And there are many wonderful interludes in the savage brutality of the fighting, moments during which the beauty of peace shines through even though it cannot be enjoyed. The scene where Hector unknowingly says goodbye for the last time to his beloved wife, Andromache, and his little boy, brings tears to the eyes of the hardiest reader. The response of Andromache to the return of her husband’s body from the encampment of Achilles is wrenching: she understands perfectly what must happen to her and her child now that her husband can no longer protect them. And the last dirge for Hector, spoken by Helen herself, who remembers that he was always kind to her even though he knew, as did she, that her very presence in his city was a curse, is riveting. You realize you will never forget these remarkable men and women and that you are richer for having known them.
During the German occupation of Paris in World War II, Simone Weil, a French philosopher, published a small book (really only a pamphlet) titled The Iliad; or, the Poem of Force. She said that The Iliad was a poem without a hero; the dominant figure in the war was force itself, brutal force, the force of bronze cutting into flesh, the force of fate overtaking a human life, the hopelessness of all the characters, great and small, in the face of events they did not and could not comprehend.
The book was a veiled reference to the brutal German occupation of France, but it is as a commentary on The Iliad that it achieved permanence. Simone Weil was right about Homer’s epic, which is completely without sentiment and is about force, another name for which is anangke, the “necessity” that stands between human beings and the realization of their dreams.
The world of The Odyssey, although superficially the same as that of The Iliad, is really utterly different. The entire action of The Iliad takes place in a period of forty-one days on a blood-soaked beach at the foot of the walls of Troy, and within the beleaguered city. The action of The Odyssey ranges over land and sea, extends all the way to Hell and back, and only at the end—ten years after it begins—focuses on the small island of Ithaca, in the Ionian Sea, where the crisis and denouement of the poem are played out. The sounds of The Iliad are those of clashing arms and the screams of wounded and dying men, and finally the hoarse gasp of a single man running from his foe. Those of The Odyssey are the cries of sea birds and the strumming of a lyre as a harpist sings of a world that is no more. And our memory of The Iliad suggests to us that much of its action occurs at night in flickering campfire light, whereas The Odyssey unfolds in daylight, high noon, with the sun shining and sea waves lapping against a white beach, while on the brow of a hill there shines a building, dazzling, white, a dwelling whether of gods or men we cannot tell.
For more than two thousand years readers have said of The Iliad that it is, or is like, a tragedy; and of The Odyssey that it is, or is like, a comedy. This judgment is, I think, most just.
Not that The Odyssey is funny. A man has gone off to war, and although his side has won he has not returned. For ten years, since word came of the fall of Troy, his faithful wife has waited for him, hoping and praying that he is still alive and will come home to her.
Now, a troop of greedy neighboring landowners is trying to force Penelope to choose among them, beautiful as she still is, her riches and the kingdom to be the reward of the man who wins her. Her son, Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus went off to war and is now almost twenty years old, sets out to seek news of his father, in the faint hope that he can be found and brought back to help them. Meanwhile Odysseus lies in the soft, illicit bed of the lovely nymph, Calypso, whose fame is immortal.
The gods are impatient with Odysseus, particularly the dread goddess Athene, the daughter of Zeus. Athene sends the messenger god, Hermes, to Calypso, warning her that she must release her lover, who has remained with her for seven years. Calypso finds Odysseus sitting by the edge of the sea, weeping, and she begs him to stay with her; she will make him immortal, and they will live together for always on her island, Ogygia, the island of the Dead, in the paradise she has made.
He refuses, declaring that he must go home if she will let him. Reluctantly, she helps him build a raft. But Poseidon, Lord of the Sea Waves, angry with him, causes a storm to rise. It destroys the raft, and Odysseus is washed up on the shores of a magic land, Phaeacia. There he meets the maiden Nausicäa, who takes him to her father the king. Odysseus is recognized and tells the story of his earlier voyages, beginning at Troy after the end of the war and concluding with his rescue by Calypso. It is probably the most famous voyage ever described—even though it never happened.
Odysseus leaves Troy intent on going home as quickly as possible, but is waylaid by adventures, mostly of his own making. They arise out of his great curiosity about lands he has never seen and the people who inhabit them. He leads a raid on the Ciconians, which offends the gods. He visits the land of the Lotus-eaters, where all is sweet and delightful and no one seems to be ambitious. Odysseus breaks away from that temptation only to fall into the clutches of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon. He nearly loses his life but in the end he blinds Polyphemus, thus incurring Poseidon’s wrath.
Onward Odysseus wanders, to the land of the Lastrygonians, and then to Circe’s island, Aeaea, where Circe transforms his men into grunting swine. Odysseus once again escapes and, at Circe’s suggestion, travels to Hell in order to discover the best way home. There he meets the dead Heroes, including Achilles, who tells him how terrible death really is. Returning to the world of the living, Odysseus avoids the Sirens, manages to sneak through the strait between Scylla and Charybdis, loses all his companions, and finally is rescued from the sea by Calypso at the very moment he is expiring.
The telling of this tale within a tale occupies four whole books of The Odyssey. By the end of his story, Nausicäa is more than half in love with Odysseus, and the king of the Phaeacians would like to keep this famous, fascinating man in his kingdom, as his son-in-law. But that is impossible; Athene won’t have it. And so the Phaeacians carry Odysseus home to Ithaca after bestowing on him princely gifts.
He has arrived home, but he is not yet safe. If the suitors who are harassing Penelope were to find him, alone and unarmed, they would slay him in an instant. How “wily Odysseus” makes contact with Telemachus, how father and son plan together their revenge on the suitors, and how Odysseus finally triumphs over his enemies, is the real story of The Odyssey, and a superb story it is. It is made even more astonishing as we realize, slowly but surely, that the plan is really Penelope’s (although she refuses to accept credit for it). His lovely, faithful wife is therefore the equal of her husband, the famous “Man of Many Devices,” and deserves as much fame as he does.