The Odyssey Lecture 2
Lecture Notes · Session II
On Homer's Odyssey
Paul Cantor · University of Virginia
Understanding a Distant Culture
The world of Homer is genuinely different from our own, but that does not make it unintelligible. Studying a remote culture is difficult, not impossible. We can recognize common human elements across time — people laugh, cry, get angry, fall in love. These desires are shared. What differs is the context: the institutions, the beliefs, the way anger or love is expressed and understood. How you get angry looks different if you were raised on the New Testament, told to turn the other cheek, than if you were raised to believe "the Greek shall inherit the earth."
Comparative literature would be impossible if there were no continuity in human nature — otherwise studying the Greeks would be like studying visitors from another planet. But the Greeks are human beings just like us; in fact, they were the first to develop the very concept of "human being." This continuity is what allows us to look for differences and makes genuine comparison possible. Still, we have to be careful.
The Myth of "Classical" Greece
Our inherited image of the Greeks is that they were rational and disciplined — this is what we mean when we call something "classical": the proportion and symmetry of the Parthenon, the model behind neoclassical architecture like the Lawn and the Rotunda (itself an imitation of the Roman Pantheon). But we tend to forget that the Parthenon was originally painted — red and blue, gaudy, thoroughly Mediterranean. The classical perfection we associate with Greece is, to some extent, an illusion created by time: the paint fades and leaves only white marble behind. This vision of a serene, "classic" Greece is really an eighteenth-century invention.
Nietzsche challenged this picture. He asked how passionate the Greeks must have been to have placed such a high premium on rationality in the first place, and he uncovered the dark side of the Greek world — what he called the Dionysian, as opposed to the Apollonian. Apollo is the god of rationality and discipline; Dionysus is the god of wine and sexual excess. Consider all the weeping in the Iliad — grown men weeping over losing a chariot race. We think of the Greeks as sober and restrained, as Stoic, but that is a late development, belonging to the Roman world (Zeno lived in the fourth to third centuries BC, long after Homer). Homer's Greeks are very different: they do not keep their emotions bottled up. The Iliad and Odyssey show us a Mediterranean people given to mafia-like vendettas, driven by eros and thumos. If anything, the Greeks were more passionate than we are, not less.
Passion, Virtue, and the Absence of "Sin"
The world of the Iliad and Odyssey is, in a sense, an innocent one. The Greeks do not think that passions in themselves are evil or sinful — not pride, not envy (hubris will come up later). There is, in fact, no ancient Greek word that corresponds exactly to our concept of "pride." The word megalopsychia appears late — first in Aristotle — and eventually comes to mean something like "pride," but its primary meaning is "greatness of soul." What we think of as pride, the Greeks fundamentally understood as greatness. Aristotle lists megalopsychia as one of the virtues; he does not list humility or piety among them. This is not to say the Greeks saw no danger in what we call pride — it gets both Achilles and Odysseus into trouble — but they did not think of it as a deadly sin. In its primary sense, it is a virtue, not a vice.
The same holds for sex. The Greeks did not think sexuality was inherently evil. Odysseus sleeps around a good deal; this may be a mistake, may even be wrong in some sense, but it is not sinful. Ancient Greek hardly has a word for what we call "sin." The closest term, hamartia — which the New Testament translates as "sin," and which Aristotle also uses for what gets translated as "tragic flaw" — primarily means "missing the mark," a term borrowed from archery. It describes something closer to a mistake than a sin. Greek discussions of sexuality tend to be frank and casual, more medical than moral — manuals advising things like: in summer, don't indulge too much, it's hot and will tire you out; in winter, go right ahead, it will help keep you warm.
None of this means the Greeks were unconcerned with sexual morality by their own lights. The Odyssey is obviously built on the ideal of marital fidelity — Penelope is held to a much stricter standard, and Clytemnestra is condemned for her adultery, though this is fundamentally a matter of family honor and the integrity of the family line. Still, the Greeks were generally more tolerant than we are of what we would call sexual lapses, seeing them as natural. Just consider how the Greek gods themselves behave sexually — they do not maintain a very high standard of sexual morality by our terms. This is exactly what we mean when we call this world "pagan," and it is why the early Christians rejected Greek and Roman paganism and smashed its statues. It is worth remembering throughout that this material is pre-Christian, and that it reflects a genuinely different view of the world. You may ultimately reject that view, but give it its due first — try to understand it. There may be something admirable in it.
The Emergence of Human Agency
Among the ancient Greeks we can see the beginnings of something like what we now think of as full humanity: strong passions, but also a real effort to control them. In Homer, learning to control your passions and learning to control the world go together. Homer's sense of the cosmos is, in part, an effort to find room for human control within it. Other early poetry tends to attribute all power to the gods — if a man succeeds, it is because the gods willed it. That view is certainly present in Homer too, and it's often what modern readers notice first. But what is actually new in Homer is a sense of inherent human excellence — not everything comes from the gods. Homer looks at the world with wide-eyed appreciation for excellence wherever he finds it — human and otherwise. This is arete: what an excellent horse, what an excellent sword, what an excellent bow, what an excellent goblet. Things have excellent natures, and human beings especially so. This produces a hierarchy of excellence among human beings — not a democratic one, and often quite physically grounded, based in nature: you are either strong in body or you are not.
The tragic fact, for Homer, is that this natural hierarchy of excellence is not always supported by the cosmos, by the gods, or even by other human beings. The gods encourage excellence but do not always reward it — they may even punish it, striking down heroes precisely for behaving heroically. There is a terrifying moment in the Iliad when Aphrodite and Helen confront one another — the most beautiful goddess facing the most beautiful woman, mirror images of each other. The gods admire the human beings who are most like them, but they also fear those same human beings, who present a kind of challenge to them. This explains the disturbing, up-and-down pattern of the Homeric world. The story of Achilles begins with exactly this gap between nature and convention: one day he is the best of the Achaeans by nature, the next day he argues with the conventional ruler and retreats to his tent to sulk. The same problem exists among human beings as among the gods: people recognize the grandeur of excellence and yet fear its power as a challenge to their own standing. Agamemnon knows he needs Achilles, his best warrior, and yet feels he must publicly insult him, to put him in his place. In a world where virtue is fundamentally identified with strength and power, whatever makes people admire you also makes them fear — and therefore hate — you.
Our world tends to identify virtue with moral virtue, and so with qualities compatible with community: compassion, sensitivity, kindness — the things that let people live together harmoniously. The Greeks understood these communal virtues too, but they did not identify them with virtue as such. What they thought of as virtue was often at odds with communal living. Consider a vicious lion: the Greeks would say, "what an excellent lion" — a strange sentence in English, but it makes the point. It is the perfection of "lion-ness"; a lion should not be a housecat. It is in the nature of a lion to be vicious, and in that sense it is virtuous — excellent — for a lion to be vicious. The more vicious the lion, the more lion-like it is. But you cannot make a pet of that lion (a point Aeschylus makes); it is very hard to live with such a creature, and it does not fit easily into a city. The Greek sense of excellence, in other words, is not necessarily compatible with their sense of community — which is precisely why the Greeks are a tragic people. We, by contrast, are so committed to community that we have almost redefined virtue to mean simply the ability to live together.
Theodicy: Justifying the Ways of the Gods
Homer is searching for intelligibility in the universe — for a theodicy, a justification of the gods' justice (theos and dike). There is a shift visible between the Iliad and the Odyssey: in the Odyssey, the gods increasingly transfer responsibility onto human beings themselves. Somehow the poem attempts to vindicate divine justice, though not through any simple or easy vindication. This places Homer among the great religious thinkers — alongside Aeschylus and Sophocles, but also the Book of Job, or the Buddha. The great question is: why do human beings suffer? Why especially do the good suffer, why do the good die young? Why do the good sometimes suffer while the wicked prosper? For Homer, "goodness" is not primarily moral goodness — the puzzling question is why a handsome, powerful hero is struck down. It remains a live poetic theme much later, as in Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young."
Homer's implicit answer is polytheism, which has certain intellectual advantages over monotheism. (This is not an argument for paganism.) If there is only one god, and that god is omnipotent and benevolent, it becomes genuinely difficult to explain the existence of evil in the world — it can be done, and Milton will attempt exactly this, but it requires enormous theological labor. Polytheism, by contrast, is a fairly reasonable response to the world as it actually appears, which is one reason most peoples throughout history have been polytheists, and monotheism is a comparatively late development in human history — one that has a persistent tendency to slide back toward polytheism, as in the veneration of saints, or belief in devils and demons.
Homer's account of the world steers between two extremes: that the universe is perfectly ordered, or that it is perfectly chaotic. The first possibility is tempting — consoling, offering a sense of security — but it doesn't fit the facts; too many strange and unfair things happen, and it would leave no room for human agency, since everything would be determined by fate. The second possibility, that the universe is simply chaotic, with no rhyme or reason to anything, is dangerous in its own way: it breeds skepticism and undermines human resolve. Why struggle to be a hero if the universe does not reward heroism? This is precisely what torments Achilles in the Iliad.
Homer instead portrays a universe that is neither perfectly ordered nor perfectly chaotic. There are gods who care about human affairs and watch over them, but they are not always paying attention — they may be off in Ethiopia. And although the gods are very powerful, they are not omnipotent; there are things even they cannot do, such as overcome human mortality. Finally, there are many gods, and they do not always agree — sometimes they work at cross-purposes. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition posits one God, omnipotent and benevolent; Homer questions all three of these premises. There are many gods, they are not all-powerful, and they are not always kind. This is, roughly, a plausible account of how things actually seem to happen in the world: sometimes the wicked prosper, but sometimes they seem to be punished for their crimes; sometimes the good suffer, but sometimes they seem to be rewarded after all.
The central Homeric experience is this: just when you begin to think the universe is intelligible, something strange happens; just when you begin to think it is unintelligible, something happens that restores your faith in order. Odysseus's return will be delayed, and he will suffer greatly and unjustly, but he will eventually get home. Consider Laertes's reaction to the news of the suitors' deaths: it reaffirms his faith in Zeus — but this implies that his faith had been shaken in the first place. Notably, he puts a condition on the gods; his faith is not unconditional or absolute. For him to believe in the gods, they must behave in a certain way. This is the Homeric world: the gods may delay punishment, but they must not abandon it entirely. They must act justly often enough to keep human trust alive. Greek faith is not absolute — they do not give their gods a blank check. The gods have to come through for their worshippers at least now and then. This is hard for us to fully appreciate about the ancient world: if the gods abandon you, you abandon them in turn. The ancient landscape is littered with abandoned gods. If another people defeats you in battle, you start worshipping their gods instead — they must be the stronger ones.
The Ambivalent Gods of Homer
Homer's picture of the gods is strangely ambivalent. Sometimes they seem all too human — a squabbling family, with Zeus as a harassed father and Ares and Aphrodite bickering in the back seat, "are we at Olympus yet?" Other times they seem genuinely divine and cosmic — Zeus commanding lightning and thunder, seemingly omnipotent, much closer to our own conception of deity. But often Zeus's hands are tied: he could not prevent the death of his own son Sarpedon in the Iliad; there is a sense of fate standing above even the gods. Because the Greeks had kings, they naturally think of Zeus as king of the gods — more powerful than any other single god, perhaps than all of them combined, but not all-powerful. He has to respect the other gods, make deals with them, and sometimes give in to his wife.
(Some scholars have tried to account for these two different pictures of the gods historically, treating the Iliad's view as more primitive and the Odyssey's as evolving toward monotheism — a reading that assumes monotheism is the superior, more advanced view. But in fact, both pictures of the gods can be found in both poems.)
This view of the gods in Homer is coherent, and even in a sense plausible: it explains why human life is more or less the way it is, while still leaving room for human action and motivation. The gods may not punish evil, but in any particular case you cannot be certain they will not. The gods may not reward good, but you cannot be certain they will not do that either. Recall the formula in the Iliad: Zeus grants one prayer but not another — but you never know in advance which one. Homer gives us odds, not certainties: not what the gods definitely will do, but what they may do, or probably will do — just enough to keep people honest. The Greeks stood in awe of their gods without being convinced the gods were always right; they could argue with them. What is distinctive in the Homeric view of the gods is that it expresses conviction about their power, but not about their justice. People know the gods are powerful; they can only hope they are just. This is a view of divinity well suited to a military aristocracy accustomed to dealing with people who are powerful but not necessarily just — this was, after all, a slaveowning society. Our own view of divinity is saturated with the idea of justice and moral goodness in a way that is quite different from the Greeks'; it feels almost wrong to us to say "God is not just" — as if a being could not be God at all without being just. The Greeks were more skeptical about their divinities, which is part of why they seem to have been the first people to develop science and philosophy as an alternative to a purely religious view of the world.
One especially characteristic moment is Circe telling Odysseus his fate. She advises him to do the reasonable thing, and he rebels, wanting to fight fate itself — a profoundly Homeric passage. What Odysseus has to learn, over and over, is what he can and cannot accomplish as a human being. He even calculates carefully, concealing parts of his fate from his men, and yet still struggles against it when the moment comes. This constant struggle against the limitations of humanity is characteristic of Odysseus for Homer — in this respect he resembles Achilles.
Homer's Legacy and the Birth of Nature
Homer's importance for later Greek thought is immense: he laid the groundwork for the deepest speculations of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — questions about whether the universe is intelligible, whether there is a natural order, and what the relationship is between nature and convention. Significantly, the Greek word for nature makes its first appearance anywhere in Homer: physis (the root of "physics," "physical," "physician," "physique"), related to phuton, the Greek word for plant. Nature, in this sense, is fundamentally what grows on its own, containing within itself the principle of its own development or motion — unlike human artifacts, which have to be made (shoes, after all, do not grow on trees, and do not reproduce themselves).
This first appearance of the concept is tellingly connected to a plant: the moly that protects Odysseus against Circe. There is an order of things that even the gods cannot change — this is the great Greek discovery underlying both philosophy and science. As far as we know, this is the first time the concept of "nature" appears anywhere in human thought. There is no word for nature in the Old Testament — the closest equivalent is "heavens and earth," but these remain subject to God's will; he can make the sun stand still if he chooses. Most Greeks, of course, thought of the sun itself as a god, but later philosophers, around the sixth or fifth century BC, began to understand the sun as a purely natural phenomenon — simply a great ball of fire. The idea of nature is present here in Homer only in germ, still undeveloped: notice that it still takes a god to protect Odysseus from another god, and a god must reveal the nature of the moly to him, since only a god can pluck it. But this is nonetheless the beginning of a process that will culminate in Greek philosophy. Physis becomes the great lever the ancient Greeks use against their gods — a sense of natural order, a sense that even the gods are constrained and not all-powerful, much like the fairness of a chariot race, which leaves room for human nature and human skill to matter. The development of the idea of nature is perhaps the single greatest intellectual accomplishment of the Greeks — it is where science itself comes from.
Homer as Scripture — and as Something Less Than Scripture
Homer shows us something distinctive about the Greeks. His poems are as close as the Greeks came to having a Bible, but they are not quite a sacred text. No one took oaths in an Athenian courtroom by swearing on a copy of the Odyssey. Homer was an authority — people quoted him to make points, the way ministers quote scripture — but he was not authoritative; no one was required to believe in the literal, factual truth of the Homeric poems. Greek religion was a matter of practices rather than beliefs — there was no creed, no catechism. To be pious, one simply had to perform the right ritual acts and make sacrifices at the right times (compare Aeschylus's Libation Bearers, or Sophocles's Antigone, and the recurring importance of sacrifice throughout Homer). Zeus never wonders whether a given mortal believes in him; he only wants to know whether he is receiving the proper sacrifices. This is very different from a revealed religion — you become a Muslim, for instance, by affirming that Allah is God and Muhammad is his prophet. There was nothing comparable in the ancient Greek or Roman world. One could get into trouble for publicly denying that the gods exist at all, as happened to Socrates (see Aristophanes's Clouds), but on the whole there was far less doctrinal content in pagan religion — it was a way of life rather than a set of beliefs. Being a good pagan did not require believing, for instance, that Ares and Aphrodite once slept together. There was no religious fundamentalism among the ancient Greeks, no reading of Homer the way some later readers read the Bible for literal truth. Two Greeks could consider themselves members of the same religion while disagreeing entirely about the events of the Homeric poems. There was no central religious authority, no Pope, to settle questions of orthodox doctrine.
None of this means Homer did not believe in the gods. Homeric religion involves a strange combination of reverence and skepticism, awe mixed with doubt. Odysseus, across the poem, learns to have faith in the gods — but also learns to doubt them. The Homeric gods deceive human beings, frequently appearing in disguise, which is exactly what Plato has Socrates complain about in the Republic when criticizing Homer's portrayal of the gods.
What actually happens over the course of the Odyssey is not quite what one would expect: Odysseus grows more suspicious, not less, as the poem progresses — and he gets into trouble precisely when he is too trusting. He suspects Calypso's motives; he does not trust the sea-nymph Leukothea's advice, even when it is sound. This may strike us as strange — the expectation that a god might simply deceive you. Odysseus trusts only what he sees with his own eyes, not what anyone else, human or divine, tells him. He does not even fully trust Athena: in one remarkable, thoroughly Greek scene, he actually lies to a goddess — mortal and god behaving exactly alike in that both of them lie. This is precisely why Athena loves him. Odysseus stands up to Athena — the same spirit that leads Diomedes to challenge Aphrodite and even Apollo, and Achilles to fight a river god. Odysseus is, if anything, even more daring: he challenges the goddess of wisdom herself to a contest of wits. He has a legitimate grievance — why has she abandoned him? Athena admires him for this, even while not being entirely candid with him in return. Odysseus was already having difficulties even before reaching the Cyclops's island; among the underlying reasons (as classicist Diskin Clay has argued) is that Athena remains angry with him over his treatment of Troy — Odysseus stole the Palladion, her own sacred image. More broadly, Athena's anger stems from the fact that Odysseus is simply too much like her: his cleverness is itself a challenge to the superiority of the gods, just as Helen's beauty challenges Aphrodite's. A god has difficulty confronting her own mirror image in human form. Odysseus is the only mortal clever enough to actually deceive the gods. He tactfully and tactically does not press his complaint too far — he accepts reconciliation with Athena, and in a sense triumphs over her precisely by appearing to yield, thereby securing her help.
This is a distinctly Greek scene between a mortal and a god, and it is worth comparing to the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. Abraham never questions God; the story is one of total submission to divine will — Hebrew piety with no back talk, doing exactly what God commands, no questions asked. Abraham deceives his own servants and his son — or at least withholds the full truth from them — but he never attempts to deceive God, since there is no point in trying to deceive an omniscient being. (Adam and Eve, earlier in Genesis, learn precisely this lesson: that you cannot get away with lying to God.) There is some quarreling with God elsewhere in the Old Testament, notably in Job. Hebrew piety, in Abraham's case, is a profound ideal of genuine moral grandeur, making incredible demands on human beings — deeply impressive in its own right. But there is something equally impressive about Odysseus, who stands up to the gods and matches Athena in metis, in cunning intelligence. Imagine, by contrast, how Odysseus would respond if placed in Abraham's situation, with Zeus commanding him to kill his son Telemachus: "Odysseus? I'm not Odysseus. You must mean the guy who lives across the street. And what son? I don't have a son — and if I do, he's not named Telemachus. Are you sure you have the right Odysseus?"
These two stories illustrate the complexity of our own cultural inheritance — there is no single, uniform "Western culture." Abraham and God, on one hand, Odysseus and Athena on the other: these give us two very different notions of what a human being's proper attitude toward the divine should be. Abraham's absolute faith is admirable, but only on the assumption that he can be certain it is truly God speaking to him — what if some evil demon were masquerading as God instead? This is exactly where Greek skepticism comes in: it claims the right to judge divine commands against reason and our own sense of what is right. These are genuinely different attitudes toward divinity, and we are the product of the collision between them — which is part of why our culture is so complex, and part of why courses like this one are necessary.
Conclusion: Skepticism, Enlightenment, and the Roots of Tragedy
The Homeric view of the gods is not purely skeptical — it still produces real fear and awe of the gods — but it is nonetheless more skeptical than most religious worldviews. This skepticism helped make the Greeks what they were. Consider what a people would become, shaped fundamentally by these two poems and their view of the gods. We tend to look at Homer and think of him as superstitious, when in fact he stands at the beginning of a kind of Enlightenment. Greek humanism — the willingness to stand up to one's own gods — is exactly what got the Greeks into trouble, but it is also what made them great. We can see this in Odysseus himself: his wiliness is what allows him to survive, but it is also what gets him into trouble in the first place. This is the problematic nature of the Greek hero, and it is precisely what leads to Greek tragedy.
We can already see this tension emerging at the end of the Odyssey, in the growing conflict between the hero and the community. The people of Ithaca are fed up with the slaughter — first all the Ithacans who died at Troy, then all who died on the long voyage home, and Odysseus, on finally returning, is met not with celebration but with a pointed question: how many did he bring back with him? Now, on top of everything else, over a hundred suitors have just been slain in the middle of downtown Ithaca. Enough is enough — we begin to hear the voice of the anthropoi, ordinary humanity, in tension with the voice of the hero. This tension becomes the very basis of tragedy in Aeschylus, playing out as the tension between the tragic hero and the chorus. Listen for the first ordinary voice we hear in the poem, complaining about the body bags coming home from Troy. Throughout most of Homer, the focus stays on the world of the aner, the hero; the anthropoi, ordinary human beings, remain in the background, without a real chance to speak for themselves. They finally find their voice in Greek tragedy — where bringing the hero back into the city creates the tragic tension at the heart of the genre.
