“Any of these major epics exerts enormous demands on the reader — demands of attention, of involvement, and of imagination. The effort to read them is very great indeed.” – How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
Since it took me over a year of reading in fits and starts to get through The Iliad, I was somewhat apprehensive about The Odyssey. The Iliad is a good book, but epic poetry, I’ve discovered, is not for the faint of heart; it’s vast in scope, heavy in subject matter, and often, especially in the case of The Iliad, weirdly repetitive — intended for oral recitation, in sections, epic poems were enjoyed by their original audiences in a far different manner than how we take them in today.
That said, The Odyssey was a much more enjoyable read for me than The Iliad. First of all, the characters go somewhere, and there is much less bickering, and no pouting Achilleus. The translation I read, by Richmond Lattimore, was easy to follow, but the language was suited to the epic subject matter (I was even able to scribble down some new words to look up.) That’s not to say that The Iliad was a worse book; I just found it a lot more difficult.
The premise of The Odyssey is known to most people, even those who haven’t read the book, since most everybody has skivved off reading it in favor of the SparkNotes version, at school. Odysseus, on his journey back from the Trojan War, suffers many troubles and obstacles, only to to find his house in Ithaca taken over by suitors seeking his own wife’s hand in marriage.
That’s the simple version. In reality, the structure of the book is well-built and complex. I was surprised to find that the better part of Odysseus’s journey is told in flashback, and that his story is surrounded by a framing device: before we are introduced to Odysseus, we meet his son, Telemachos, who grows more frustrated by the day at the suitors who waste his father’s property in feasting and entertainment, who dally with the serving girls, and try to force his mother, Penelope, to choose one of them against her will. With the assistance of Pallas Athene, goddess of war, wisdom and etc., Telemachos goes on a journey to learn whether anyone knows whether his father is dead or alive. Seeing an advantageous opportunity, the suitors send out a ship to lie in wait for him, and we leave Telemachos in a cliffhanger — could this be the first cliffhanger ever written?
I was surprised at the sophistication of the storytelling in The Odyssey; it employs numerous narrative devices that add to the excitement for the reader, and the pacing is just right for each part of the story. Homer knows when to linger over a matter, and when to skip another. Whereas in The Iliad, the battle scenes dragged on and on, the events in The Odyssey flow briskly along (in spite of a propensity on everybody’s part for speeches in response to just about everything).
Maybe it was because there was a greater feminine presence in the story, but I liked all the characters, both male and female, better than when I read The Iliad, though as in The Iliad, I found the often prideful and sometimes downright dumb behavior of Odysseus and his companions perplexing — for instance, when Odysseus, angry over the murder of some of his friends, shouts at the Cyclops, who throws a huge rock at their boat, sending it back to shore to where the Cyclops is, they get away once more… and then Odysseus does it again. The pre-Christian tendency to lack mercy also bothered me, but paganism was a tough path, after all. So many interesting themes and questions emerge through the course of the story — the treatment of the female characters in the ancient world and their varying responses to it, the contrasting potrayals of hospitality (or lack thereof, in the case of the Cyclops) — but I think the theme that stands out the most and which seems to be the main theme of the story is the question of suffering. In other words, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Homer’s answer seems to be, “Because the gods hate you.” Like I said, paganism was a tough path. The interesting thing, however, was Athene’s protection and provision all through the journey of Odysseus, perhaps as a representative of grace.
Really, I’m still processing it. I don’t think it’s the sort of book that you could fully grasp in one reading, or even multiple readings. Though it was fairly difficult to get through, I’m glad I read it, and happy to have it on my bookshelf, and I’m sure I’ll return to it for further exploration.
This post is a stop on The Classics Circuit: Ancient Greeks Tour.
