The Difficult Art of Being Human: Reflections on Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey is a masterpiece of Western literature. Even those who never read any of it know what it’s all about. At the end of the ten-year-long Trojan war the Greek hero Odysseus travels ten more years before finally returning to his country, the tiny but prosperous island of Ithaka. Along the way, he must face the Cyclops Polyphemos, who devours some of his companions but is eventually blinded by him with a beam; he must overcome the tricks of the goddess Circe, who turns some other companions of his into pigs; he must visit the underworld, resist the lure of the deadly song of the Sirens, and cross the terrible straits between Skylla and Charybdis. Having lost all his ships and companions, he gets stuck with the nymph Kalypso on the island of Ogygia; after seven years of that, with the gods’ help, he builds a raft and reaches first the island of Scheria, the land of the Phaiakians, and then Ithaka. But, once he gets there, he finds his house invaded by a bunch of arrogant men who compete for marrying his wife Penelope and in the meantime feast at his expense, eating up his property. Joining forces with his son Telemachos and a couple of faithful servants, he kills off the suitors and gets reunited with his wife and his people. That, as everyone knows, even those who never read any of it, is what the Odyssey is all about.

Or is it? If you do read the Odyssey, you are in for a few surprises. Beginning with a minor one, though Odysseus’ travels are supposed to last ten years, the action of the poem only lasts a little over a month, and indeed most of it takes place in a few days. When the Odyssey begins, Odysseus has already been with Kalypso seven years, and is about to leave her. It takes him twenty days on the raft and off it (after a powerful storm destroys it) to reach Scheria, but the poem dispatches them in a few lines. Then, by the time he’s in Scheria, things start happening very quickly, just as the poem starts giving an extremely detailed account of each and every move. Odysseus spends a couple of days there, and during the second night he tells King Alkinoös about his ten-year travels; on the third day he’s off to Ithaka on a Phaiakian ship and, because the Phaiakians are so good sailors, it only takes them one day to get him to his destination. Once he’s arrived, it’s less than a week before it’s all over: the suitors massacred, the maidservants who took their side hanged, and Odysseus safely in place as the legitimate king of Ithaka. So, if anyone expected a long poem such as this one—all twenty-four books of it—to leisurely describe ten years of wonderful wanderings, she will have to drastically revise her expectations: when the poem begins, all the wandering is already over, and events are about to follow one another at breakneck speed.

But, you might say, that is only a rhetorical artifice. We all know that it’s far more effective for dramatic purposes to concentrate the action in as little time as possible, and if that requires extensive use of flashbacks, so be it. The movie The Usual Suspects, for example, is shot virtually in real time, with the whole action taking only a couple of hours, but what that action consists of is a detailed narration of events that took place over several weeks. So maybe Homer just wanted to be cute, and instead of telling us of Odysseus’ ten-year odyssey in his own words, he decided to have that story told within the poem by Odysseus himself. Nothing substantially changes, though stylistically the thing may work a lot better, if indeed most of the time is taken over by that narration. Right?

Wrong. Throughout the Odyssey, Homer seems to have only marginal interest in the most exciting, fantastic, or even just active parts of his material. He starts out with four books—one sixth of the whole work (and one of these books is by far the longest of all twenty-four)—in which Odysseus is not even present, but his son Telemachos is; and the subject-matter there is how troubled Telemachos is by the presence of the suitors in his house, and how he eventually decides to go away and ask some older friends of his father’s for news of him. Then Odysseus comes into the picture, gets to Scheria, and for the next four books we follow him as he goes to sleep on a bunch of leaves, is taken to town by the king’s daughter, competes with the Phaiakians in their athletic games, and sits down to dinner with them. When he does, they ask him about himself, and for four more books he tells the story of his travels—which is what everyone knows the Odyssey to be about, except that by now we know better—and even then the proportions are not quite what one would expect: the famous episode of the Sirens only takes thirty-five lines, and the equally famous episode of Skylla and Charybdis twenty-six; whereas the much less known episode where Odysseus’ companions eat Helios’ cattle (but, in anticipation of what is to come, do so after a complex deliberation process) takes one hundred and forty-three lines, and Odysseus’ visit to the land of the dead (including, to keep anticipating, his conversations with some famous ones of them) takes a whole book of six hundred and forty lines. By the end of all this storytelling, in any case, we are only halfway through the poem; the other half Odysseus spends in Ithaka, mostly talking to one person or another. His most impressive feat there he performs when with the help (I said) of only three others he destroys the whole small army of 108 suitors, but that is as quickly as effectively disposed of in about four hundred lines, less than are spent to account for Odysseus’ conversation with his swineherd Eumaios. What’s wrong with Homer? one might wonder. He’s got so much hot stuff in his hands; he could make his poem jampacked with action and thrills of all sorts; so why does he take the long way around? Why all this patient belaboring of meals and baths and talks when there are one-eyed and six-headed monsters to be fought, and horrible storms to be weathered, and arrows and spears to be thrown against powerful, numerous enemies?

To some extent, the wait might simply be a trick designed to make the action more effective. Even extremely forceful—indeed, extremely violent—movies like, say, The Wild Bunch have long scenes when nothing happens, and those help make the forceful, violent outbursts even more striking. If a narration’s every instant were to be frantically active (think Luc Besson), after a while the reader or spectator would simply tune out and no longer be impressed; so it’s necessary to have some ups and downs, if the ups are to be truly exciting. But, however true that might be, it cannot be the whole story. If nineteen of the twenty-four books of the Odyssey are occupied by something other than Odysseus’ travels and the massacre of the suitors, we can’t just think of those nineteen books as fillers: as ways of getting our adrenaline down in order to make the next rush of it more vibrant. There must be something going on in those nineteen books, something important, even something that forces us to take a new look at the five books everyone knows about, the five books most people think are what the Odyssey is all about—or maybe this poem would not be such a masterpiece after all. What could this other something be?

Let me begin with a shocking piece of news. Though most people, again, think that the Odyssey is about Odysseus’ travels, there is not much reason to think, in the poem, that those travels have actually happened. Odysseus tells the Phaiakians about them, of course, and later gives Penelope a brief summary of them, but he also has another fanciful, different story to tell, about his being from Crete and having traveled to Egypt and having followed a Phoenician man to Libya; and he tells that story, too, with various amounts of detail, as many as five times. He tells it to Penelope (so she’s told both stories)—though he does not go as much into it with her as he does with the swineherd. Once he even tries it on the goddess Athene, not recognizing her; but she sees through his lies and calls him “wretch” and “devious” (205).¹ And that is not all: apparently there were at the time all sorts of people going around telling similar stories. Many of them had even landed in Ithaka and tried to convince Penelope that they knew a lot about Odysseus, only to be later proved frauds. So the bottom line is: the main way we know about Odysseus’ travels is from Odysseus himself, but Odysseus might simply be a more successful deceiver than most. Indeed, he does seem to be the kind of person who can easily tell a tall tale whenever that suits him—even improvise it on the spot if needed. Why then should we believe him? Why should we believe anyone, within this general confusion?

But wait, you will say: there are fundamental warranties of truth here. There aren’t just fallible and/or deceitful humans; there are also gods, and gods know how things are, and can and do tell us. Didn’t I just say that Athene scolded Odysseus, when he tried his Cretan nonsense on her? Well, maybe the gods are that way and know the whole truth, but, as far as their providing warranties here, there are two things to consider. First, the gods hardly ever show up in person. When Athene appears to Telemachos, she does so either as old and wise Mentor or as Mentes, leader of the Taphians; when she advises Penelope in a dream, she shows up as an image of Penelope’s own sister Iphtime; with Odysseus, she wears the shape of a young girl, of a lady, or—in the specific case in which she calls him wretch and devious—of a young man. So, in the end, if you are Odysseus or Telemachos or Penelope, how can you know for sure that that particular father figure, or friend, or sister, or lady, or young man, is a god or a goddess? You might believe it to be the case, but as for being certain of it—it’s quite another matter. “[T]he gods do take on all sorts of transformations” (265), says crisply one of the suitors to their leader Antinoös, so you better watch out whom you insult or abuse.

And, if uncertainty about the identity of the gods were not enough, there is also the fact that the gods themselves lie, so they cannot be trusted even when you have established that they are gods. Take Poseidon, the Earthshaker, lord of the sea. When he decides to seduce beautiful Tyro, who is in love with Enipeus, he takes Eunipeus’ form, and only after making love to Tyro does he reveal his true identity. (Read about it at 174.) Or, for an extreme example, consider Proteus, Poseidon’s immortal underling. His word is prophetic, but before he tells you the future, as the hero Menelaos informs Telemachos, he will take all conceivable shapes, and try to scare you off by turning into a lion and a snake and a boar, and only if you refuse to believe any of those shapes and keep holding on to him will he eventually give up and consent to your wishes. In the face of so much variability and deceit, how can we take the gods to be messengers of truth? Shouldn’t we agree with Hephaistos (who should know, being himself a god), who, when Poseidon urges him to ask for Ares’ word, retorts that there is no reason to believe a god’s word, since (as Hephaistos puts it) “[t]he business of wretches is wretched even in guarantee giving” (130)?

But you might still disagree that there is no firm basis here, and think that, if everything else fails, at least we should believe Homer. He, after all, tells us about Odysseus being stuck in Ogygia with Kalypso, and about his reaching Scheria and Ithaka, and refers occasionally to his many other adventures; so we can at least trust him that everything happened the way the story is usually told. And yet, that kind of assurance does not quite work either. For, to begin with, what does Homer know? He’s never met Odysseus—if Odysseus ever existed (more about this shortly). All Homer knows is the stories he’s himself heard, and all he can do is tell them once more. Does he at least believe them? Well, consider this: There are two poets in the Odyssey, and neither seems especially good at divining the truth. The blind Demodokos, at the court of the Phaiakians, sings about Odysseus while Odysseus is before him—or so we are told—without any hint of recognition. As for the other one, Phemios, he will just sing for whoever feeds him. While Odysseus is gone, he sings for the suitors; as soon as Odysseus starts killing them off, he falls on his knees and asks for mercy. All the while, he’s never seen it coming; all he could do was sing. So why should we think that Homer is any better? Of that he judges himself to be any better?

Let’s take stock of the situation. We started out with a clear and conventional picture of the Odyssey, the kind of picture anyone who has never opened and read the poem is likely to have: the Odyssey is about Odysseus’ travels. But, having opened and read some of the poem, we found that only a small portion of it is about that; and, furthermore, that the Odyssey itself doesn’t give us much of a reason for believing that those travels really occurred. What the Odyssey conjures up instead is a world of humans and gods constantly telling each other intricate stories, at best to entertain each other (because the alternative is going to sleep and, as Eumaios puts it, “[t]oo much sleep is only a bore,” 235), at worst in order to fool each other: a world in which you never know whom to trust, or which of the many things anyone says you should trust.

As we go back to the poem and read it with this new picture in mind, we are struck by how many times humans and gods deliberate about the right course of action: how many times a character considers whether to go this way or that, and has a hard time deciding between the two. Once he has landed on Scheria, Odysseus deliberates whether he should sleep on the beach or in the woods, and “[i]n the division of his heart this last way seemed best” (100). A little bit later, when he faces Alkinoös’ daughter Nausikaa, he wonders whether to supplicate her by clasping her knees or speak to her from afar, and “in the division of his heart this way seemed best to him” (106). When he is imprisoned in Polyphemos’ cave, and the monster is asleep, again he carefully reviews his options, and “this [he says] was the plan that seemed best to me” (145). When the god Zeus confronts his brother Poseidon who wants to inflict a sharp penalty on the Phaiakians, he too offers careful advice phrased in much the same way: “Good brother, here is the way it seems to my mind best to do” (202). And Telemachos’ friend Peisistratos ponders how best to see Telemachos off without offending his own father, and Penelope is reported by Telemachos as having a divided heart and pondering two ways, and Phemios the singer wonders whether to hide by Zeus’ altar or implore Odysseus’ mercy. And on and on: when it comes right down to it, the Odyssey might well not be about Odysseus’ travels, but it certainly seems to be about all sorts of people (and gods) trying to make up their minds about something. In fact, even when it comes to those travels, the emphasis seems to be more on the episodes where there is an element of decision involved, or of finding out the truth of the matter—such as (I had suggested) in the visit to the underworld, or in the tantalizing hesitation about whether to eat Helios’ cattle, or in the complicated negotiations with, and undoing of, Polyphemos—rather than on those others that are just portentous and extraordinary.

Suppose we take this line seriously, and think of the Odyssey as an object lesson in how people can tell right from wrong, how they can come to making the right decision. Then it would not be strange that so much of it is spent detailing less Odysseus’ marvelous adventures than the twists and turns of his identification: the tortuous ways he came to be recognized by those who were once dearest and closest to him, but had not seen him for twenty years. For that would be an especially striking case of what the whole thing is about: an especially vivid example of making up one’s mind about something highly uncertain and important—something that matters a lot and about which it is so difficult to see clearly.

The first to recognize Odysseus is his dog Argos, and that is significant. For Argos does not speak or understand the language of humans; so he cannot be fooled by stories, lies have no power over him, his is a simpler and also more truthful world. He simply “perceive[s]” (261) Odysseus—by smell, perhaps—but dies before any of it could transpire to others. Then the old maidservant Eurykleia recognizes her master, but again words have nothing to do with it: as she washes his feet, she sees an old scar, and no tall tale will now be able to persuade her that anyone else could have exactly the same scar. Later Odysseus uses that scar to prove his identity to two other servants, Eumaios and Philoitios, as well as to his father Laertes. With Penelope, he must go a little further: he tells her a story, all right, but one that checks out, since she can compare it with perfectly reliable data. For once Odysseus fashioned their bed out of an olive tree, and no other human being knew about it; so only Odysseus could tell that story. Something similar happens with Laertes: in conjunction with pointing out the scar, Odysseus reminds him of what took place for the two of them long ago—though here no indication is given that no one else was present. So far, then, the moral of all these acts of recognition is that either words had nothing to do with them or, if they did, they were to be trusted only because of some factual evidence they pointed to, some evidence that was not itself a story, not itself words. But this is not all there is to it. For there is one other person Odysseus reveals himself to, one indeed to whom he reveals himself before anyone else, and one who has no data, no memories, because he was an infant when Odysseus left. This other person can go by nothing but words; he must learn what words to trust while knowing that all words can be deceitful. He is Odysseus’ son, Telemachos.

“[A]lways the younger people are careless” (118), Odysseus tells Alkinoös in Scheria, but, by the time Odysseus meets him, Telemachos is no longer careless. He may have been that at the beginning: the poem opens up with an unflattering comparison between him, who watches idly as the suitors dissipate his house and property, and Orestes, who “came of age” (28) and knew how to avenge his father’s death. Then Telemachos must do some growing up too, and do it the hard way: he must travel (!) to foreign countries, by sea and by land, visit powerful kings and hold his own in their presence, face a murderous ambush and emerge unscathed. After so many ordeals, back in his own country, he meets a beggar, who declares to be his father. Is that true? Is that beggar really Odysseus? Maybe, and then, maybe not. When Penelope first speaks to the beggar, she says that no one is left in her household “such as Odysseus was among men—if he ever existed” (290; italics added). When Laertes speaks with the same beggar, he remembers his son and wonders, “did he ever live?” (352; italics added). If his wife and father are puzzled, after so many years, about the reality of their own memories, how can the son be sure, who has no memories at all? As Telemachos himself puts it, early in the poem, “[n]obody really knows his own father” (32); later he will add, speaking of Odysseus, “if ever he lived” (232). The beggar tells him, “No other Odysseus than I will ever come back to you” (245), and after twenty years of waiting it’s hard to think otherwise. But then, does it matter who that beggar is? Despite his rags and his age, he looks enormously strong; and he certainly looks shrewd; and if he says he’s Odysseus he should be a powerful ally in the destruction of the suitors. So the no-longer careless Telemachos embraces him, and makes secret plans with him, and eventually fights besides him, and the suitors are exterminated, and Telemachos has avenged his father, whether or not his father was there. He’s done what Orestes did. He’s come of age.

So, one last time, what is the Odyssey about? If you think it’s about Odysseus’ travels, there are all sorts of things you cannot understand: that Telemachos is the first character we encounter, that the first four books are entirely about him, that the narrative of Odysseus’ travels only takes up a small portion of the poem, and that so much of it is taken up instead by lengthy conversations, through which various people try to make up their minds about what to do and who it is they are really speaking to. All these things become clearer if you think that the Odyssey is about a boy growing up. He had a famous father, powerful and wise and respected by gods and humans alike. But that father left long ago, before the boy could even retain any image of him. He went to war and accomplished many wonderful deeds there; all the boy has left of him, however, are stories, words, and he has learned that all words can be deceitful. So he decides that he cannot sit around waiting for father forever: if father is gone, there are other powerful and wise and respected people to look up to, to model himself against. There is Nestor, and Menelaos, and Mentor, and maybe Mentor is a goddess in disguise and maybe not, but powerful and wise and respected he certainly is. So he does look up to them, and walks in their footsteps, and the thing works. At the beginning he’s totally helpless, so much so that he doesn’t even know how to talk to another—“I have no experience in close discourse” (51), he says. By the end, he can discriminate right from wrong, and proudly say: “I myself notice all these things in my heart and know of them, better and worse alike, but before now I was only an infant.” (276; said to his mother; he will use much the same language with the suitor Ktesippos). In the midst of this process of maturation, he encounters a nameless beggar, one to whom Alkinoös in Scheria had once said that “[n]o one among all the peoples, neither base man nor noble, is altogether nameless” (135) but also one who, when confronted by Polyphemos, had told him that his name was Nobody (in Greek, Oudeís). So Telemachos encounters this Oudeís man, and embraces him, and that embrace turns Oudeís into Odysseus: Telemachos himself does that, and the rest of it is the relentless unfolding of his plan, the final vindication of his decision to call the beggar his father. His decision, yes, because a grown-up will realize that often, in a deceptive, delusive universe of words, truth is what one is ready to take responsibility for, to live with.

That the beggar should really turn out to be Telemachos’ father, that he should really have the scar and know about the bed and the olive tree, sounds to me like one of those happy endings that are often superimposed on Hollywood movies to make sure no one is left wondering. Though, again, here one could still wonder. For I overstated it when I said that no other person knew about the tree and the bed—none other than Odysseus and Penelope, that is. What Penelope in fact says is that the thing was known to three people, the two of them and a maid, and is it totally impossible that such knowledge could have somehow managed to filter through from the maid to countless beggars? Therefore, in the end, all we are left with is a dying dog’s tail wagging, and a scar, and the belief of some old people that no one but Odysseus could have a scar quite like that. Or, better, what we are left with is Telemachos coming of age, and naming his father, and learning to distinguish right from wrong, learning how to make up his mind, how to decide what to do.

“Of all creatures that breathe and walk on the earth there is nothing more helpless than a man is” (273), the beggar says to the suitor Amphinomos, and the main reason for that, to me, is that man—or woman—cannot simply go by instinct, as the dog Argos does: humans live in a universe of words, and must learn to unpack their meaning, and the unpacking is tricky, and it will not just happen to you—it will have to be learned. Telemachos learns it, and the Odyssey is a masterpiece because it details his painstaking and painful learning process: his painstaking and painful mastering of the difficult art of being human. Humans are weaker than many animals, and than many machines; but (so far!) they have been the only creatures who can think, and deliberate, and decide, and because of that of course they can go wrong. Also because of that, however, as Telemachos learned, they can make their future, their lives, truly their own.

Note

¹ All the Odyssey quotes are from Richmond Lattimore’s translation (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

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Ermanno Bencivenga is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of California. The author of seventy books in three languages and one hundred scholarly articles, he was the founding editor of the international philosophy journal Topoi (Springer) for thirty years, as well as of the Topoi Library. Among his books in English are Kant’s Copernican Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); The Discipline of Subjectivity: An Essay on Montaigne (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Logic and Other Nonsense: The Case of Anselm and His God (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); A Theory of Language and Mind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Hegel’s Dialectical Logic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ethics Vindicated: Kant’s Transcendental Legitimation of Moral Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Theories of the Logos (Berlin: Springer, 2017); Understanding Edgar Allan Poe: They Who Dream by Day (Newcastle upon Tyne UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2023).