The Odyssey (Barnes & Noble Signature Editions)

By Homer and Damian Stocking

Ten years have passed since the fall of Troy. The surviving Greek warriors who destroyed that city have returned home. All except Odysseus, whose wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, await him. Claiming that Odysseus is dead, a host of suitors have taken up residence in his home, eating up his wealth and trying to persuade Penelope to marry one of them. Penelope steadfastly refuses.
 
Odysseus, in fact, is alive. Having spent seven years as a captive of the nymph Calypso, the gods finally take pity on him and persuade her to set him free. When he resumes his journey home, the sea god Poseidon sends a great storm to destroy his raft. Exhausted and near death, Odysseus and his men wash up on an island shore. They are delayed by Polyphemus the Cyclops, the Lotus-eaters, the Sirens, the sorceress Circe, and other strange creatures.
 
Set in a time that was ancient even when Homer composed it almost 2,800 years ago, The Odyssey reveals a universal order where gods intercede directly and sometimes capriciously in the destinies of men, where heroes are as deceitful as they are brave, and where a sea voyage becomes a test of human ingenuity and courage in the face of helplessness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781435141209

Homer

Although recognized as one of the greatest ancient Greek poets, the life and figure of Homer remains shrouded in mystery. Credited with the authorship of the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, Homer, if he existed, is believed to have lived during the ninth century BC, and has been identified variously as a Babylonian, an Ithacan, or an Ionian. Regardless of his citizenship, Homer’s poems and speeches played a key role in shaping Greek culture, and Homeric studies remains one of the oldest continuous areas of scholarship, reaching from antiquity through to modern times.

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Introduction, Annotations, and Further Reading

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CONTENTS

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HOMER

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

PRINCIPAL PERSONAGES OF THE ODYSSEY, THEIR PARENTAGE, AND POSITION

THE ODYSSEY

ENDNOTES

BASED ON THE BOOK

FURTHER READING

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HOMER

INTRODUCTION

I PUT ON MY ARMOR. THEN SEIZING TWO STRONG SPEARS I TOOK MY stand on the ship’s bows, for it was there that I expected first to see the monster of the rock . . . Thus does the shipwrecked Greek hero, Odysseus, describe to a spellbound audience his brave yet futile attempt to defend his men from the cave-dwelling, six-headed Scylla—only one of the many strange and terrifying threats he must survive to get himself and his men safely home after their recent victory in the Trojan War. Odysseus’ famous cunning and valor, his trick of the Trojan horse in particular, helped win that war for the Greeks. Yet as we soon learn, Odysseus’ prized warlike qualities prove of little use to him in the mystifying new world he finds himself in now. For all his foresight and courage, Odysseus does not see Scylla until it is too late: to his horror, he must endure having to watch six of his best men being snatched away from him in the creature’s savage jaws, even while, as he describes, they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. There are, it would seem, certain aspects of life in which mere military prowess proves inadequate, in which something more is required than those virtues that bring victory on the battlefield. It is Odysseus’ growing understanding of what that something more might be that gives us this strange and enthralling ancient Greek epic known as the Odyssey.

Along with the Iliad, the composition of the Odyssey has long been ascribed to a certain poetic genius named Homer, the famous (some would prefer mythical) blind bard born in the seventh or eighth century BCE, either on the Aegean island of Chios or the Greek-speaking colony of Smyrna, on the coast of modern-day Turkey. The notion, however, that either of these two great poems could be attributed in any traditional sense to a single original author has, during the last two hundred years, been almost entirely discredited. In 1795, the German critic F. A. Wolf pointed out the implausibility of such extensive poems having been written down at a time in which writing was unvalued and essentially unknown. Wolf suggested instead that the original Homeric epics were much shorter works, recited orally in song form and subsequently committed to memory by generation after generation of professional singers (each of whom would naturally bring his own peculiar changes to the song he had received). The epics in their modern canonical versions are thus, for Wolf, the product of collective authorship and long historical accretion.

Over the course of the next century, many critics would still continue to argue for the existence of a historical Homer in one form or another (for instance, as the name of the compiler and editor of the independent songs that supposedly formed the larger epics), but in the 1930s, the whole so-called Homeric question was put on an entirely new footing by the work of American classicist Milman Parry. Parry’s basic concern was to explain the exact mechanism whereby a large-scale poem like the Odyssey could be passed down from one generation of singers to the next without the aid of writing. Based on his investigation of living oral traditions, Parry concluded that any singer of oral poetry must have composed improvisationally by means of a vast store of verbal formulae and narrative-type scenes that the singer would have inherited as part of a general oral poetic tradition. Thus, Homer is generally understood today not to refer to any particular historical personage (neither an original poetic genius nor skilled compiler and editor of others’ songs), but is taken instead to be the collective name given to a whole tradition of inherited phrases and oral poetic techniques that could be used, over the course of many centuries, to build poems of the size and quality of our present-day Iliad and Odyssey. The content of these continuously improvised songs would, it is assumed, have varied considerably from one performance to the next, until they were finally written down and preserved in the form in which they are familiar to us today.

Parry’s oral formulaic theory goes a long way toward explaining many of the peculiar features of Homeric epic—its constant repetition of heroic epithets (swift-footed Achilles, the wily Odysseus), its employment of slight variations in the same basic type of scenes to convey significant meaning and differences. Odysseus, for example, encounters several different women throughout his travels, many of them singing and working at a loom; but the fact that one lives in a cave, the other in a palace, and so forth, alters considerably the significance of these encounters for the hero. The theory also explains why so many basic phrases and motifs are common to both the Iliad and the Odyssey: manifestly, the two poems were generated by one and the same poetic tradition.

That said, many readers have detected within the story of Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War a self-conscious effort on the part of the singers to differentiate this poem from the more grimly martial perspective of the Iliad (generally agreed to be the older of the two epics). Some have even gone so far as to characterize the relationship between the two works as antagonistic, though this overstates the case. The Iliad, which restricts itself to events surrounding the death of Hector at Achilles’ hands in the tenth year of the Trojan War, takes as its fundamental theme the existential importance of risking oneself—one’s life, one’s goods, one’s reputation—before (and in contest with) others. Having withdrawn from the war, no longer able to enter the places of political assembly or martial contest, the great Achilles gnawed at his own heart, pining for battle and the war cry (book one). The source of this agony for the hero is not far to seek: in removing himself from battle, Achilles has, in a very real sense, cut himself off from the sources of his own being. Yet the scene in which we are first introduced to Odysseus in the Odyssey is almost identical to this. When we first come upon Odysseus, he too is alone, eyes filled with tears, grieving and fretting [his] life out. Significantly, what Butler has chosen to translate as grieving and fretting in the one epic, and gnawing and pining in the other, are in fact two forms of the same word in Greek, namely, phthinô (I waste away.) Like Achilles, Odysseus lacks for nothing in terms of biological necessities; indeed, the Odyssey has upped the ante over the Iliad considerably by having the sea-nymph Calypso promise Odysseus not only eternal life, but eternal youth as well. Why then does Odysseus refuse this offer? It is surely because his imprisonment on Calypso’s island, for all its sensual (and sexual) charms, necessarily deprives the hero of the social context within which he might meaningfully act with and upon his fellow human beings. His entrapment by Calypso denies him access to the kinds of places and situations where he might stand out and make a difference in the lives of others. In this respect, the yearnings of Achilles and Odysseus are at one.

The Iliad and the Odyssey could therefore be said to share one and the same existential perspective. Yet the emphasis falls quite differently in each. The Iliad, in the severe isolation of its heroes in the dangerous open space between the hosts (book six) places its stress upon the individual’s decision to take the risks that ground and fulfill his or her existence. What the Odyssey realizes, however, in a way that does not seem to be recognized in the unrelentingly violent Iliad, is that such risks fundamentally require the existence of others. If the Iliad emphasizes the risk whereby one might win one’s own selfhood, the Odyssey is there to remind us that such risks only make sense in relation to other people, in relation to the continued existence of the human community at large. Thus, we find that for the majority of the epic, Odysseus must, for all his martial excellence, approach others in the guise of a beggar—that is, as one whose primary relation to others is dependence. And thus, too, we find in the very final lines of the Odyssey that when Odysseus attempts to wage a kind of violent Iliadic war against his fellow townsmen, the gods forbid it; such divine interference tends to enrage Achilles in the Iliad. Odysseus’ ultimate response to this divine, community-preserving limitation on his activity, however, is finally one of joy: Thus spoke Athene, and Odysseus obeyed her gladly.

The relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey is thus not so much antagonistic as it is complementary. The plot of the former revolves around the agonized decision to risk oneself in battle; the plot of the latter, with its insistence on the human community that makes such risks meaningful, focuses instead upon the excruciating trials and hardships involved in what the Greeks called nostos—the attempt to make one’s way home, to reenter the community that confers significance upon one’s life and activity as a human being. What is it about the nostos that makes it so fraught with difficulty in the Greek imagination? Obviously, it is not merely because a certain number of storms and perils just so happen to intervene between a returning hero and his homeland. Nor does the difficulty of nostos in the Odyssey simply reflect (as Homeric critic and clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has so attractively argued) the typical hardships any soldier might encounter in readjusting himself to civilian existence after having lived one’s life on the battlefield. The Odyssey casts its net somewhat wider than that. What ultimately makes the return home so terrible for Odysseus—and for any one of us—is the simple fact that people are difficult, that other human beings are themselves unpredictable and terrifying, whether at home or abroad. The dangers and adventures Odysseus must endure on his way home are thus no simple excursion into randomly selected fairy-tale settings. They are meant to reflect, rather, the perils and temptations we face every day in our relations with others—the others we rely upon for our very being, yet whose uncertainties and indeterminacy we cannot help but fear.

Odysseus’ travels through mythic, fairy-tale lands is, of course, by far the most famous aspect of the Odyssey. Regardless of what interpretation one finally wishes to place upon these travels, two crucial facts concerning them ought to be kept firmly in mind. In the first place, we should always remember that the adventures occupy only four of the twenty-four books of the epic. To miss this point is to miss the meaning of the poem entirely, for there is a sense in which these four books exist only to elucidate what happens in the course of the other twenty. Secondly, Odysseus’ travels are not simply journeys through this or that geographic region (regions more or less familiar to us, say, from maps of the Mediterranean Sea). Odysseus’ travels exist first and foremost as movements through a kind of conceptual space. Odysseus tells us, for instance, that he is detained on his journey homeward in the dwellings of two separate, supernatural females, Calypso and Circe. Modern guidebooks are eager to tell us that Calypso’s island lies, in all likelihood, somewhere in the Maltese Archipelago, while Circe’s island can almost certainly be identified with a peninsula located on the Italian seacoast, almost directly west of Rome. The composers of Homeric epic would have found such information to be not only irrelevant, but in all likelihood, wholly unintelligible. For what the Odyssey itself is most anxious to have us understand is that Calypso’s island, Ogygia, is the omphalos, the navel of the sea—a place located somehow at the center of things. Circe’s island, by contrast, lies in the mysterious eastern lands from whence the sun rises—at the world’s farthest edge. In traveling between these two islands, Odysseus has done much more than travel a certain number of miles in the Adriatic. He has, in fact, traversed the entire range of human possibility, from its most extreme limit to its inmost core. On Circe’s island he must face the threat of becoming an animal; on Calypso’s he is offered, as discussed earlier, the chance of becoming a god. Calypso’s isle is a place abundant with life; Circe’s serves as the gateway to Hades, to death. It is such thematic contrasts, not modern geographic equivalents, that give real force and meaning to Odysseus’ epic adventures.

These adventures serve the hero, and us, as a kind of education in the full range of temptations and perils involved in living with other human beings. The thematic contrast between Circe and Calypso provides us with a useful illustration of that principle. On Calypso’s island, the hero is offered a totally enclosed, self-sufficient existence. This, of course, is one kind of response we might fall prey to in our dealings with others. Faced with the threat and uncertainty to which human community makes us vulnerable, we might be tempted to stage a sort of general retreat into the suburbs, as it were, of human life—into a wholly anonymous yet purely self-contained subjectivity. Alternatively, we might allow ourselves to become mere objects for others, no longer human beings in any proper sense of the word, but only so much livestock to be penned in for another’s use and disposal. That it seems is precisely what others would most often like to make of us—as Odysseus’ misadventures with the monstrous Cyclops so pointedly demonstrate.

Odysseus’ decision to enter the Cyclops’ cave and await the arrival of its monstrous inhabitant is motivated by a desire that the modern reader of the Odyssey might find a little bizarre: he wants to see whether the Cyclops might give me a present. From an ancient point of view, however, this is perhaps not such an unusual wish. In the ancient world, the exchange of gifts was the primary way in which separate groups of people established and maintained ties with one another. Odysseus’ desire for gifts is understandable enough, then, for a rich storehouse of exchanged and exchangeable treasures represents for the ancient imagination the potential for human connection and relation. Odysseus’ naive mistake, however, is to assume that the Cyclops will share his interest in the establishment of human, social ties; the Cyclops does not. Instead, the Cyclops’ primary interest in Odysseus and his men is to reduce them to livestock, to use them, quite literally, as meat.

Odysseus, of course, will not make this sort of naive mistake again, especially not upon his return to Ithaca. For him to return home under the belief that the people there are simply waiting to embrace him, to enter into respectful human relations with him, would be to invite the very same destruction that Agamemnon suffered at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus upon his return from Troy. Odysseus’ time in the Cyclops’ cave has taught him the possibility that things could go otherwise. Odysseus’ terrifying adventures abroad, in a world of gods and monsters that can seem so far removed from everyday human life, has really served to educate him in the range of attitudes he himself might take up in relation to other people, and the attitudes that others might take in relation to him.

It is significant then that after having experienced every possible form of human social dysfunction in his adventures, Odysseus should finally land on the shores of Phaeacia before coming home. This is, in every possible sense, an ideal world—a halfway house and rehabilitation zone for Odysseus’ all but broken sense of humanity. Here he learns to engage again in the life of risk that defines the Homeric human being—only here in Phaeacia is he able to do it in the controlled environment of an athletic competition, not a war. Here he accumulates a store of gifts with which to establish human ties. And it is here, most importantly, that he effects the transition from being a mere story—a predetermined object to others—to being a real living presence among men and women. At the beginning of his stay in Phaeacia, Odysseus can only listen to stories told about him and weep. To be the subject of a story alone is, in the Odyssey, to be as predetermined as the dead. The shades of heroes he meets in Hades are eternally stuck in their stories; listening to stories is also the way in which a man is lured to his death and ruin by the Sirens. By the end of his sojourn with the Phaeacians; however, Odysseus is telling his own story and bringing it to its natural conclusion in a fully alive and indeterminate present.

Staying faithful to the indeterminacy of being alive, of being human, is perhaps what the Odyssey is finally about. Imprisoned deep in the bowels of the Cyclops’ cave, Odysseus hits upon the device of calling himself Noman to escape death at the hands of the Cyclops. In one sense, Odysseus’ self-naming trick speaks to the occasional necessity of having to endure becoming no man and nothing among others. At another level, however, it suggests as well that we are never merely only one thing, never only one being in particular. Such is the real meaning of the trial with which Odysseus chooses to end his narration to the Phaeacians. So that he doesn’t perish in the vortex of Charybdis, Odysseus must suspend himself, upside down, over the whirlpool from an overhanging tree. I could not, Odysseus tells us, plant my feet anywhere so as to stand securely. Odysseus must learn to endure not ever coming to a stand, not ever being in stasis. He must cling for survival to a tree—in itself an image of that which is never just one thing, but is always in the process of becoming.

From this point of view, it is notable that when Odysseus finally does arrive at his home to unite with his long-suffering wife, Penelope, the two come together in a bed formed out of a still living tree. Odysseus’ nostos is thus not to be a return to home as a place of deathly stability, but to a place of living, flourishing, and resolute uncertainty—in partnership with a woman who is every bit Odysseus’ equal in resisting determination at others’ hands. Each of the suitors wishes to make Penelope his own. But with her famous trick of ever weaving and unweaving her work (she has been commanded to weave a burial shroud), she avoids becoming an object for others’ use. She, as much as her husband, deserves the epithet given to him in the very first line of the epic: polytropos, meaning many-turning.

But although husband and wife seem to have mastered well this human art of enduring (and thriving within) instability—an art this epic holds to be more important, finally, than any display of martial valor—things are not so certain for their son. The Odyssey, as we have seen, confronts its characters incessantly with the tempting possibility of letting themselves be reduced to mere things, of relinquishing their human indeterminacy for the convenience of others (as well as, no doubt, for their own comfort). Rather than beginning with the story of the man who will, almost by definition, successfully resist all such temptations, the epic opens with the story of one for whom the outcome is in much greater doubt—the story of Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. Young and inexperienced, Telemachus finds himself penned in by the abusive suitors, men who live as though they were gods, but who also (by a neat symmetrical inversion) reduce themselves and all around them to the status of animals. As the Odyssey begins, Telemachus has more or less given himself over to the ills of this situation. He broods alone, skulking dreamily in the corners of his own home, having cut himself off entirely from the social interactions that define us as human in the first place. Only the surprise of Athena’s divine intervention (the perpetual surprise of life itself), will lift Telemachus out of this condition and prompt him to go forth into the world and risk himself there. There is, thus, an exquisite antithesis at play in the overall plotting of the Odyssey: as Telemachus must learn to go forth, so his father, Odysseus, must learn to return; as the one goes out to risk himself in the world, the other must come back to an appreciation of those who made that risk meaningful—one grand overarching image of turning, of being in relation to others, to encapsulate the multitude of such images out of which this epic has so artfully been composed.

Damian Stocking is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. His scholarly publications include works on Homer, Greek tragedy and comedy, and the relations between literature and philosophy in the ancient world.

PREFACE

THIS TRANSLATION IS INTENDED TO SUPPLEMENT A WORK ENTITLED The Authoress of the Odyssey, which I published in 1897. I could not give the whole Odyssey in that book without making it unwieldy, I therefore epitomized my translation, which was already completed and which I now publish in full.

I shall not here argue the two main points dealt with in the work just mentioned; I have nothing either to add to, or to withdraw from, what I have there written. The points in question are:

(1) that the Odyssey was written entirely at, and drawn entirely from, the place now called Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, alike as regards the Phaeacian and the Ithaca scenes; while the voyages of Ulysses, when once he is within easy reach of Sicily, resolve themselves into a periplus of the island, practically from Trapani back to Trapani, via the Lipari islands, the Straits of Messina, and the island of Pantellaria;

(2) that the poem was entirely written by a very young woman, who lived at the place now called Trapani, and introduced herself into her work under the name of Nausicaa.

The main arguments on which I base the first of these somewhat startling contentions, have been prominently and repeatedly before the English and Italian public ever since they appeared (without rejoinder) in the Athenaeum for 30th January and 20th February 1892. Both contentions were urged (also without rejoinder) in the Johnian Eagle for the Lent and October Terms of the same year. Nothing to which I should reply has reached me from any quarter, and knowing how anxiously I have endeavored to learn the existence of any flaws in my argument, I begin to feel some confidence that, did such flaws exist, I should have heard, at any rate about some of them, before now. Without, therefore, for a moment pretending to think that scholars generally acquiesce in my conclusions, I shall act as thinking them little likely so to gainsay me as that it will be incumbent upon me to reply, and shall confine myself to translating the Odyssey for English readers, with such notes as I think will be found useful. . . .

In the preface to my translation of the Iliad I have given my views as to the main principles by which a translator should be guided, and need not repeat them here, beyond pointing out that the initial liberty of translating poetry into prose involves the continual taking of more or less liberty throughout the translation; for much that is right in poetry is wrong in prose, and the exigencies of readable prose are the first things to be considered in a prose translation. That the reader, however, may see how far I have departed from strict construe, I will print here Messrs. Butcher and Lang’s translation of the first lines of the Odyssey. Their translation runs:

"Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and many were the men whose towns he saw and whose mind he learnt, yea, and many the woes he suffered in his heart on the deep, striving to win his own life and the return of his company. Nay, but even so he saved not his company, though he desired it sore. For through the blindness of their own hearts they perished, fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios Hyperion: but the god took from them their days of returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, whencesoever thou hast heard thereof, declare thou even unto us.

"Now all the rest, as many as fled from sheer destruction, were at home, and had escaped both war and sea, but Odysseus only, craving for his wife and for his homeward path, the lady nymph Calypso held, that fair goddess, in her hollow caves, longing to have him for her lord. But when now the year had come in the courses of the seasons, wherein the gods had ordained that he should return home to Ithaca, not even there was he quit of labours, not even among his own; but all the gods had pity on him save Poseidon, who raged continually against god-like Odysseus, till he came to his own country. Howbeit Poseidon had now departed for the distant Ethiopians, the Ethiopians that are sundered in twain, the uttermost of men, abiding some where Hyperion sinks and some where he rises. There he looked to receive his hecatomb of bulls and rams, there he made merry, sitting at the feast, but the other gods were gathered in the halls of Olympian Zeus. Then among them the father of men and gods began to speak, for he bethought him in his heart of noble Aegisthus, whom the son of Agamemnon, far-famed Orestes, slew. Thinking upon him he spake out among the Immortals:

Lo you now, how vainly mortal men do blame the gods! For of us they say comes evil, whereas they even of themselves, through the blindness of their own hearts, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained. Even as of late Aegisthus, beyond that which was ordained, took to him the wedded wife of the son of Atreus and killed her lord on his return, and that with sheer doom before his eyes, since we had warned him by the embassy of Hermes the keen-sighted, the slayer of Argos, that he should neither kill the man, nor woo his wife. . . .

The Odyssey (as everyone knows) abounds in passages borrowed from the Iliad; I had wished to print these in a slightly different type, with marginal references to the Iliad, and had marked them to this end in my ms. I found, however, that the translation would be thus hopelessly scholasticized, and abandoned my intention. I would nevertheless again urge on those who have the management of our University presses, that they would render a great service to students if they would publish a Greek text of the Odyssey with the Iliadic passages printed in a different type, and with marginal references. I have given the British Museum a copy of the Odyssey with the Iliadic passages underlined and referred to in ms.; I have also given an Iliad marked with all the Odyssean passages, and their references; but copies of both the Iliad and Odyssey so marked ought to be within easy reach of all students.

Anyone who at the present day discusses the questions that have arisen round the Iliad since Wolf’s time, without keeping it well before his reader’s mind that the Odyssey was demonstrably written from one single neighborhood, and hence (even though nothing else pointed to this conclusion) presumably by one person only—that it was written certainly before 750, and in all probability before 1000 B.C. that the writer of this very early poem was demonstrably familiar with the Iliad as we now have it, borrowing as freely from those books whose genuineness has been most impugned, as from those which are admitted to be by Homer—anyone who fails to keep these points well before his readers, is hardly dealing equitably by them. Anyone, on the other hand, who will mark his Iliad and his Odyssey from the copies in the British Museum above referred to, and who will draw the only inference that common sense can draw from the presence of so many identical passages in both poems, will, I believe, find no difficulty in assigning their proper value to a large number of books here and on the Continent that at present enjoy considerable reputations. Furthermore, and this perhaps is an advantage better worth securing, he will find many puzzles of the Odyssey cease to puzzle him on the discovery that they arise from oversaturation with the Iliad.

Other difficulties will also disappear as soon as the development of the poem in the writer’s mind is understood. I have dealt with this at some length in The Authoress of the Odyssey. Briefly, the Odyssey consists of two distinct poems:

(1) The Return of Ulysses, which alone the Muse is asked to sing in the opening lines of the poem. This poem includes the Phaeacian episode, and the account of Ulysses’ adventures as told by himself in Books IX–XII. It consists of lines 1–79 (roughly) of Book I, of line 28 of Book V, and thence without intermission to the middle of line 187 of Book XIII, at which point the original scheme was abandoned.

(2) The story of Penelope and the suitors, with the episode of Telemachus’ voyage to Pylos. This poem begins with line 80 (roughly) of Book I, is continued to the end of Book IV, and not resumed till Ulysses wakes in the middle of line 187, Book XIII, from whence it continues to the end of Book XXIV.

In The Authoress of the Odyssey I wrote:

The introduction of lines xi, 115–137, and of line ix, 535, with the writing a new council of the gods at the beginning of Book V, to take the place of the one that was removed to Book I, 1–79, were the only things that were done to give even a semblance of unity to the old scheme and the new, and to conceal the fact that the Muse, after being asked to sing of one subject, spent two-thirds of her time in singing a very different one, with a climax for which no one has asked her. For roughly the Return occupies eight books, and Penelope and the Suitors sixteen.

I believe this to be substantially correct.

SAMUEL BUTLER

July 25, 1900

PRINCIPAL PERSONAGES OF THE ODYSSEY, THEIR PARENTAGE, AND POSITION

The names by which they were known to the Romans, when different from the Greek, are given in parentheses.

GODS AND GODDESSES

ZEUS (Jupiter, Jove), son of Cronus (Saturn); king of the gods and ruler of the sky.

POSEIDON (Neptune), son of Cronus; king of the sea.

HADES, son of Cronus; ruler of the house of the dead.

ATHENE (Minerva), daughter of Zeus; goddess of skill and intelligence.

APOLLO, son of Zeus and Leto; archer god of light.

ARTEMIS (Diana), daughter of Zeus and Leto; huntress goddess of the woods.

APHRODITE (Venus), daughter of Zeus and Dione; goddess of love.

ARES (Mars), son of Zeus; god of war.

HEPHAESTUS (Vulcan), son of Zeus and Hera; god of metalworking and handicraft.

HERMES (Mercury), son of Zeus; messenger of the gods.

PERSEPHONE (Proserpina), daughter of Demeter; wife of Hades and queen of the underworld.

LESSER DIVINITIES

PROTEUS, old man of the sea, one of the gods deposed by Zeus.

ELDOTHEA, daughter of Proteus; sea-nymph.

CALYPSO, daughter of Atlas; island nymph of Ogygia.

AEOLUS, son of Hippotas; keeper of the winds.

CIRCE, daughter of the sun; goddess of the wild, enchantress.

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD OF ODYSSEUS

ODYSSEUS (Ulysses), son of Laertes; king of Ithaca.

LAERTES, son of Arceisius; aged father of Odysseus.

PENELOPE, daughter of Icarius; wife of Odysseus.

TELEMACHUS, son of Odysseus and Penelope.

MENTOR, friend and steward of Odysseus.

PHEMIUS, son of Terpes; minstrel in the house.

MEDON, herald.

EUMAEUS, son of Ctesius; keeper of Odysseus’ swine.

MELANTHIUS, son of Dolius; keeper of the goats.

PHILOETIUS, keeper of the cattle.

DOLIUS, aged gardener and field worker.

EURYCLEA, daughter of Ops; old nurse of Odysseus and Telemachus.

EURYNOME, head maid and housekeeper.

MELANTHO, daughter of Dolius; favored maid of Penelope.

EURYLOCHUS, husband of Odysseus’ sister; sailor with Odysseus.

ELPENOR, youngest sailor with Odysseus.

MEN OF ITHACA AND SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF PENELOPE

AEGYPTIUS, aged lord in Ithaca.

HALITHERSES, son of Mastor; seer and prophet.

NOEMON, son of Phronius; shipowner.

PIRAEUS, son of Clytius; trusty friend of Telemachus.

EUPEITHES, lord in Ithaca.

IRUS, town beggar.

ANTINOUS, son of Eupeithes; leader of the suitors.

EURYMACHUS, son of Polybus; suitors from Ithaca.

LEIOCRITUS, son of Evenor; suitors from Ithaca.

AGELAUS, son of Damastor; suitors from Ithaca.

AMPHIMEDON, son of Melanus; suitors from Ithaca.

CTESIPPUS, son of Polytherses; suitor from Same.

AMPHINOMUS, son of Nisus; suitor from Dulichium.

LEIODES, son of Oenops; soothsayer for the suitors.

PERSONS MET BY TELEMACHUS ON HIS TRIP TO THE MAINLAND

NESTOR, son of Neleus; aged king of Pylos, returned from Troy.

PISISTRATUS, son of Nestor.

MENELAUS, son of Atreus; king of Sparta, returned from Troy.

HELEN, daughter of Zeus and Leda; wife of Menelaus, brought back from Troy.

THEOCLYMENUS, son of Polypheides; fugitive seer from Argos, received by Telemachus.

DWELLERS IN THE LAND OF THE PHAEACIANS

ALCINOUS, son of Nausithous; king of the Phaeacians in Scheria.

ARETE, daughter of Rhexenor; wife of Alcinous and queen of the Phaeacians.

LAODAMAS, eldest son of Alcinous and Arete.

NAUSICAA, young daughter of Alcinous and Arete.

DEMODOCUS, blind bard at Alcinous’ court.

EURYALUS, son of Naubolus; Phaeacian noble.

MONSTERS AND OTHER INHUMAN BEINGS

POLYPHEMUS, son of Poseidon; giant Cyclops and ogre.

ANTIPHATES, king of the cannibal Laestrygonians.

TWO SIRENS, fatal beguilers of men with their singing.

SCYLLA, daughter of Crataiis; six-headed monster and man-eater.

CHARYBDIS, a whirlpool which draws vessels to their doom.

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD IN THE HOUSE OF HADES

TEIRESIAS, blind prophet of Thebes.

ANTICLEIA, daughter of Autolycus; wife of Laertes and mother of Odysseus.

TYRO, daughter of Salmoneus; mother by Poseidon of Pelias and Neleus.

EPICASTE, also called Jocasta, mother and wife of Oedipus, king of Thebes.

AGAMEMNON, son of Atreus; king of the Greeks at Troy.

ACHILLES, son of Peleus; hero of the Iliad.

PATROCLUS, son of Menoetius; comrade of Achilles.

AJAX, son of Telamon; great warrior at Troy.

TITYUS spirits tormented punishment

TANTALUS spirits tormented punishment 

SISYPHUS spirits tormented punishment

SHADE of HERACLES (Hercules), son of Zeus; heroic laborer for mankind.

NEW ARRIVALS, spirits of Elpenor and of the suitors.

SCENE OF ACTION

Island of Ithaca.

Nestor’s home at Pylos.

Palace of Menelaus in Sparta.

Calypso’s island of Ogygia in the West.

River mouth in Scheria, land of the Phaeacians, and palace of the king, Alcinous.

The names of the gods and goddesses and of the hero Odysseus, which our translator, Samuel Butler, turned into Latin forms, have in this edition been restored to the Greek.

BOOK I

The gods in council agree that the time has come for Odysseus to be brought home to avenge himself on Penelope’s suitors and to recover his kingdom. Hermes is sent to Calypso’s isle to bid her release the captive Odysseus. Athene, disguised as Mentes, appears to Telemachus, advising him to call an assembly of the men of Ithaca, to complain of the behavior of the suitors; then to go himself in quest of his father to Pylos and Sparta.

TELL ME, O MUSE, OF THAT INGENIOUS¹ HERO WHO TRAVELED FAR and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly² in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Zeus, from whatsoever source you may know them.

So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Odysseus, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the