The Odyssey is the story of a warrior who survives the Trojan War and seeks to return home. It takes him a decade to reach Ithaca, and his wife Penelope.
The narrative and its characters are cruder in the writing than those in the Iliad . Because of this, though it is sequentially and chronologically after the Iliad , many think that ‘Homer’ wrote the Odyssey before the Iliad. Homer is like our Ved Vyas: an elusive figure with no fixed history. It is believed now that the works attributed to him are actually those of the many bards who chanted in the lyric tradition of Greece.
I have written here before about how the American scholar Milman Parry studied the Yugoslav bardic poets. He established in the early 20th century that ‘Homer’ was actually a tradition of generations of poetic narrators who used fixed meter and stock phrases (like “Hector, breaker of horses” and “rose-fingered dawn”) to communicate the epics to mostly illiterate audiences. The classically-educated 19th century European and American was familiar with the Odyssey in ancient Greek.
Cunning hero
The English-speaking world was introduced to Homer in translation in the early 20th century through the Odyssey . E.V. Rieu translated the Odyssey in 1946 for Penguin, for the first time making the classic widely accessible in simplified language.
In the Iliad , Odysseus is shown as a wise individual who influences things in the right way. Some see him as cunning and deceitful but there is no doubt that he moves the plot along.
For the modern reader of both the Iliad and its sequel, Odysseus is a patriarchal and conservative figure. He stands for tradition, and in a warrior society he also stands for honour and the old ways.
American journalist Ira F. Stone takes up one episode in the Iliad featuring Odysseus to demonstrate this. This relates to the story of Thersites who stands up to the tyrant Agamemnon and resists the Trojan war. For this insolence he is beaten up by Odysseus. Stone points out that Homer describes Thersites as hunch-backed and broken-bodied (the ancient Greeks had the same loathing of disabilities that we Indians do) and, therefore, imperfect.
After the war, which is won by the besiegers though their hero Achilles dies, the Greeks begin their journey home. This is also full of adventures, during one of which Odysseus’s ship is the only one to escape. At this point, he visits the witch Circe, who turns half his men into pigs. Odysseus has taken a potion to resist her wiles. Attracted by his resistance, Circe falls in love with him and releases his men.
Ulysses around the world
Circe instructs Odysseus and his crew to cross the ocean and sail to a harbour at the western edge of the world, where Odysseus summons the spirit of the old prophet Tiresias for advice. Next, Odysseus meets the spirit of his mother who had died of grief during his long absence.
From her, he learns news for the first time of his household, threatened by the greed of Penelope’s suitors. As can be imagined, Odysseus arrives home just in time to reveal himself and all is well.
For the literal minded, this work contains the original references to the distracting sirens and being caught between Scylla and Charybdis. In 1965, Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote a strange work named The Continent of Circe in which he speculated that Indians are all originally Europeans or of European descent, and we were mysteriously seduced into becoming barbarians by Circe, played by India.
Odysseus in Latin is Ulysses. There are at least two stories related to that name. The first is of the American warrior Ulysses S. Grant. He was the man whom Abraham Lincoln trusted, after a series of failures, to deliver victory in the American Civil War. Grant later went on to come president himself, though he was disgraced by scandal.
The second reference is to the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, one of the great modern works. Its writer reimagines Odysseus as a cuckold and sets his travels around the city of Dublin. The novel, thought to be impenetrable, examines the patience and desires of a woman in a sexless relationship.
Aakar Patel is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.
