Sing, O Muse—but of what?
The proem opening of the Odyssey is not an accurate reflection of the epic's narrative. The Muse had her own ideas about what stories should be told.
Invoking the Muse
As you may be aware, the Homeric epics (the Iliad and the Odyssey) begin with the narrator invoking the divine Muse to assist him in telling the story.
See, the poems were rooted in a centuries-long oral tradition of epic stories. With no written record to help storytellers remember the text, they just had to rely on their own memory, aided by the power of spaced repetition. The Iliad and the Odyssey show signs of being built from oral sources that were designed to be easy to remember, with a lot of repetition and regularity and with little aides-memoire sprinkled throughout (one of which gives this blog its name).1 But it’s still no mean feat to recall an entire poem from memory, even allowing for changes and creative misrememberings, and so ancient Greek storytellers would start their poems with a little prayer for memory to a goddess, the divine Muse.
The conceit of these prayers was that the storyteller does not merely ask for assistance in telling the story, but (in humility) asks the Muse to tell the story herself. The storyteller becomes a mere conduit for the Muse, who will speak through them. Here, for example, is how the Iliad begins:
Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath
of Peleus’ son Achilles, cause
of so much suffering for the Greeks, that sent
many strong souls to Hades, making men
a feast for birds and prey for dogs: the plan
of Zeus was moving to its end—beginning
when those two argued first: Lord
Agamemnon and glorious Achilles.[Iliad, trans. Emily Wilson,2 ll. 1–7 of the Greek text.]
This is a pretty perfect précis of the Iliad: the poem is about Achilles getting angry, initially out of an argument he has with Agamemnon, and the consequences of his anger which leads to much death but which is ultimately in accord with Zeus’ plan.
I want now to look at the invocation of the Muse in the other Homeric epic. My argument in this post is that the relationship between the Muse and the storyteller is much less clear in the Odyssey than it is in the Iliad, and that this has crucial implications for how we should read the poem. Here is how the Odyssey starts:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home
He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.
They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.[Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson,3 ll. 1–10 of the Greek text.]
Odysseus (the hero of the Odyssey) was something of a ‘stock character’ in ancient Greece. Stories about him and his exploits were incredibly common, and it would have been obvious that he was the ‘complicated man’ who had ‘wrecked the holy town of Troy’ by dreaming up the infamous Trojan Horse plan. So with this context in mind, we can see that the storyteller is making a very specific set of requests here. To put it in a list, the storyteller asks that the Muse speaks (through him) about:
How Odysseus wandered and was lost;
Where he went and who he met;
The pain he suffered on the sea; and
How he worked to save his life and bring his men back home.
Now, if what you know about the Odyssey is just what you’ve picked up through cultural osmosis, you might think that this is a pretty good précis of the poem, just as the Iliad’s opening is a good précis. If you asked the man on the Clapham omnibus what happens in the Odyssey, I bet you’d get an answer like this:
The Odyssey is about Odysseus, a great hero of the Trojan War, returning home from that war. Cursed by the gods, he sails around the Aegean Sea for a decade, unable to reach his home on Ithaca. He encounters exciting and deadly adventures that he always manages to survive, even though (sadly, despite his best efforts) his crew do not. Among these are escaping the cave of a cyclops, becoming the first human to hear the sirens’ song and live to tell the tale, navigating between the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, and wooing the witch Circe.4
If you told this story, filling in all the gaps, you would fulfil all four requests set out above. And this story has been told many times, from Charles Lamb’s famous Adventures of Ulysses to dozens of modern ‘Greek myths retold’ books.
But this story is not told by the Muse in the Odyssey.
Telling the story
The Odyssey begins, not by telling us about the complicated man, but by telling us about his son Telemachus, who has been growing up on Ithaca with an absent father. After several books following Telemachus around Greece, where he hears many tales from men who fought in the Trojan War, we finally transition to Odysseus’ point of view. He’s stuck on the island of Ogygia, and where he has been for seven years (out of a decade since the end of the Trojan War). Whatever ‘wanderings’ and adventures led to the death of his crew are long over by the time the poem catches up to him.
In short order, divine intervention (from the god Hermes) gets Odysseus off Ogygia and brings him to a feast being held by Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians. At the feast, there is an athletic competition, and a great lyric poet performs moving and emotional songs of the Trojan War that bring Odysseus (a veteran of that war) to tears. When Alcinous notices this, he asks Odysseus who he is.
The next line, the first line of book nine, is (very crudely translated) ‘polymētis Odysseus answered in his turn’. The meaning of ‘polymētis’ could be the subject of a whole book—has been the subject of a whole book—but it means something like ‘tricksy’, ‘cunning’, ‘strategic’. It’s a common adjective used to describe Odysseus, but in the context it conveys to the reader or listener that he is not just going to give Alcinous a straight answer. And indeed, he doesn’t: while he does eventually give Alcinous his name, he does so in the course of launching into a very long story.
Robert Fagles renders the line as ‘Odysseus, the great teller of tales, launched out on his story’. This gets at one aspect of Odysseus’ character: his position as a storyteller, a spinner of great yarns, reflected in the praise he subsequently showers on the lyric bard. But I prefer Emily Wilson’s translation, even though she bends the meaning of polymētis: ‘Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies, answered’. Her unliteral translation here is justified, I think, in light of the character’s introduction of himself a few lines later: he tells Alcinous that he is Odysseus, known by all men for his deceptions (his doloi). The obvious reference is to Odysseus’ war-winning deception, the Trojan Horse. But the line reveals a lot more than that about the man, his character, and his reputation: not just a storyteller, but a deceiver.
So we have Odysseus, at a grand feast, ‘handed the mic’ to follow an excellent storyteller. He introduces himself (and is described by the narrator) as a teller of tall tales and a trickster, perhaps even a habitual liar; he praises how great it is to hear a good yarn; and then he launches into the story of his wanderings.
It is only here that we hear of the sirens, the cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the lotus eaters, communing with the dead, the sun god’s cattle, everything that our culture has internalised as ‘the Odyssey’. These stories are not the Odyssey; they appear in the Odyssey as a tale the main character tells at one point. And, as many readers down the millennia have realised, Odysseus’ storytelling (especially the cyclops story) contains many clues that he is an unreliable narrator of his own adventures.
Subsequently, the poem follows Odysseus as he returns very quickly, with Alcinous’ help, to his home of Ithaca. A full half of the epic (twelve out of twenty-four books) is set on Ithaca, as Odysseus takes political control of his home island in a brutal fashion. All in all, Odysseus’ wanderings are related only indirectly, and make up only a small sliver of the epic.
All of this is familiar enough to readers of the poem. But the conclusion that must be drawn is this: the Muse does not fulfil the requests made of her by the storyteller at the beginning. The Odyssey does not tell of how Odysseus wandered, or was lost; where he went and who he met during that time; the pain he suffered on the sea as he wandered; or how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. The epic takes place after all of these events, which are related only briefly and indirectly, and with context clues that positively scream ‘this information is unreliable!’. Most of the poem is taken up with completely different events.
In short: at the beginning of the poem, the storyteller makes specific requests of the Muse; and the Muse refuses them. Through her divine inspiration she causes the storyteller to remember, not Odysseus’ wanderings leading up to exile on Ogygia, but his rapid conquest of Ithaca after he manages to escape exile. This latter story of return and reconquest, not the tale of wandering adventure, is the Odyssey.
The poet’s authority
Why would the Muse leave the storyteller’s prayers unanswered? Or rather: why agree to speak through the storyteller at all, if she is not going to speak about what he has asked for?
It is here that I think the epic’s very first line becomes exceptionally important, more important even than it is commonly reckoned. The first five words of the poem are ‘andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon’: tell me about a man who is polytropon, complicated or multifaceted or (literally) ‘of many turns’. And the Muse certainly answers this request.
The Odyssey contains one of the most compelling and complicated portraits of a hero in all of literature. Odysseus is by turns charming and brutal, strategic and intuitive; above all, he is a chancer. But the way the Muse creates this portrayal is shifting the focus away from the stories of Odysseus’ heroics that would have been familiar to an ancient Greek audience, the stories of his wartime exploits and Aegean wanderings. These stories, the Muse implies, give you a distorted perspective of Odysseus and his character.
Indeed, more than just implying this, the Muse explicitly shows it. The Odyssey contains a character whose perspective of Odysseus comes from hearing of his wartime heroics: the anxious and childish Telemachus, in awe of the father he has never met, travelling around Greece hearing tales of Odysseus’ exploits from those who fought alongside him. And it also contains a character whose perspective of Odysseus comes from hearing of his wanderings after the war: the overly trusting and credulous Alcinous, taken in by tall tales, letting Odysseus take advantage of his hospitality.
In the characters of Alcinous and Telemachus, the Muse is implicitly rebuking the poem’s ancient Greek audience, denigrating their assumptions about this ‘complicated man’ as childish or credulous or both. The picture of Odysseus that the Muse leaves the audience with at the end of the epic is very far from the perspective Telemachus has at the end of book four, or that Alcinous has at the start of book thirteen. It’s simultaneously darker, more brutal, and more violent (as exemplified by Odysseus’ mass slaughter of the slave women) and more charming, more charismatic, even sexier (as exemplified by his flirtatious interactions with Nausicaä and Athena).5 It is a portrayal that is complicated and multifaceted—that has ‘many turns’—and is justly regarded as one of the great character portrayals of world literature.
This is to say that the Muse does fulfil one of the storyteller’s requests, his primary request, expressed in the very first line spoken: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But to do so, she has to ignore all his other requests, which already assume too much about the ‘complicated man’. The Muse knows Odysseus better than ancient Greeks raised on tall tales; so she ignores what they want (or think they want), and tells a different story.
Of course, there was never actually a divine Muse. These creative choices were human decisions made by Homer (whoever he was)6 in the process of combining oral sources into an epic poem, not the result of divine inspiration. And there was no Odysseus, either: he’s a mythical character, not a historical figure, and the more ‘complicated’ portrayal of him in the Odyssey is neither more accurate nor more inaccurate than ‘simpler’ perspectives—there is no historical truth to be accurate to.
But Homer deploys the idea of a divine Muse telling a story about a real man to great effect. He repurposes the device from its original oral-storytelling context, and uses it to abjure creative responsibility for his revisionism. He portrays himself as just like the audience, wanting to hear stories about Odysseus’ fantastical adventures. That’s what he asked the Muse for, but the Muse had other ideas; and who is he to argue with a goddess?
More than this, Homer does not offer a bald up-front statement of revisionist intent—the Muse never just declares, ‘no, I will tell a different story.’ Instead, he works to give the effect of a slow, drip-fed revelation of the truth about Odysseus, given to the audience not by Homer but by the gods themselves. This effect can only work to the extent that the audience is willing to go along with it, suspend their disbelief in the poet’s words. But if it works, it allows the poet to do more than offer ‘a different perspective’ on a story: it imbues their version of the story with authority, transforming their perspective into the ‘true’ perspective.
The central irony
Yet at the same time as Homer is claiming true authority as a storyteller, he is relating a narrative in which the primary storyteller is, connectedly, a wily and strategic liar who takes advantage of those around him. The Odyssey is (among other things) about how people get taken in by good stories, and how those stories shape their assumptions in ways they don’t even realise, with sometimes-dangerous effects.
This combination, the authority of storytelling and the untrustworthiness of storytelling, runs through the Odyssey as one of its central ironies. And so it is fitting that, while the epic’s proem is not an accurate précis of its narrative, it is an accurate précis of this thematic conflict.
Before the narrator has finished invoking the Muse, before the prayer has been completed, he has already begun to tell the story. Immediately after asking the Muse to tell him ‘how [Odysseus] worked / to save his life and bring his men back home’, the narrator starts to tell the subsequent bit of the story: ‘He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died. / They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god / kept them from home.’ The narrator has not even finished praying for memory, and he is already running on ahead of himself—with the impious assumption that he does not need the Muse to remind him of this bit of the story.
Even in the very moment that Homer is claiming divine authority for his narrator’s story, he is also surreptitiously showing us that storytellers frequently exceed what authority they have, running on ahead with a good tale regardless. The Odyssey might not fulfil the explicit requests that the narrator made in his prayer. But it is a perfect response to that prayer nonetheless, building on the irony that the narrator inadvertently created as he prayed. The Muse knew what she was doing.
For the duration of the election campaign I have been advised to include this little notice at the bottom of my posts, in case they are officially considered ‘election materials’. I have no intention of turning this blog into a campaigning tool, don’t worry, this is just for legal purposes.
Promoted on behalf of P McLaughlin (Scottish Liberal Democrats), 4 Clifton Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 5DR.
The phrase ‘rhododaktylos Ēōs’, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, appears throughout the Odyssey at the start of every new day, to create a regular structure. It’s also, in my humble opinion, one of the most beautiful images in literature, hence why I have appropriated it.
This is not from Wilson’s published translation of the Iliad; this is an earlier partial translation she did just of these lines, for the endmatter of the Norton Critical Edition of her translation of the Odyssey. See also note 3.
This is not the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey I originally read? The ‘popular’, ‘market’ version of her translation has some quite noticeable differences to the version I quote from in the piece, which is from the Wilson-edited Norton Critical Edition of the Odyssey. I mean, fundamentally they are the same translation, changes are limited to a few lines per book—but still.
Anyone who has any insight into the differences between these versions of the text, I would be grateful if you could enlighten me, as the Norton Critical Edition frontmatter seemingly does not acknowledge these differences.
Probably you’d get a much less detailed answer, with much more umming and ahhing and ‘oh I’m not quite sure’, but you get what I mean.
That his character comes out most strongly in his interactions with female characters is not irrelevant to the fact that feminist readings of the Odyssey are incredibly productive and interesting. But going more into this is beyond the scope of this post.
Or indeed, whoever they were.