Back in September, with part I, I sang a few praises of my two favorite commentaries on Homer’s Odyssey, Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey (and the Iliad), and Jenny Strauss Clay’s The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey. I promised to tell more about them after I had given due honors to some lesser but still top commentators in my view, Bernard Knox, Luc Ferry, and Gregory Nagy.
As all of the necessary qualifiers about my not being a “Homerist” and warnings about spoilers were made there, and as I also had provided a more general introduction to Brann and to reading the Odyssey, let’s get right into it.
Homeric Moments
It is a challenge to convey the peculiar richness of this book. Brann has noticed more than nearly all other scholars, which owes something to her many decades of teaching at St. John’s College, which requires each tutor (i.e., each professor) to repeatedly take students through the book; she is also willing to propose interpretive hypotheses that seem far-fetched at first, but which gradually establish themselves as ones which deserve serious consideration. Another distinctive feature is her attention to various literary qualities and oddities of Homeric epic—of the 48 (often quite brief) chapters of the work, 26 are devoted to the 24 chapters of the Odyssey itself, about 9 to aspects of the Iliad, and a remaining 13 to various topics which span both works, such as the characteristics of the gods and the heroes, the use of similes, the quality of “visuality and visibility,” etc. There is also a strange—and slightly annoying—dispensing of the usual referential notes to classical scholars, replaced with delightful quotations of various poets, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson, Stevens, Auden, and Edwin Muir, who have commented on the epic through their own poems.1
Those who have dipped into her fine commentary on the Republic will recall her finding that a ring-structure ordered that work, and she makes some similar discoveries here, although they turn out to be more involved. Now, as is well-known, the 24 chapters of the Odyssey divide into two types, organized like the “bread” and “meat” of a sandwich as three parts, in which the two enclosing “bread” sections recount fairly realistic events in and around Ithaca, and the inner “meat” section is “Odysseus’ Odyssey,” aka the “odyssey proper,” the sea-faring story, with its fantastical and famous episodes such as the encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe, etc… So this “sandwich” begins with a thinner 4-chapter slice of the “bread,” which sets the scene in Ithaca and shows how Odysseus’ son Telemachus travels to Pylos and Sparta to seek clues about his father’s failure to return from the Trojan War (this is often called “the Telemachy”); then there is the “meat,” chapters 5-12 on the odyssey proper, where we are told what happened to him; and then the thicker “bread slice,” chapters 13-24, which recounts what Odysseus does on his return to Ithaca, with the help of Telemachus, to arrange a surprise-attack on the wicked “suitors” who have taken over his palace.
Now in the odyssey proper, Brann discerns a ring-structure with a center, but she locates a different center for the entire work:
The odyssey is a kind of ring tale that ends where it begins, with Odysseus leaving Ogygia [Calypso’s isle]. …By the number of events [of the odyssey proper] Hades is the central adventure…especially if Ismarus the real is excluded or the magical arrival in Ithaca is included among the adventures. …By the measure of lines, Thrinacia, where Odysseus’ own crew is doomed to the last man is central. Their fatal deed [killing the sun-god’s cattle due to their starvation] is recorded in the exact middle lines (as best determinable) of Homer’s Odyssey.
To see how she arrives at the first of these two centers, I will here reproduce most of one of the three or so charts she provides in the book; this chart constitutes most her chapter 25, titled “The Stations and Sightings of Odysseus’ Odyssey”:
Event # Event’s Elements or Places [0] Phaeacia [where O. tells the odyssey proper] 1 Ismarus 2 Lotus-land 3 Cyclops 4 Aeolia Ithaca Aeolia 5 Lagestrygonians 6 Circe 7 Hades Phaeacia [i.e., the Queen interrupts] Hades Circe 8 Sirens 9 Syclla 10 Thrinacia Charybidis 11 Ogygia Sea Phaeacia Sea 12 Phaeacia [where O. tells the odyssey proper]
[For the sake of a chart that would work for those reading this on their phones, I omitted two additional columns where Brann notes every instance when Odysseus falls asleep or loses men—apparently, she wants us to regard those as key markers.]
Admittedly, one could quibble with the way in which she is counting the “events.” There also appears to be something odd about her 11th event, but I can explain that the reason Brann includes the sea-Phaeacia-sea triad, which is merely recalling that when Odysseus is clinging for his life to a remaining plank of his storm-ruined raft, he gains sight of Phaeacia, but then is driven out to sea from it before coming in again to land, is that she feels it parallels something which happened in the “Aelous and the magical bag of winds event” (#4), when he and his crew gained a brief sight of their home island Ithaca, but were then, heart breakingly, driven away from it by the winds they released.
I won’t say more about what Brann is suggesting with this one chart, but it gives you a sense of the intricacy and audacity of her entire commentary. Perhaps in another essay I will try to trace her hypothesis that the odyssey proper occurs in a “fairy land” invented by Odysseus in order to veil and poetically reflect upon some presumable set of actual journey-events he underwent during his long absence (with the sole exception of the costly raid on Ismarus, which to Brann has the hallmarks of an actual episode).
Here’s one last quote from Brann, which conveys something of the uniqueness of her whole commentary, one where she shares “her main notion”:
It is that there are two Odysseys: Odyssey straight and Odyssey cunning. The straight Odyssey is full of memorable incident and captivating beauty, but the cunning Odyssey is, once you’ve caught on, the marvel of the ages in its artfulness. …I am certain that other readers have always known, or at least sensed, the myriad of small revelations I am about to relate, though these readers—early on they were hearers—may not have been the type to make a book of their insights. Consequently, it would perfectly suit my hopes for this book if readers were to poke around in it to find encouragement and corroboration of their own wild surmises.(5)
The Wrath of Athena
Curiously, the pattern of reading which Brann’s commentary draws one into is itself ring-like, because one often winds up skipping around, going to a later or earlier chapter about this or that, say, to one about Hades or Helen, before one wraps-up the chapter that corresponds to where one is in the epic; that is, the reader gets pulled to this idea and that, as Odysseus’ ship was to various isles and coasts, and is unlikely to proceed directly along the table of contents. In contrast, Jenny Clay Strauss’s The Wrath of Athena is a tight and driving delivery of a single argument, albeit, one whose path illuminates many key aspects of the poem. Another contrast is that it uses standard classicist formality and citation, always showing us where it is building upon or departing from previous scholarship, and indeed, provides in passing the best advice I’ve encountered for navigating the various “Homeric questions.”
And what is her argument? It is meant to answer a question raised by the Odyssey’s beginning invocation, where Homer leaves the starting-point of the narrative up to the Muse—having asked the Muse to tell of “the man of many turns, who was driven far and wide, after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy,” and mentioning that he suffered much, that he saw many cities, and that he lost his comrades due to their general foolishness and especially their killing of the sun-god’s cattle, the poet completes his plea to the Muse by saying, “of these things, from some point at least, tell us too.” That too points to the fact, which all the best scholars agree upon, “that countless traditional tales stand behind Homer and must have been common knowledge to his audience.”(81) Then, “the story itself begins with a depiction of Odysseus’ situation…the time is after the return of the other surviving heroes; the place is Calypso’s island (I, 11-21).” This is “…the Muse’s starting point.” Of course, this is the situation at the end of Odysseus’ seven-year captivity by Calypso, so the action begins with 1) Zeus’ decision to order her to let him go, prompting his raft-voyage which takes him to Phaeacia, but also, with 2) Athena stirring Telemachus to begin searching for clues of his father’s fate or whereabouts, thus initiating his little “Telemachy” journey to see Nestor and then Menelaus. If we look more closely, however, we see that while a number of the Olympian gods were dismayed by the blocking of Odysseus’ return, it was Athena who really pressed Zeus for the change.
So why did she? Or, more to the point, why then? Why didn’t Athena make this plea Zeus seven years earlier, or at any time within that period? And why not even earlier? After all:
At Troy, Athena constantly stood by Odysseus, loving and supporting him. In the action of the Odyssey, from the time Odysseus leaves Calypso’s isle to the final truce in Ithaca, Athena likewise aids her favorite, both directly (after his arrival on Ithaca) and indirectly (among the Phaeacians). But between Odysseus’ departure from Troy and the moment at which the poem opens, Athena is absent. (43)
Clay then explains why most existing scholarly explanations of this are unsatisfactory; she also dismisses the usual quick answer given, an excuse deployed by Athena herself, that the gods had to wait for an opportunity to get around Poseidon, whose anger was triggered by his son the cyclops Polyphemus being blinded by Odysseus. Clay points out that at XIII 314-319 Odysseus reproaches Athena for her prior abandonment of him, and that “the goddess’ [Poseidon] alibi covers the period only after the blinding of the Cyclops and gives no account of her whereabouts during the preceding period, from the time Odysseus left Troy up to the Polyphemus incident.”(45)
So what is the real answer explaining Athena’s period of absence? It is that she was angry, at the Greeks generally, and at Odysseus in particular. Evidence for at least the former claim is unambiguous, even if it is given so quickly that one might not be struck by it: one of the songs sang in the Ithacan palace in the very first book, is of “the return of the Achaeans, the baneful one, from Troy, which Pallas Athena inflicted on them.” (I, 326-27, emph. added; cf. III, 130-135) Clay regards this so-downplayed as to be nearly hidden detail as crucial:
I consider the Wrath of Athena to be…the key to the structure of the entire Odyssey, and to provide the answer to the question: why does the Odyssey begin where it does? In the opening scene of the poem, Athena intervenes on behalf of Odysseus. In all that follows, she aids him constantly. In all events from Odysseus’ departure from Troy, by contrast, she had helped him not at all. The beginning of the Odyssey signals the end of Athena’s anger. (51)
So what had made her angry at Odysseus in particular? How is it connected to the more general anger she held towards the Greeks right after the fall of Troy? And why does her anger at Odysseus end? I will let you go to the book for Clay’s answers to these questions, and for the more fulsome evidence for her claims.
Now as this introduction to Clay’s argument has been complex, necessarily going into matters usually not noticed, I feel obliged to indicate what the near-beginner or intermediate reader of the Odyssey might gain from her book; since it doesn’t comment upon every chapter the way Brann’s does, the best way to indicate that is to summarize what it does cover.
There is a long chapter on the character of Odysseus. This includes, among other riches: a masterful exploration of the clues about his mythic background contained in his very name, but also hinted at through subtle connections of his heritage to the older trickster figure of Autolycus; a brilliant comparison of Odysseus and Achilles as hero-models—you also get this in Brann and Nagy--; and, an excellent exposition of the section of chapter IX on the Cyclops incident, because Clay feels it highlights various virtues and faults of Odysseus. Later on, Clay provides an even closer reading of the section of chapter XIII where Odysseus and Athena meet onshore at Ithaca.
There is also a long chapter, as befits the book’s subtitle, delineating the differences between gods and men in Homeric epic, which is the most helpful discourse I have ever come across on the topic. She shows us how the texts themselves teach us most of what we want to know on this, keeping us from wandering too far out into the vast fields of beyond-Homer research and speculation about Greek religion and its development.
Her final chapter is a consideration of what she calls the “dual theodicy” of the Odyssey, which goes into some classic questions about the “Justice of Zeus” raised by countless poets and scholars. Some of the answers to the questions her main argument has raised are given there. While not everyone will be satisfied by them, I will again stress that the unfolding of Clay’s argument leads her into many of the key questions we have about the poem. Her book thus has a comprehensive character even though it is not a chapter-by-chapter affair.
I recommend reading The Wrath of Athena alongside Homeric Moments, but if forced to choose, on most days I would pick it as the best book I know of on the Odyssey. That is, I believe it is the one that will teach you the most about its core features and secrets, and with the precision, force, and speed of a seemingly impossible feat of Odyssean archery; sure, I might have to admit there is something more beautiful, and Homerically so, about Brann’s more elusive and fluid commentary, but I ought to underline that Clay sees as much of the “cunning” side of the poem as Brann does, and in places even more of it, even if she apparently did not want to design a book that luxuriates in it.
My annoyance is not because I do not believe Brann’s implicit claim that she learned more from her own many re-readings and discussions, and from these poets, than from the Homerist literature, but due to my being sure that she has learned some significant things from that literature-- including examples of how not to approach Homer--, which her readers could benefit from.