This summer the book club I lead went through Homer’s Odyssey. It was my third time reading it, and I noticed a number of things I hadn’t before. This is one hallmark of those works we rightly call the Great Books: they may be read repeatedly over the course of one’s life. Some of the new-found learning is due to your realizing the existence of slightly-hidden avenues of thought which the text itself allows any diligent reader to discover, and yet, some of these paths only open because you are a different person, wiser or at least more experienced.
In my case, one major difference this time around was that I was armed, like a hero gifted some divine Amulet of Deep-Seeing, with one of the very best commentaries, Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey (And the Iliad).
What is more, I discovered another book, one perhaps even more magically illuminating, Jenny Strauss Clay’s The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey. What led me to it was its title, for the curious character of Athena’s role throughout the Odyssey, and the way she seemed more responsible for the most wrathful aspects of the vengeance at its end than Odysseus, had set me up to be intrigued by a study exploring her agency.
Here at pomocon, one of our slogans is “retrieving antiquity at the peak of modernity.” While I know pretty little about the set of younger conservative men who declare their interest in the virtues of the “Bronze Age,” as represented by writers like “Bronze Age Pervert” or “Raw Egg Nationalist,” it seems that no figure from the Bronze Age (or more precisely, no figure from what the Greek Archaic Age remembered and imagined about the Bronze one) would be better for such men to study than Odysseus. Aspects of his character and situation make him a more useful model for those seeking to retrieve the best of antiquity’s manliness than Achilles, Herakles (Hercules), or the Spartans. To take the Achilles example, a situation like his could not really apply to any modern man, unless he was the very best fighter of our time, and guns and other advanced weapons did not exist!
And as the Odyssey meditates on the examples of Penelope and Helen (Brann shows us that the latter is not the simple character we often assume), and prods thought about how the hero who is to excel at both war and family must navigate the promises and perils posed him by the fairer sex—it is no accident that most of the “danger-figures” of the fantastical section, e.g., Circe, the Sirens, Charybdis and Scylla, are female—, it can benefit readers whose conceptions of what it takes to be a heroic and effective man are too narrow. Penelope’s struggle to maintain the home against the injustices and temptations of the suitors requires great endurance and practical wisdom, just as Odysseus’ struggle to get back home does, and we repeatedly see that Odysseus’s famed tactical smarts will amount to nothing if he is not similarly astute about women, domestic and political ‘home-making,’ and the gods also.
The Odyssey’s emphasis on “battle of the sexes” and “home-restoration” themes perhaps explains why my favorite two works on it are by women; although clearly, the more important shaping-facts about Eva Brann and Jenny Strauss Clay are that the first developed her Homer-expertise at St. John’s College, the “Great-Books-Only” school which tasks all its teachers with repeatedly reading the epics with their students, and that the second was the daughter of Leo Strauss, the greatest thinker of the 20th century, and the one who did the most to revive the importance of classical works.
Anyhow, one main point here is that if you’re a man or woman who touts culture-revolutionizing and self-help possibilities in the cultivation of “Bronze Age” virtues, and you haven’t studied your Odyssey, you’re blowing it.
And to anyone who hasn’t yet had the pleasure of reading this great work, know there will be spoilers from this point forward, in this, and in subsequent Odyssey posts. You do want the full experience, so save this link for when you have finished your first reading. Also note that in my first post on the epic I provided guidance about the best translation to use.
A Disclaimer
I am not a classicist, nor the specialized kind they call a “Homerist.” My Attic Greek is poor, I have never studied Homeric Greek, and most importantly, I’m new to Homerist subfield—this summer was my first sustained foray into it. (FWIW, I do more work with classics than my writings at pomocon might suggest, and I am pretty familiar with the scholarship in some areas, such as on Plato’s Republic and on Athenian democracy.) In this post I am going to highlight commentary-type works on the Odyssey by Bernard Knox, Luc Ferry, and Gregory Nagy; in part two I’ll turn to the two very-best-in-my-judgment commentaries already mentioned, those by Brann & Clay. However, I am sure there are major works I am unaware of—I can see that works by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Cedric Whitman, Kostas Myrsiades, and the giant of Strauss-influenced classical scholarship Seth Benardete, likely deserve to be in the running for the best book on the Odyssey, and I’m not even weighing here the countless important journal articles or chapters, for example, the one in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Nor do I know what to recommend from the more text-focused and team-authored commentaries listed by some classics departments. So take this as a celebration of a few fine works that one Great Books and political philosophy scholar stumbled upon.
That is, despite my (Nagy-derived) title for this, I know I am not strictly qualified to serve as a final judge here.
And if you have judgments of your own, let us know in the comments. Who else we should be reading on Homer’s second epic?
Bernard Knox
I don’t know much about Knox, other than that he provides the notes and the introductions for the Robert Fagles editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that these are top-notch; even if I didn’t believe the Fagles translations were the best, I would still judge Knox’s contributions as rich enough to make these editions must-buys. He does the same for Fagles’ edition of Virgil’s Aeneid, and one point in favor for buying the physical-edition audiobook versions of all three, is that you get his introductions in the accompanying booklets.
Each introduction is around sixty pages. There is some repeated-text in the introductions to the two Homeric epics, because Knox provides one the best layman-friendly entries to the somewhat complex “Homeric Question,” which concerns the long-standing debate about the epics’ composition and language. Was Homer illiterate? Was his name simply tagged onto a collectively and orally passed-down body of epic poetry, perhaps because he was first writer to organize such material into unified works? Or should the two epics be considered his own, ‘his own’ in terms of authorial intent especially, albeit works whose main subject-matter and plot were largely set by already-existing bodies of songs and myths? Both Brann and Clay lean more towards the side of that last-mentioned hypothesis, while acknowledging the discoveries of Milman Parry and others regarding the evidence of mnemonic formulas at work all through the text, and they recognize the referential background and/or partial-authority of the preexisting Trojan-war lore, some of which likely existed in song-cycles never written out, and others of which definitely existed in six or so writings lost and thus only handed-down to us in summary form (these writings are often referred to as the “Cycle”—we have fragments, and we have summaries from Proclus, a scholar of late-antiquity). In any case, Knox provides the best introduction I know of to these fundamental issues. He then for each epic provides a an interpretive essay which ranges over the entire work but concentrates on a handful of central subjects, and always with good judgment.
By the way, I can report from the experience of our book group, that it works well-enough to tackle the Odyssey without having first read the Iliad. Ideally, you would read them in proper order, but if you decided, as most of our high school curriculums which teach Homer do, to read the Odyssey apart, you would not be totally at sea.1
Luc Ferry
Before the Christian “Benedict-Option” writer Rod Dreher gave us a book about How Dante Can Save Your Life, the be-content-with-your-atheism and philosophy-for-everyman French writer Luc Ferry gave us The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life. A wise scholarly friend (and a fellow Christian) once recommended Ferry’s work to me, especially Man-Made God: The Meaning of Life and What Is the Good Life? I’ve not looked much into those, more than to say they seem beneficially Aristotle-influenced, but I have read most of Ferry’s myth-book. Its main attraction is its retelling of the major Greek myths in a compelling and philosophy-attuned manner, and its offering a few overall theories about what they meant for the thoughtful Greek, as well as what they might mean for the (presumed to be post-Christian) thoughtful modern. It has around fifty Odyssey-focused pages, though the whole of it is naturally more about Hesiodic than Homeric material, and it begins by insisting on the centrality of one incident, Odysseus’s refusing the nymph-goddess Calypso’s offer of everlasting life, if he agrees to go on being her lover and companion at her island paradise:
The proposition that Calypso dangles before Odysseus is irresistible, as is she herself, as is her island—an unprecedented offer for any mortal. To all of which, Odysseus remains unmoved. As unhappy as ever, he declines the goddess’ uniquely tempting proposition. Let us be quite clear: the refusal is of epochal significance. It contains in nucleo what is undoubtedly the most powerful and profound lesson of Greek mythology, which will be subsequently adopted by Greek philosophy for its purposes, and which can be summarized as follows: the ultimate end of human existence is not, as the Christians (further down the line) would come to believe, to secure eternal salvation by all available means, including the most morally submissive and tedious, to obtain immortality. [Yes, that statement is grossly inaccurate, but bear with him…] …Following Odysseus, we must learn to prefer a condition of mortality in accord with cosmic dispensation, as against an immortal life doomed to…“hubris”: the immoderation that estranges us from reconciliation to, and acceptance of, the world as it is…
Obviously, I disagree with Ferry about Christianity and about what its afterlife promise does to our living of this life. Additionally, I’m not sure his various theories, such as this one, correctly capture the main lessons Homer thought he was imparting to his best readers, let alone those which Hesiod and other mythographers thought they were; but since some subtle Homeric lessons on attributes of the gods which would be undesirable for humans to have are widely agreed to be present in both epics, Ferry’s interpretation here has located one of the issues we need to discuss.
More importantly, he vindicates his claim that philosophic or proto-philosophic ideas are more generally present in the myths. In several of his theories, he seems to follow, or dialogue with, certain leads of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, especially the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, but I am obliged to report that he has also edited a book titled Why We Are Not Nietzscheans. He is likely even more influenced by the classicist Jean-Pierre Vernant, whose books he treasures, but in any case, he is helpful at highlighting how certain obstacles faced by Odysseus in his story are “philosophically charged.”
I do find Ferry less careful and observant in places than Brann, Clay, or Nagy, however. Perhaps then, his book is the best one—after Plato’s Republic!--for making a case for the reading of Homer by the philosophically minded; but once you’ve commenced that study, you inevitably begin consult the Homerists themselves. In any case, The Wisdom of the Myths is on my mind because I’m looking forward to revisiting it this fall as our book-club reads Hesiod, Aeschylus, Plato, and Shelley on the various versions of the Prometheus story.
One last mythology-focused point--Ferry says that among the stories he told his children, he never saw them light up so much as with the Greek myths. An interesting observation, that lines up with certain teachings of Jordan Peterson (and our Titus!) about the abiding necessity of hero-stories, and which demands a further book recommendation, as I know that as my group tackles Hesiod, I’ll also be delving again into this gem from the children’s literature library, as I did when we began the Odyssey:
Magnificent illustrations, and retellings:
I can give you one substitute-teacher tip about it: if you read to fifth-graders the section about Cronos eating his immortal children and then being tricked into vomiting them up, you might get some student concerns voiced to the vice-principal that you were putting inappropriate material before them!
Gregory Nagy
The works here from Ferry and Knox are more introductory, but The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry is a work Nagy wrote with his fellow Homerists in mind, though it is accessible enough.
Nagy has gained acclaim from more intermediate-level and youtube-attuned students for his audio-course (you can audit it) that accompanies his more-recent book The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Here is an excellent 5-minute introductory video to that course. Nagy is a talented Harvard prof, who works with Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, and so we also have a ton of course-supplemental discussion videos, the “CHS Dialogues with Gregory Nagy” series on youtube. These are off-the-cuff, with all the meandering and repetition that can come with that, but they give you a pretty good idea of Nagy’s strengths.
Some readers of or listeners to Nagy might feel he does not frame his discourses or drive home his main points home in as clear a fashion as they might wish, but that is not necessarily a weakness. Like many of the ancients, Nagy just assumes that most every angle upon and detail relevant to the works of Homer is worth exploring, at the very least for the sake of eliminating one interpretive possibility. He’s a scholar whose interests naturally lead him to swim about in his vast erudition, making this connection and that as he goes, and it at times feels, even in his book, that you’re simply along for the ride—you have to be comfortable with gleaning what you can in such a situation.
Nagy has at least one blind-spot in knowledge and judgment: he says in a couple of videos that Plato regards Achilles as the better heroic model than Odysseus, working off of certain comments in the Apology especially, and stressing the moral discomfort he assumes Plato would have with Odysseus’s general trickery, and his particular share of responsibility for Ajax’s death, but essentially ignoring the surface-level and more subtle clues in two sections of the Republic which allude to or mention Odysseus, and apparently unaware of the scholarship of Allan Bloom (his “interpretive essay” attached to his translation) and Jacob Howland that highlights these, which indicate that the opposite is the case.
It’s difficult to summarize all that Nagy is up to in Best of the Achaeans, which deals about equally with the Odyssey and Iliad, but in addition to the main theme, Nagy is very strong on 1) name- and word- analysis (the most exciting part of the book for those of us less-familiar with Homeric Greek might be the index of terms!), 2) on how and when to bring-in possible interpretive insights from related texts, such as those of Hesiod, Pindar, and the Cycle, 3) on how to interpret with a respect for something like authorial intent if you are assuming—as he tends to—a more collective-authorship, and 4) how not overdo the interpretive implications of the Parry and co. findings on epithets and mnemonic devices.
As for the main theme, so important to thinking about Odysseus as one model for heroism among others, and thus a theme also dwelt upon by Brann and Clay, I’ll leave you with these two key tastes:
…the quarrel of Achilles and Odysseus is an alternative traditional theme that would have been suitable for testing the heroic worth of Achilles in a different dimension. Whereas the conflict of Achilles and Agamemnon contrasts martial with social superiority, the conflict between Achilles and Odysseus is on a different axis of opposition, bie ‘might’ against metis ‘artifice.’ (48)
To sum up: unlike Achilles, who won kleos [“glory, as conferred by poetry’] but lost nostos [‘homecoming’], Odysseus is a double winner. He has won both… (39)
In many courses which include the Iliad, professors permit first-time students to skip books IV, V, VII, X-XIII, in part or in whole. These are books which concentrate on battle details, and often ones surrounding the “second-line” set of heroes like Ajax or Diomedes. This would be very much less than ideal, but understandable if you’re in a pinch for time—just don’t listen to anyone who suggests you might also skip XXIII, the penultimate book, as it has the Funeral Games section, the only place where we get an extended view of Achilles when he’s not anger-driven.
By contrast, I’ve seldom seen a syllabus where whole books of the Odyssey are omitted—teachers tend either to excerpt one or two distinct episodes, or to do the whole book. It’s even more of an all-parts-relying-on-the-others work than the Iliad.
Who can join this book club?
Was very fortunate to have Ms. Brann as my Freshman seminar tutor at SJC. Amazing woman.