are thirteen basileus (kings), one of whom ranks first among his peers. In Ithaka, Odysseus' kingship' is probably comparable; among many basileus, he has been the most important. Antinous implies that the son of a basileus might be expected to succeed his father in his title, but in none of this is there any indication of kingship in the modern sense of a hereditary monarchy.

We should probably therefore not think in terms of a 'vacancy' left by Odysseus' presumed death, which there is a contest to 'fill'. Rather since Odysseus left, no one of comparable stature has emerged in Ithaka who could be recognised as its leading man.

There is no government and a basileus does not 'rule' in any political sense. It is not that Ithaka has been without a head of state for a generation; it has never had one.

Scheria seems to have a government. Alkinous joins the other basileus in council (od.6.53-5) presumably for the conduct of civic business; by contrast there has been no civic assembly in Ithaka for twenty years.

Telemachos' problem, which brings the Ithakans to formal assembly after such a long time, is an extremely unusual one. Ordinarily most conflicts would be occur and be settled within a household or between households. In this world there is therefore no need for civil government, and indeed there is none.’

‘The integrity of the oikos [household] is, I believe, the central and dominating issue of the Odyssey, a much more sharply focused theme than simply 'Odysseus' homecoming.

1.248: the suitors are 'consuming the household'... their presence has been a defilement of the household.’

‘In the conflict between the Odyssean household and the suitors, there are intimations of a conflict between a younger and an older generation, between town and country, and their respective value systems.’

‘The Odyssey draws from folk-tale traditions recorded primarily in art, but also offers a more disenchanted, epic exploration of power and its consequences. Just as it draws from several different genres and traditions, so it illicits a vast range of responses. By turns a comic character, a tragic hero, a stoic sage, and a villain, Odysseus could never and cannot yet, be pinned down.’

‘Penelope is famous above all for her role as the faithful wife…But there is more to Penelope than that. Occasionally we catch glimpses of another story: in one post-Homeric version of the legend Odysseus returns to find that Penelope had enjoyed herself with several, or indeed all of the suitors, a tradition to which Ovid alludes to in his Amores when he suggests there was more to the contest of the bow than meets the eye…Because Homer tells us little about her thoughts, her motives are mysterious and can never be finally determined.’

‘The one Odysseus is a wanderer among magic and monsters, the other is a king rooted in his own kingdom, a noble whose prowess is displayed in close combat with other nobles.’

‘Alcinous is a bit of a bumbler…there is something touching about the lovely idyll of Scherie, a land of dance,’

‘Homer’s blend of the elevated and every day is at its most delicate in the handling of Nausicaa. She belongs with Circe and Calypso in the sequence of women whom Odysseus encounters in his wanderings, but she differs from the others in that they are goddesses, while she is an ordinary mortal, and that they have sexual relations with him while she may not…..And though she is not a goddess, at moments she resembles one. As she plays with her maidens she is likened to Artemis, accompanied by her nymphs….Later he (Odysseus) will promise that when he reaches home, he will always pray to her as a god, in gratitude for what she has done for him….Homer shows us that, in a sense, girlishness can be divine.’

‘Odysseus is a returned husband, long-missing and plausibly presumed dead; Leodes, among many others, desired his wife. Few of Homer’s modern readers could condone a killing in such a context, let alone acclaim it, but the Odyssey does-or does it…?‘

When Odysseus describes the Cyclops’ island (9. 131-6), he speaks with the discerning eye of the colonist. Odysseus the mythical explorer is related to the real-life Greeks who in the archaic age sailed into unknown waters across the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

‘There have been three common responses to the hero of the Odyssey. First, he is the loyal hero-husband whose eyes are fixed on one goal only: return home…Second, he is the eternal wanderer, fired with a passion for knowledge and experience. Third, he is an anti-hero, a mean, selfish time-server who employs disguise and deceit often to gain the most disreputable ends (classical Greeks and Romans frequently saw him in this light).’

‘The Iliad is a poem about force; the Odyssey is a poem about the triumph of the mind over force.’

‘The so-called “reverse simile” in which Penelope’s gladness at seeing her husband is like the gladness of the survivors of a ship wrecked by Poseidon who have managed to swim to shore safely (23. 233-240), has particular force because Odysseus himself in Books 5 and 12 has been represented as such a survivor. This simile and others that reverse normal male and female roles and experiences (8.523) are of special thematic importance in a poem that seems to value others’ viewpoints and that is concerned with analogies between the heroism of Odysseus and that of Penelope and with the powerful role of Penelope and women generally.’

‘The Odyssey can show us the young man in the process of achieving adult status, asserting himself for the first time both with the Suitors and with his mother.’

‘The ill-starred return of Agamemnon, with the treachery of his wife and his avenging by his son, is repeatedly brought in as a foil and a warning to Odysseus and Telemachus.’

‘The tale of Agamemnon is explicitly a model for Odysseus.’

‘Helen tells us how Odysseus entered Troy in disguise, an episode which looks forward to his disguised presence, in the second half of the poem, in his own house.’

‘The poet preferred, as Aristotle remarked, to let Odysseus himself, rather than the primary narrator, vouch for the truth of those tales: they are full of fantastic creatures, far beyond what the poet tells us in his own person, and if the audience is sceptical of the truth of some of them, why everyone knows sailors tell tall tales.’

‘The Phaeacians are remote from ordinary humanity and close to the gods.’

‘Among them the queen wears the trousers.’

‘Books 13-21: he does very little that is heroic, accepts humiliations, and at moments looks like a real beggar rather than a hero.’

‘Odysseus is always talking about his belly and its imperious demands.’

‘Athena in classical art often carries in her outstretched hand a miniature figure of herself: that is Athena nike, Athena victory. Her favour means success, and it is no less true to say that she favours Odysseus because he is a winner, than to say that he wins because of her favour.’