W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York * London
HOMER
THE
ODYSSEY
TRANSLATED BY EMILY WILSON
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To my daughters,
Imogen, Psyche, and Freya
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
MAPS
1. The World of The Odyssey
2. The Aegean and Asia Minor
3. Mainland Greece
4. The Peloponnese
THE ODYSSEY
BOOK 1The Boy and the Goddess
BOOK 2A Dangerous Journey
BOOK 3An Old King Remembers
BOOK 4What the Sea God Said
BOOK 5From the Goddess to the Storm
BOOK 6A Princess and Her Laundry
BOOK 7A Magical Kingdom
BOOK 8The Songs of a Poet
BOOK 9A Pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave
BOOK 10The Winds and the Witch
BOOK 11The Dead
BOOK 12Difficult Choices
BOOK 13Two Tricksters
BOOK 14A Loyal Slave
BOOK 15The Prince Returns
BOOK 16Father and Son
BOOK 17Insults and Abuse
BOOK 18Two Beggars
BOOK 19The Queen and the Beggar
BOOK 20The Last Banquet
BOOK 21An Archery Contest
BOOK 22Bloodshed
BOOK 23The Olive Tree Bed
BOOK 24Restless Spirits
NOTES
GLOSSARY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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INTRODUCTION
The Odyssey is, along with The Iliad, one of the two oldest works of literature in the Western tradition. It is an epic poem: “epic” both in the sense that it is long, and in the sense that it presents itself as telling an important story, in the traditional, formulaic language used by archaic poets for singing the tales of gods, wars, journeys, and the collective memories and experience of the Greek-speaking world.
Modern connotations of the word “epic” are in some ways misleading when we turn to the Homeric poems, the texts that began the Western epic tradition. The Greek word epos means simply “word” or “story” or “song.” It is related to a verb meaning “to say” or “to tell,” which is used (in a form with a prefix) in the first line of the poem. The narrator commands the Muse, “Tell me”: enn-epe. An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that is told.
The Odyssey is grand or (in modern terms) “epic” in scope: it is over twelve thousand lines long. The poem is elevated in style, composed entirely in a regular poetic rhythm, a six-beat line (dactylic hexameter), and its vocabulary was not that used by ordinary Greeks in everyday speech, in any time or place. The language contains a strange mixture of words from different periods of time, and from Greek dialects associated with different regions. A handful of words in Homer were incomprehensible to Greeks of the classical period. The syntax is relatively simple, but the words and phrases, in these combinations, are unlike the way that anybody ever actually spoke. The style is, from a modern perspective, strange: it is full of repetitions, redundancies, and formulaic expressions. These mark the poem’s debt to a long tradition of storytelling and suggest that we are in a world that is at least partly continuous with a distant, half-forgotten past.
But in some ways, the story told in this long piece of verse is small and ordinary. It is a story, as the first word of the original Greek tells us, about “a man” (andra). He is not “the” man, but one of many men—albeit a man of extraordinary cognitive, psychological, and military power, one who can win any competition, outwit any opponent, and manage, against all odds, to survive. The poem tells us how he makes his circuitous way back home across stormy seas after many years at war. We may expect the hero of an “epic” narrative to confront evil forces, perform a superhuman task, and rescue vast numbers of people from an extraordinary kind of threat. Failing that, we might hope at least for a great quest unexpectedly achieved, despite perils all around; an action that saves the world, or at least changes it in some momentous way—like Jason claiming the Golden Fleece, Launcelot glimpsing the Holy Grail, or Aeneas beginning the foundation of Rome. In The Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back to the way it was before he went away. For this hero, mere survival is the most amazing feat of all.
Only a portion of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey describes the magical wanderings of Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca. These adventures are presented as a backstory partly told by the hero himself (in Books 5 through 12). The poem cuts between far-distant and diverse locations, from Olympus to earth, from Calypso’s island to the palace at Ithaca, from the underworld to the cottage of the swineherd. Sometimes the setting feels entirely realistic, even mundane—a world where a mother packs a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where there is a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and play checkers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together. At other moments, we are in the realm of pure fantasy, inhabited by cannibals, witches, and goddesses with six barking heads, where it is possible to cross the streams of Ocean (the mythical river that encircles the known world), and come to the land of asphodel, where the spirits of dead heroes live forever. Different characters tell their own inset stories—some true, some false, of past lives, adventures, dreams, memories, and troubles. The poem weaves and unweaves a multilayered narrative that is both simple and artful in its patterning and composition.
The story begins in an unexpected place, in medias res (“in the middle of things”—the proper starting point for an epic, according to Horace). It is not the start of the Trojan War, which began with the Judgment of Paris and the Abduction of Helen and was fought for ten years. Nor does the poem start at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey home, which has been in progress for almost as many years as the war. Instead, it begins when nothing much seems to be happening at all; Odysseus, his son, and his wife are all stuck in a state of frustration and paralysis that has been continuing for years and is becoming unbearable.
Odysseus, at the start of the poem, is trapped by the goddess Calypso, who wants to have him stay there as her husband for eternity. He could choose to evade death and old age and stay always with her; but movingly, he prefers “to see even just the smoke that rises / from his own homeland, and he wants to die.” Odysseus longs to recover his own identity, not as a victim of shipwreck or a coddled plaything of a powerful goddess, but as a master of his home and household, as a father and as a husband. He sits sobbing by the shore of the island every day, desperately staring at the “fruitless sea” for a boat that might take him back home.
Meanwhile, in Ithaca, Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is surrounded by young men who have forced their way into her home and are making merry with daily feasts, wasting the provisions of the household, waiting for her to agree to give up on Odysseus and marry one of them. Penelope has a deep loyalty both to her lost husband, for whom she weeps every night and whom she misses “all the time,” and also to the “beautiful rich house” in which she lives, which she risks losing forever if she remarries. She has devised clever ways to put off the suitors, but it is clear that she cannot do so forever; eventually, she will have to choose one of them as her husband and perhaps leave the household of Odysseus for a new home. When that happens, either the suitors will divide the wealth of Odysseus between them—as they sometimes threaten—or the dominant suitor may gain the throne of Ithaca for himself. The ambiguity about what the suitors are seeking matches an even more central ambiguity, about what Penelope herself wants. Indefinitely, tearfully, Penelope waits, keeping everyone guessing about her innermost feelings and intentions. As the chief suitor complains, “She offers hope to all, sends notes to each, / but all the while her mind moves somewhere else.” This premise allows for artful resonances with earlier moments in the myth of Troy. Much-courted Penelope resembles Helen, the woman to whom all the Greek heroes came as suitors (Menelaus, her husband, eventually won her hand by lot), and whom Paris, Prince of Troy, later stole away. Like Paris, Penelope’s suitors threaten to steal away a married woman as if she were a bride. Penelope’s house also echoes the besieged town of Troy, when the Greeks were fighting to take Helen back home—but there is here no strong Hector to defend the inhabitants.