Introductory remarks:

• 8 books, and Odysseus STILL hasn't identified himself: note how he sidesteps Arete's question in Book 7 -p. 187 (Identity, Disguise, Recognition: Thursday after the break)
• The role of Athena as the "helper" of the hero: overdeterminism: symbol of hero's power - Example: book 4:
• Appears as friend of Nausicaa: go wash, young woman!
• Diverts the ball so as to awake Odysseus
• Appears as little girl to guide him to palace, and hides him in mist
• Herald of Phaeacians: summons them at the beginning of book 7 to the games; measures the mark of Od.'s discus throw
• (a bit more like a fairy god mother in some ways!)

The exemplum of Orestes, and the Death of Agamemnon

"Telemachy" (=book 1-4, those centering on Telemachus): the complex narrative technique

• gets us involved, makes us ask questions
• sets up Odysseus as an intriguing, mysterious figure
• establishes central paradigms and themes

Narrative Technique: the non-chronological structure of the Odyssey serves

• to pique the interest of the reader, to build a sense of suspense and mystery and lead the reader into the story, getting the reader to ask questions about what is going on, and thus to become involved in the story,
• to put right up front some central issues and themes of the epic:
• central to Homer's plan, for instance, to begin with a scene at Ithaca, a scene of riotous feasting, of domestic disorder, a scene where the usual civility of human interaction in the setting of a great house and in a time of peace has gone topsy-turvey: where feasters feast without being invited, without even a host, and without the proper form: for the feast has not the usual prayers, sacrifice, and libations to mark its beginning, nor is there a point where the food and drink is put away.
• When Athena arrives (in the form a young man, Mentes), she is at first not even noticed, such are the carryings on. When Telmachus notices her and comes to greet her, she asks (with obvious irony) "what sort of feast is this? is it a wedding? a revel?" The feasting is out of control, definitely out of control.

The story of the murder of Agamemnon by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra (Zeus' first words!) at once provides a central paradigm for the story at hand, and serves to encapsulate some of the critical issues. As a paradigm, it serves both as a foreshadowing device and as a justification for the eventual outcome of this disorder.

• foreshadowing, we sense that there will be ultimate revenge, whatever may come first: horror of Ag's death as backdrop and central paradigm for our tale (who is who in the analogue?)

• Aegisthus = suitors, interlopers trying to take over Od's wife and household just as Aeg. (successfully) takes over Agamemnon's wife and household
• Agamemnon = the returning Od.
• Orestes, Ag.'s son who avenged his death in the eighth year = Telemachus (the initial focus of our tale) So what will happen here, by this set of parallels?
  

Later in book 1, Athena (in her disguise as Mentes) pointedly asks Telemachus if he has heard of the glory of Orestes, who cut down Aegisthus and thus avenged his father. Immediately we know that the suitors will die.

the suitors reinforce this impression early in book 2, when in answer to Telemachus' speech before the assembly Zeus sends a pair of eagles who drop down and attack the crowd with their talons-- an event rightly interpreted by the local seer as meaning that Od. is near at hand and that the suitors are in peril.

But, just as Aegisthus was warned by the gods against his action against Agamemnon and ignored the gods' warning to his peril, so too the suitors ignore the omen, heaping scorn on the seer: "Old man, go tell the omens for your children at home, and try to keep them out of trouble. ... Bird life aplenty is found in the sunny air, not all of it significant." So the suitors, like Aegisthus, are warned by the gods but choose to ignore the signs and go on with their abuse of the house of Odysseus. By signals such as the omen of the eagles, it gradually becomes clear that the two stories are not quite parallel, that Od. will not die at the hands of the suitors and await revenge from his son, but will himself act to set right the disorder that reigns in his house.

• a means of justification for the final action.
  
• the story shows what could happen, what will happen if Od. does not act, and thereby makes Od's final attack on the suitors necessary: for the suitors will kill Od., or so the story goes: that at least is what Aegisthus did to the returning Ag. When, at the end of book 4, the suitors perceive that Telemachus has gone off to consult with other powerful Greek leaders (Nestor and Menelaus), and they thus finally perceive him not as a boy, but as a threat, they lay in wait off in boats off Ithaca in order to murder him. Nothing could be clearer than that these men are bad men, men who will stop at nothing to strip Od. of his household, and pose a real threat to Od.
• More on the suitors: in many respects the label "suitors" misleads, for their principal aim seems not, really, to court Penelope. As we are told repeatedly, the proper way for them to carry through on their proposal of marriage is to go to Penelope's father, who does not live on Ithaca, and seek his consent. Penelope, as any woman in ancient Greek society, cannot give herself away (a women, in ancient Greek society, is always under the guardianship of a man, regardless of her age or station: thus her husband, or father, or if neither of these then some other male relative; women are in law treated much like any other property of the man's household, and he is free to dispose of her as he wishes). So to our Greek reader-listeners of the poem, it is quite obvious that the suitor's explicit aim-- to get Penelope to choose one of them-- is little more than a ruse. For her choice may well, in fact very likely would, mean very little. Her father is much more likely to be influenced by gifts and other signs of material prosperity for his princess daughter than by something silly like romantic attachment. So, I think, would be the reaction of a Greek audience.
• So what are the "suitors" up to anyway? The first books hint at a number of things. They seem to be quite designedly trying to reduce the power of the king's household, in (as generally in Homeric society) a most material way. They seem quite literally to be trying to eat Od. out of house and home. Repeatedly, we are told of the great expense of this day-in day-out feasting. What is more, they are undermining the influence of the house in less direct ways. By the constant humiliation of both Tel. and Pen., they demonstrate that the house of Od. is no longer in charge of its own affairs, much less those of others. This will of course discourage local alliances, and indeed we see very little support from the people of Ithaca, despite the fact, as we are told, that Od.'s father and Od. himself had ruled the island well for many years. Indeed the old man who opens the assembly in book 2, and speaks with tearful memory of Od., has a son among the suitors. We have very much the sense of vultures hovering over an almost spent corpse.

The broader significances of these parallel stories -- that of the murder of Ag. on the one hand and of the return of Od. on the other

• strikes deep to the heart of the Odyssey-- or, at least, to one important aspect of the Od.-and also helps to explain how the Od. is so fitting, in some cosmic sense indeed so necessary, a sequel to the Iliad.

Remember our reading of the Iliad:

• The Iliad leaves us with a dark world view, for all its reconciliation in the end. We see humans and gods at the heights of their passions, in passions which are excessive, beyond anything we can call civilized. The world seems out of control. Men kill men in a way and on a scale that is monstrous, gods like Hera and Athena hate beyond any sort of reason, well beyond the usual insouciant capriciousness of godly anger and vengeance, but with a passion that defies reason or explanation, that is brutal, outlandish, where at the beginning of bk 4 of the Iliad Hera says that she will be glad to see her favorite Greek cities all destroyed if only she can see Troy razed to the ground; where Zeus, as we've seen, says that she, Hera, will not be satisfied until she has eaten Priam and his sons raw.
• And so too, on the human side, Achilles-- or perhaps even more so, if that is possible. For Achilles' anger is relentless, iron like the heart of Hadas, king of the gods, and this anger against Ag., an anger which leads him to watch with satisfaction as his fellow Greek soldiers are slaughtered by the enemy, this anger against Ag. is only superceded by a yet greater anger, the anger against Hektor for killing his comrade Patroclus, an anger in which, again, we have seen that Achilles wishes he could eat Hektor raw, so beyond the bounds of civilized feelings and behavior has he gone. Towards the end of the Iliad, in books 20-21, the gods come down to the field and fight with each other alongside the men. This is a cosmos, a universe, out of control, way out of control, way beyond civilization and the light, way off into the darkness, that primal darkness of irrationality, of terror, of hate, and other deep and real and awful passions.
• In the final 2 books of the Il. we have the reconciliation that shows both gods and Achilles realizing their self-absorbed excess, backing off, showing pity, finding reconciliation. But it is, in a sense, very little very late, and hanging over the end is the death of Achilles, the fall of Troy, and the pillage of the city, the wholesale slaughter and rape of the people hinted at over and over again-- and therefore, I think, the darkness of the Iliad remains the overriding feeling.

Now let's think about how the story of Aegisthus both links back to the Iliad, and forward to the Odyssey

• The story of Aegisthus introduced in the first lines of the Od. tells of the continuation, in a sense, of this world out of control that we studied in the Iliad. For Ag. finally returns, the great hero, from the war, and is invited to a banquet by a man who was, before the war, one of his principal local allies. He is invited to a feast. In the middle of the feast Ag. and his men are ambushed, and Ag. is killed by Aegisthus, with the participation of Clyt., Ag's wife (and now the lover of Aeg.), and now Ag. and his men lie in a pool of blood and wine. The fundamental disorder seems then to continue. For again we are confronted with a faithless wife (think of Helen), and, again, a gross violation of hospitality, a murder in the midst of a banquet no less (again, think of Paris and Helen, for Paris was Menelaus' guest when he stole Helen away).
• And recall that Zeus is the god of hospitality, the protector of guests wronged. This role of Zeus as god of hospitality -- Zeus Xenios, a fundamental aspect of Zeus-- shows the degree to which the Greeks thought the guest relationship fundamental to civilization-- and this makes sense if you think of our discussion of the role of guest-friendships in archaic society, of the central importance of gift-giving in the forging of alliances that kept the peace, and that helped to knit together the top levels of society. So another wife is faithless, indeed assisting in the plot to kill her husband, the king of kings, and the ruler topples. The world is a nasty place.
• But, and this is an important "but", indeed a central "but", something has just recently happened at the time when the Odyssey opens. That something is that Orestes has avenged his father. It took eight years, but now, finally, all has been set aright in Mycene. Ag. is avenged, and his son rules the kingdom. And, as we see in the opening books, all is now very well indeed in the palaces of Nestor, and in the awesome palace of Menelaus, who with Helen has at long last returned from his own travels to Egypt and elsewhere on his way back from Troy.
• And the gods, as we see from the first, are also behaving in a much more reasonable manner. Zeus seems much more in control, and the poem shows none of those strange quarrels and challenges to one another's power that are so frequent in the Iliad. The gods are both more dignified in their behavior and more willing to yield to one another in accordance with the rules. Moreover, the restoration of order, the avenging of Orestes, seems to be in accordance with the rule of what is right, with the rule of justice. Orestes' action is not prompted because Zeus owes a favor to Thetis, or the like; instead, Orestes acts, and the house of Agamemnon is set in order, because that is what is right. There does seem to be some moral center, a moral center that involves Zeus, involves some sense of what is right. Od. will return, and will prevail over the suitors in part because he is Athena's favorite, but also, and ultimately, because Zeus favors him, and, we sense, favors him because that is what is right, what is just. Order is almost at hand.
• The great boiling up of confusion, revenge and counter-revenge, lust and hatred and rages, that great exploration into the dark, primal, irrational side of behavior that seems to have been set in motion by the judgement of Paris and stealing of Helen-- that boiling cauldron seems, almost, cooled down, and the universe is almost restored to its status quo ante, the more orderly way it used to be before these problems all began. The last problem seems to be Odysseus. And the locus of disorder among the Greek kingdoms now seems to boil down to the house of Odysseus. Just as the household of Ag. was, after eight years, finally restored to order, so we can anticipate that here too, and probably through violence, which is the usual instrument of change after all, that here too order will be restored. It is the problem of the poem to find a way to restore order to the household, to restore Od. to the household, and, along the way, to explore what an orderly household is all about -- what civilized life, what the civilized human society signified by the orderly household of the king, what this civilized life is all about.

In many respects, a profitable way of approaching the interpretation of the Odyssey can be to look upon scenes in the early books are paradigmatic, more or less as we have just done with the story of Aegisthus. It's typical to focus, for instance, on the parallels between Telemachus and his journey towards maturity (both real and metaphorical), and then to set that alongside Odysseus and his journey. (Douglas Stewart: "Od. is a survivor from a heroic age who outlives that age and must be taught how to function in a new society. The poet of the Od. has detached Od. from his accustomed environment and forced him through a series of appalling scrapes and boring delays so that he may find within himself a new and individualized reason for being." Od's "maturation" in this sense, for instance.) Or you might think of our brief mention of the contrast between the (paradigmatic) courts of Nestor and Menelaus as contrasted with the court of Od. at Ithaca.

But at least as interesting -- and important -- as the figure of Od. is that of Penelope, and there are interesting paradigmatic women occupying a central place in these opening books:

Helen (book 4)

• p. 128: Helen (surprisingly!) compared to Artemis: the dangerous woman (cf. Calypso, Leucothea)
• The irony of Helen as the hostess; the way in which her arrival and subsequent remarks destroys the normal sequence of the type scene
• pp.132-133: The interaction between Helen and Menelaus
• What sort of woman is Helen? How does Menelaus treat her? What sort of domestic model -- for all the outrageous wealth of the palace -- does this scene present?

Nausicaa (book 6)

• An Adam and Eve tale? (a beautiful, sexy scene, with lots of comedy and suggestiveness)
• Nausicaa: note emphasis on marriage, on suitors!
• But after the laundry....
• The girls "threw their veils to the wind" and begin playing with balls (!), moving about "as lithe as Artemis" (p. 171)
• So Odysseus moved out ... about to mingle with all those lovely girls (!) ... Only Alcinous' daughter held fast ... -p. 172
• "you're Artemis to the life" -p. 173
• You're like "the young slip of a palm-tree springing (!) into the light ... no shaft like that had ever risen up from the earth (!) -p. 173
• "strangers and beggars are from Zeus" -p.175
• N. to her handmaidens: "if only a man like that were called my husband!" -p. 176
• N. finds a way to tell Od. that she's (a) unmarried, (b) courted by many suitors (cf. Penelope!) -p. 177 What does the introduction, on the sly, of Penelope do here?
• So how innocent is Nausicaa anyway?
• How does her reaction, and their interaction, reflect on Od?
• How does this scene reflect on Penelope? What questions might it raise? (cleverness & deception of women? Note though that so also is Odysseus himself! Is Od. find in these womanly wiles a kindred spirit, his "feminine self"?)

Aphrodite (book 8, song of Demodocus)

Demodocus sings three songs

• Quarrel of Achilles and ... Odysseus (!), to which Od. weeps
• The Netting of Ares and Aphrodite: central, no weeping here! Acts as a happy tale to smooth over the recent quarrel between Od. and the youngsters at the games
• The Trojan Horse, to which Od. weeps

Song of Ares and Aphrodite

• pp. 200-202: note the brillliance of the telling
• But what sort of paradigm? What view of womankind? Recalls adultery of Helen?
• How, again, does this reflect on, or make suggestions about, Penelope and what is happening, or could happen, in Ithaca?
• significant detail: marriage beds and weaving are central in both this tale and in the Od. itself
• Parallel and contrast: Penelope takes no Ares, Od. is no cuckold; Od. does, like Hephaestus, trap his sexual enemy in a net, but there is grim consequence (as usual, the gods inhabit a fantasy world free from death, with struggles that are artificial and trivial, even comic; to be contrasted with the more serious human condition)]

Brief appendix: Similes and the Odyssey: tone and undertone

Similes in Od. are few, and mostly give a vivid image to help our imagination in descriptions of Od's feats and journeys: example of "pebbles stuck in the suckers of some octopus," p. 165

This is expected, if we accept that similes in the Battlescape of the Iliad are windows into a world of humanness-- reminders of the other side of life, and effective markers by contrast of the darkness and grimness of the Battlescape; while the Odyssey is lighter, a poem very much concerned on the surface with weather, and the "folk", and domestic scenes etc.

But here and there similies are used in the reverse manner: strikingly at p. 208: Odysseus weeps like a woman with arms around her husband as he's being brutally slain, and she too. Like the story of Aegisthus, it serves to remind us of that grim world that lies behind the fairytale of the Od., and the fairyland of Scheria. (Ring composition!)