Ancient Greek Notes

7/29/2019 Ancient Greek Notes

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The Iliad ends under a haze of smoke

from

a funeral pyre.

And really one of the striking thingsabout the Trojan War is how insubsequent

literature, it's not the good war.

It's depicted as being sort of

catastrophic for both victims and victors

alike.

But, there is another epic attached to it.

And that is the Odyssey.

Generally thought to be a little bit laterthan the Iliad.

Perhaps composed by a bard, or brought

into some sort of compositional unity by

amaster bard who took a whole bunch of

different stories and brought them

together.

And we talked a little bit last time about

theories of Homeric authorship and how

they have changed.But the Oddessey has a very different

tone

from the Illeiad.

In fact, its hero, Odysseus, has been

called an atypical hero.

This may or may not be Odysseus.

Some people identify this little figure as

being the hero himself.But what makes him an atypical hero?

Well, he's short, unlike say Achilles or

Ajax or Hector, are always described as

being towering.

He's clever.

He's eloquent.

He's a master of words.

In that embassy to Achilles, Odysseus isone of the lead ambassadors.

And Achilles says to him, with scarcely

concealed irritation.

I hate like the gates of Hades the man

whosays one thing and keeps another in his

heart.

Well, that's Odysseus all over.

So he's short.

He's clever.He's eloquent.

He's tricky.

It's Odysseus who's credited with the

ruse

of the Trojan horse, which doesn't appear

in either of the surviving epics.

But which we know about from, of

course,

from other stories.

He's curious.The beginning of the Odyssey is tell me,muse, of a man of many turnings,

polytropon.

We'll come back to that in a moment.

And Odysseus is a man of twists and

turns.

He is also, and quite unusually,

interested in food.

There's no other hero who talks so muchabout eating as does Odysseus.

And in fact, the Odyssey has been

described, and I think accurately, as a

poem of appetite versus intelligence.In a very real sense, you are what you eat

and how you eat it.

And we'll come back to that too.

Moreover, Odysseus's weapon of choice

is

the bow.He's a great archer.

Now, what is it about the bow?

Well, it puts you at a little bit safer

distance from the enemy than does hand

to

hand combat with sword.

And spear and shield.

So Odysseus, after the fall of Troy,wanders trying to make his way home

and to

bring his companions safely home.

This is also from the first few lines of

the Odyssey.

And on his travels, Homer says, he saw

the

towns and learned the minds of manydifferent men.

What has happened at home is trouble,

and

we'll come back to that in a moment.

But I want to introduce you, introduce toyou three more key terms.

One of them is metis.

And this is a particular kind of cunning

intelligence.

It's different from wisdom.It's different even from a kind of

theoretical philosophical intelligence.

This is a kind of tricky, conniving

intelligence.

And that's Odysseus all over, too.

I mentioned a moment ago, this term

polytropos, meaning versatile, adaptable

and even well traveled.

That's Odysseus too.

But another key element of the Odysseyisa very important cultural value called

xenia.

This is the ritualized exchange between a

host and a guest.

This is one of the most important cultural

values that the Homeric poems convey.

To give you just one very small example,

in Book Five of the Iliad, a Greekwarrior

named Diomedes is in a condition of

aristeia.

He's killing every Trojan who gets in hisway.

And he finally winds up face to face with

a Trojan named Glaucus.

And Diomedes says, tell me who you are

so

you, so I'll know who I'm killing.And Glaucus says, give me a break or

something, the Greek equivalent of it.

And tells him his lineage.

And as Glaucus describes his family.

Diomedes, who, remember, has been in a

killing fury, says, from now on, we must

avoid each other on the battlefield.

Why?Because their grandfathers had shared

xenia.

This is in a world of constant contest,

strife, the need to excel.

This a very important break on that.

But what has happened in Odysseus'

absence

in his palace at Ithica is that a numberof suitors have settled in to woo his

wife, Penelope, who is, after all, thought

to be an eligible widow.

And what they do is take and eat, and

takeand eat without any gesture at

reciprocity.

They're living in a constant violation of

xenia.

And there's nobody there, not evenOdysseus's son Telemachus, who can get

rid

of them, at least not yet.

Where's Odysseus been?

He's been on the island of Calypso.

The Ancient Greeks Wesleyan University ^ Professor A. Szegedy-Maszak SP2013 Lecture Transcripts

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Wk. 1 prehistory to Homer Lecture 6 Homer 2 Odyssey


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And he's been living a life of total, onemight say, physical satisfaction.

She's beautiful, she's a nymph, they have

sex a lot.

And yet what does he do?

He often just sits on the shore weeping.And as soon as he can, he takes the

opportunity to leave.

Because a life of total physicalsatisfaction but without any kind of glory

is not a life a hero can live.

And then he lands on the island of

Phiecia, is drawn slowly back into

society.

And we have probably the best known

part

of the Odyssey, the so called AdventureBooks.

These are interwoven tales.

They have some folktale motifs, but we

can

group them roughly.

And there are three groups of three,

interrupted with a trip to the underworld.

And in those three groups of three thereare, they're characterized.

Each tale is characterized, I'm sorry, Ishould say, by a monster or by

temptation

or by folly.

The monsters are generally identified as

cannibals.

And the most famous is certainly thehuge

one-eyed monster Polyphemus.The description that Odysseus gives of

his

interaction with Polyphemus involves

not

only xenia and its violations.

I mean, Polyphemus isn't a great host, he

starts killing Odysseus's men and eating

them.Odysseus isn't a great guest, he comes in

and starts stealing stuff.

But even more than that, there are somehints of the social reality of the time.

The island on which Polyphemus lives,

is

described as having a good harbor,

plentiful timber, good water supply.We'll see in a lecture or two that the

Greeks are starting to send out coloniesnow into the Mediterranean.

And this is a perfect site to set up a

colony.

But even more important than that, thecyclops is described as not eating bread,

and as not performing sacrifice.

A great french scholar, Pierre Vidal

Naquet, has analyzed this.

And he has pointed out that not eatingbread means that the cyclops don't do

agricultural labor.

And the fact that they don't performsacrifice means that they don't recognize

the importance of the gods.

These two characteristics, that is, not

doing farmwork and not recognizing the

gods, marks the cyclops as inhuman.

Even more than does his enormous size

and

canabalistic appetite and single eye inthe middle of his forehead.

Using cunning, cleverness, Oddyseus

and

his men blind the cyclops and manage to

escape.

But as he's leaving, Odysseus taunts the

cyclops.

Up to this point, Odysseus has calledhimself.

Ootus, no man.But now he says, you can tell the other

cyclopes that the one who blinded you is

Odysseus.

Bad mistake, it's a bad point for

Odysseus

to claim his identity, because it give thecyclops the opportunity to curse him.

If cyclops called that a curse on no man,of course it wouldn't work.

But the cyclops's father is the great god

of earth and sea, Poseidon, and he's

furious.

And Odysseus is set a wandering with

Poseidon, Poseidon's rage kind of

overshadowing him.

Odysseus also meets temptation invarious

forms.

Probably the most famous is in the formof

the witch, Circe, who turns his men, by

means of a magic potion, into swine.

And we could hardly have a clearer

illustration of what I was talking about,in terms of appetite versus intelligence.

Odysseus gets a little bit of divineassistance, manages to overcome Circe.

But she sends him on a quest, and the

quest is to the underworld.

This is Book 11 of the Odyssey, and itgives us our first and in many ways, the

most detailed description.

Of what life was thought to be like after

one died.

It's not hell.That is, it's not a place of constant

torment.

It is instead a place that's cold, it'sdark.

And people exist in a kind of shadow

form

of themselves.

When Odysseus descends to the

underworld,

he meets some of his former companions

from the war at Troy.There's Agamemnon, who has been

killed by

his treacherous wife, Clytemnestra.

There's always a tension in this poem

about what's really going to happen

when

Odysseus gets home.

That we know, so to speak, what's goingto

happen.But the, the poem keeps setting up a

counter possibility, that faithful

Penelope might not turn out to be so

faithful after all.

And maybe, like, Chlytemestra, wind up

killing her hero husband when he finallyshows up.

Odysseus also sees Achilles.And with that same kind of directness

that

he had shown in the Iliad, Achilles says

to him, what are you doing here?

Odysseus says we're on a quest and he

says, you have everything a hero could

want.

You have a great reputation.You have fame.

You have clay offs everywhere.

You have a son who's carrying on afteryou.

And Achilles says, don't talk to me so

lightly of death.

You get to go back.

And then in one of the most strikingsentences in all of the Odyssey, Achilles

says I would rather be a live serf.That is the lowest form of free

agricultural laborer.

I'd rather be a live serf than a dead


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hero.So much for the heroic code.

And then Odysseus sees Ajax, who had

committed suicide after Odysseus had

cheated him out of Achilles armor.

Ajax just refuses to talk to him.Even in the underworld, that help your

friends in hurt your enemies, that code

persists.Odysseus also faces instances of folly,

but sometimes manages to follow

instructions.

A famous scene has him fill his men's

ears

with wax.

And he has then tied himself to a mast so

he can listen to the song of the sirens,who otherwise lure ships to destruction

on

the rocks.

Some wonderful paintings shows a siren

with a harp.

And people have suggested that what she

might be singing is heroic verse.

The songs of the heroes, like Homer.The Odyssey is full of these folk tales

which are sort of spun into the mainnarrative.

And when Odysseus gets back to Ithaca

he

has to find out who's been loyal and who

hasn't.

And so he disquises himself as a beggar.The whole question of recognition and

identity comes to the fore.Odysseus has managed to achieve the 1st

of

his goals, which is to get himself home.

But here in this wonderful plaque, he is

disgusted as a beggar, and he is talking

to his wife Penelope.

But the old heroic code from the battle

field is now brought into the hall atIthica.

Odysseus lines up allies.

There is the noble swineherd Eumaeus.There is his own son, Telemachus, who

has

now come to a kind of maturity and one

or

two others.And they face off against the suitors.

This is once again an instance of an

absolute division between allies and

opponents.

The slaughter in the great hall, sorry,this is a little blurry but you get some

sense of the suitors cowering behind the

tables.The slaughter in the great hall is awful.

No one is spared, not even the good

suitor.

The only ones who are spared are the

bard,

Phemius, and the herald.

They're too precious to waste, they're too

precious to kill.So, we have Odessyus home, he's gotten

rid

of the suitors.

There still remains a reunion with

Penelope that has to be accomplished.

Recent scholarship has paid much more

attention to the role of women in general

in the ancient world.To women in the Odyssey, there are

many,many more powerful female characters

in

the Odyssey, certainly than in the Iliad.

We've seen one of them already, Circe,

but

Penelope is so to speak the center ofthese.

She is in some ways the ideal Greekwife,

faithful, an extraordinary weaver, a good

manager of the household.

But at the end of this poem, she also

reveals that she is a master of trickery,

a peer of her long-wandering husband.

When she tricks him into identifying

himself by saying that he has to move thebed.

He says, you can't move the bed, I put

that bed there.It's built into the trunk of an olive

tree.

And Penelope finally realizes that he is

the only one who knows the secret other

than herself.And Odysseus tells her his story.

So, where are we?

Again, at the end of a far too cursory

introduction to this magnificent epic.

But we can also think about a couple oflarger issues.

One, the Iliad is generally described as

being similar to tragedy and the Odysseyto comedy.

It's got a much broader range, of course

geographically, much more extensive.

And it's sort of atypical hero at the

center of things.

But we also have, and we will talk much

more about this later on, the introduction

of the gods.I want to make one point, and only one

point only.

The gods are powerful.

They can take favorites, or have enemies

among humans.

But the only thing that really

distinguishes the gods from us is that we

die and they don't.The gods are not in any way morally

exemplary.They're not meant to be looked up to, in

that regard.

The great historian, Herodotus, says that

Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks their

gods.

We'll talk about Hesiod soon.But for now, you may want to think

aboutthe fact that human life, as depicted in

the Homeric poems, is much more

serious

than divine life.

The gods simply don't have any

consequences for what they do.

For humans, male and female, all of us,

there are real consequences.And at the outset, at the sort of

wellspring of Western literature, we are

so lucky to have Homer with the twogreat

epics.

To give us some sense of how we put

ourselves into the world.


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