The Odyssey Page 0,4

with invasion by a vast Persian military in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the rival Greek states sought precedent in myth for laying aside their differences to face a common enemy. When Athenians rebuilt the Parthenon in marble after the Persians razed its wooden predecessor during the occupation of Athens in 480 B.C.—ended only by the combined efforts of a largely Athenian navy, a largely Spartan army, and the contributions of many smaller allies—they carved images of the mythical conflicts by which the Lapiths had subdued the Centaurs and Theseus the Amazons into the stone. Like the Centaurs and Amazons—and unlike the Greeks—the Persians fought from horseback; the Greeks self-servingly imagined their victories over Centaurs, Amazons, and Persians alike as an imposition of order on chaos, a reassertion of “natural” hierarchies against the “savage” ambitions of animal instincts, women, and foreigners. Similarly, Greek unity in the Trojan War became a rallying point. When Herodotus wrote his history of the Greco-Persian conflict, he included a pointed anecdote (of very dubious historicity) relating how Xerxes, the Persian ruler, visited the ruins of Priam’s palace (the nerve center of Troy) before embarking on his ill-fated invasion of the Greek mainland. In case the analogy escaped anyone’s perception, Herodotus noted that the Persian soldiers suffered unaccountable dread during the night they spent within the ruined walls.

But the poem’s influence far outstripped its momentary propaganda value. Not everyone considered Homer’s influence to be salutary. Judging by the Republic, Plato regarded the Homeric epics as his most dangerous rivals in teaching Athenians how to regulate their lives, tell good from evil, and know the truth of gods and humans. The immorality of Homer’s gods particularly troubled the philosopher, who in any case had little sympathy with what he envisioned (and condemned) as the essentially feminine act of poetic creation, with all the messy emotions it inspired in its audience. As thorough a literalist as any intellectual before the rise of empirical science, Plato often seems almost deaf to figurative meanings. He complains in his dialogue Ion, for instance, that a fisherman must surely be a better judge of the success of those Homeric passages in which a character attempts to catch fish than a rhapsodist (a dramatic reciter of poems also expected to explicate them ably).

The questionable morality of the poem’s eponymous hero, as much as the foibles of its gods, troubled the Romans. Or, perhaps more accurately, Roman poets attempted to distinguish the virtues of their people from those of the Greeks to whom they obviously had so great a cultural debt by unfavorably comparing the behavior of the brawling, self-absorbed Odysseus with the self-restrained Aeneas, a Trojan supposed to have escaped the ruin of his city and wandered for many years before landing near the Tiber and founding Rome. Virgil’s Aeneid, in fact, implicitly offers an almost point-by-point comparison of the Greek ethos with the Roman—curiously, always to the Roman advantage. Odysseus endangers his men by his curiosity to see a Cyclops, while Aeneas avoids the island altogether (pausing only to rescue a member of Odysseus’s crew heartlessly marooned in the great trickster’s haste to escape); Odysseus slaughters all the suitors besieging his home in order to reclaim his own property, while Aeneas unites his crewmen with the native tribes of Italy (even those who at first offer armed resistance) to create a new state, and so forth. Virgil does not directly depict Odysseus (or Ulysses, to use the Latin form of the name). But those Roman poets who did—most influentially, Ovid in his Metamorphoses—transformed the great warrior, the man of many devices, into something closer to a con man—and an unsympathetic one at that, always willing to take any unfair advantage that might present itself to bilk the weak or the stupid. The very qualities that made Odysseus so secure a guide to behavior in the Greek world of the eighth through the fifth centuries—a world of dangerous independence of city from city, estate from estate, and rulers from ruled—rendered him a virtual outlaw in the regulated precincts of philosophical reason and Roman polity, as purely theoretical as the rule of law may often have been in both those lands.

In the West, after the Roman Empire disintegrated in the last half of the fifth century A.D., the preservation of Greek manuscripts and the study of the Greek tongue so declined that Homer’s voice went unheard until the fifteenth century A.D. No manuscripts of the epic poems were available in any European library