The Odyssey Page 0,1

monsters, images, and tales as it does to the Iliad and the Odyssey is the Bible. At the same time, these epic poems attributed to Homer, like the Bible, are not originally Western or even European texts; in fact, even to call them Greek is misleading. Telling the full story behind this apparent contradiction sets the Odyssey firmly in its historical context, clarifying its relation both to its own time and to ours.

Before embarking on this tale, however, one must recognize the three basic layers of the poem’s creation. First, the setting for the events the Homeric epics describe (to the extent such incidents as the Trojan War ever occurred in the first place) is a wealthy era known as the Mycenaean period. The dominant leaders of the most important city-states on the Greek peninsula, the Mycenaeans were speakers of an early form of Greek who made war with weapons of bronze. This period ended sometime between 1200 and 1100 B.C. Second, the characters, plots, and settings that appear in the epics, however much their origins may belong to the Mycenaean era, continued to develop during a period of oral transmission that spanned the so-called Grecian “Dark Age,” namely, the centuries from 1100 to 800 B.C. The level of physical culture declined so markedly at this time that most historians believe a separate tribe speaking a different Greek dialect, the Dorians, conquered and sacked all but a few of the Mycenaean city-states. Iron replaced bronze, and the art of writing, known to the Mycenaean world, was lost, leaving the period utterly without written records. Third, the Iliad and the Odyssey were among the earliest works to be written down when the Greeks reacquainted themselves with literacy in the early eighth century B.C.—the Iliad, most scholars agree, around 750 B.C., and the Odyssey twenty or thirty years later.

The modern concepts of “Europe” and “Greece” do not apply to such early periods. When the long story of the wanderings and homecoming of Odysseus was first committed to writing, no one regarded the disparate lands now identified on maps by the word “Europe” as a unified geographical entity, nor did any shared cultural inheritance (let alone the consciousness of one) unite those lands. Indeed, Homer unambiguously depicts the states of Phoenicia (Biblical Canaan; roughly, modern Lebanon) and Egypt as the most vital partners and rivals of the Greek-speaking world. While Homer does perceive a cultural and linguistic identity that distinguishes speakers of Greek from other peoples, the language was divided then into almost mutually unintelligible dialects. Also, though in making this distinction, Homer predates the formation of a politically unified Greece by something like 400 years (and that was a temporary union effected by Phillip II of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, representatives of a northern tribe whom the cultural leaders of Athens regarded as semibarbarous). The illiterate centuries of the Grecian “Dark Age,” when the tale of Odysseus began to take form in the mouths of storytellers, were, of course, even earlier before the advent of a unified Greek nation.

Tellingly, Homer lacks a word that corresponds to the modern term “Greek” as a simultaneous designation of a language, a culture, and a state. He refers to what we might call Greeks as “Danaans” or “Argives,” or “Achaeans,” all three of which relate to the names of places from which some Greek-speakers happened to come, a usage loosely akin to referring to people born in the United States by randomly selecting any one of the designations “Southerners,” “Yankees,” or “Californians.”

Unusual care is required to speak of Homer’s world, as distinct from the conditions and assumptions of the later Hellenized, Ro manized, and finally, Europeanized eras that unconsciously influence the ways most contemporary readers experience the poems. For that matter, the phrase “Homer’s world” is problematic: To which of the very different layers of the poem’s formation does such a phrase refer? In some respects, the materials of which the poem is composed seem to originate in the Mycenaean period. The city-states of Pylos and Mycenae, for instance, identified by Homer as the seats of the mighty kings Nestor and Agamemnon, reached the pinnacle of their power and wealth sometime between 1650 and 1400 B.C. The latter is the approximate date at which the magnificent artifacts of the Mycenaean tombs were assembled. (The self-trained archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann unearthed them in A.D. 1879 and naively assumed they came from Agamemnon’s resting place, a view no contemporary scholar holds.) The former date, 1650 B.C.,