Bless me, Apollo, bless me, Artemis;
and greetings, all you girls! Remember me
whenever any poor and homeless stranger
comes here and asks you, “Girls, who is to you
the sweetest of all singers? Which one gives you
most pleasure?” All of you must answer him,
“He is a blind man and he makes his home
in rocky Chios; all his songs will be
the best forever.”
The historian Thucydides, writing in the late fifth century BCE, confidently quotes the passage as evidence that Homer was a blind man from Chios. Often seen as the father of modern or “scientific” historiography, Thucydides prides himself on his skeptical attitude towards implausible traditional myths. But it is extremely unlikely that the person who composed these lines had any hand in creating the Homeric epics. The hymn was probably composed by a member of a family or professional organization who lived on Chios in the sixth century, calling themselves the Homeridae—the children of Homer. These people gave performances of The Iliad and Odyssey (or portions from them) and also created their own poetic compositions, which they presented as also “Homeric.” This particular hymn may have been composed by an active member of this clan to honor an unusual double festival to Apollo of Delos and Delphi in 522 BCE—far later than the composition of the Homeric poems themselves.
The testimony about the “blind man from Chios,” then, does not tell us anything about the composition of The Iliad and Odyssey themselves—which probably originated a good two hundred years earlier. But the “Homeric Hymn” does bring into sharp relief the fact that already in archaic, preclassical Greece, the Homeric poems had a place at the absolute top of the poetic canon: they were the “sweetest,” the “best forever.” Moreover, the notion that “Homer” is a poet who celebrates a birth on a floating island may express an awareness that these poems had evolved out of a long oral history, from multiple different local traditions. Homer, like the god of poetry, emerges from an ambiguous or floating origin. Everybody in the Greek-speaking world wanted to claim and remake Homer for themselves—a process that continues to this day.
The Odyssey was, along with The Iliad, the foundation of Greek and Roman elite education. Sections from the poems were also performed by rhapsodes to adults, for entertainment. All upper-class men in the Graeco-Roman world knew the Homeric poems well. Aeschylus is said to have called his tragedies “slices from the banquet of Homer.” Homer (and the rest of the archaic epic tradition) provided the basis for much of classical literature: tragedy, but also history, later forms of epic, pastoral, and the novel.
But Greek and Roman writers often struggled with the legacy of Homer. Plato’s character Socrates in the Republic famously insists that Homer, along with the Athenian tragedians, must be excluded from the ideal city, because his work provides a false image of reality, and stirs up emotions that are better repressed and controlled. Plato and others criticized the depiction of the gods in the poems, for their lack of morality. Odysseus himself is often a problematic character in later Greek and Roman literature, characterized by his abuse of cleverness for self-interested goals. In Sophocles’ Ajax, he is a commonsensical realist, but in the same author’s Philoctetes, as well as in Euripides’ Hecuba, he is a scheming sophist, willing to say or do anything (including murder children) in order to achieve his own military ends. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Odysseus becomes “cruel Odysseus,” the unscrupulous destroyer of Troy, which was the home of the poem’s hero. But Aeneas himself becomes a new kind of Odysseus, in his search for a home that exists only in the future: the city of Rome itself.
The canonical status of Homer, combined with the philosophical and ethical challenges involved in treating these poems as a source of “truth,” led to a tradition of allegorizing the various adventures of Odysseus. We have, for example, an extensive Neoplatonic interpretation by Porphyry (third century CE) of the episode in Book 13 when Odysseus reaches Ithaca and comes to the cave of the Nymphs. Porphyry notes the fact that there is apparently no such cave on Ithaca, and that the details of the description are extremely implausible. The passage must therefore, he suggests, be read as an extended metaphor for the soul’s place inside the material, terrestrial world.
The Odyssey continued to be read and studied, alongside The Iliad, throughout classical antiquity. But knowledge of Greek became extremely rare in the Western world after the fall of the western Roman Empire, in the fifth century CE. Dante had no access to the original Odyssey, though he knew the story of Odysseus. In his Inferno, he places Ulysses (the Romanized name for Odysseus) low down in Hell (the eighth circle out of nine, the circle of Fraud), because he leads his people by deceit into destruction. Dante’s silver-tongued, self-serving, and falsely inspiring Ulysses gives his men a rousing, deceitful speech urging them to continue their adventures for “virtue and knowledge”; he is urging them on, yet again, to shipwreck, on the Mountain of Purgatory. This rhetorically gifted version of Odysseus is not entirely alien to the character we meet in Homer.
Texts of Homer were preserved in Arabic translation and in the Byzantine (eastern) Empire. We still have hundreds of important Homeric manuscripts from the eastern empire, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries CE. When Byzantium fell in 1453, refugees from Constantinople brought their knowledge of Greek with them to Italy. The Italian humanists of the fifteenth century learned Greek, read Homer, and began to spread their knowledge through Europe, by means of printed editions and translations of the Homeric poems. The poems were translated first into Latin, and then into all the vernacular languages of Europe.
The first complete Odyssey in English was that of George Chapman, in 1615. Chapman’s Odyssey, in rhyming pentameter couplets, presents the hero as a true soldier and gentleman, a proto-Christian and proto-Stoic whose greatest virtue is his ability to endure suffering and control his impulses. But not everybody in seventeenth-century England was so optimistic about the possibility of claiming Odysseus as a Christian hero. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Odysseus’ clever, deceptively inspiring rhetoric and tendency to get lost on a long journey to a homeland from which he has been excluded by divine power are now the characteristics of Satan—the epic antihero who shows us what is wrong with classical notions of heroism from Milton’s perspective.
In the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope, along with a team of collaborators, produced translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey that dominated the market and transformed interpretation of the poems for several generations to come. Pope makes The Odyssey into a text about those essentially eighteenth-century preoccupations: proper manners and good government. In Pope’s version, Odysseus is the ultimate hero of politeness and tact, the man who always has the appropriate response to every social challenge. He is also a just monarch, whose knowledge of suffering informs his exertion of power over the “nations” whom he governs.
John Keats, who knew no Greek, wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” in 1816; the appeal of Chapman, imagined in the sonnet like the discovery of the New World, comes partly from the fact that Chapman offered a glimpse of a Homer that was different from the familiar, normalized Homer of Pope. Dipping into Chapman’s Homer makes him feel like an astronomer, “when a new planet swims into his ken.” As we have seen, scholars in the nineteenth and then twentieth century discovered “new” versions of Homer by searching for the real places that might lie behind the texts, and also by reconstructing the conditions in which these poems were created. But The Odyssey could also be used as a way of thinking about what might be old and worn out in the Western cultural tradition. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” imagines the protagonist as a weary but compulsive imperial explorer, whose restless boredom makes it impossible for him ever to settle at home: he insists on pushing onward to the western stars, “made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”