us, at the very moment we set out upon what might look like a vast ocean of words, that this expanse is not a “formless void” (like the one with which another great story, Genesis, begins) but a route, a path that will take us someplace worth going.
“Someplace worth going” is a good way to summarize the great preoccupation of the Odyssey, which in certain ways is a sequel to the Iliad. A poem of twelve thousand one hundred and ten lines, it takes as its subject the convoluted and adventure-filled return home of one of the Greeks who took part in the war against Troy. This particular Greek is Odysseus, the ruler of a small island kingdom called Ithaca; he is a trickster about whose ruses and ploys, some successful, others not, the Greeks loved to tell tales. One of the most popular of these legends concerns the run-up to the Trojan War. We are told that when the Greeks came asking Odysseus to join their coalition in the war against Troy, Odysseus—“a clever man,” as an ancient commentator on the Odyssey drily observed, “who perceived how vast the conflict would be”—tried to avoid conscription by pretending to be crazy: in the presence of the Greek scout he yoked an ass and an ox together and began to plow salt into his fields. Familiar with his reputation, the scout took Telemachus, Odysseus’ infant son, and placed the baby on the soil in front of the plow; when Odysseus swerved to avoid his child, the scout concluded that he couldn’t be all that crazy, and took him away to the war.
The conflict was indeed vast—but so are Odysseus’ trials during his protracted homeward voyage. For he is continually harassed and delayed, shipwrecked and castaway, by the machinations of the angry sea god, Poseidon, whom Odysseus has offended (for reasons we learn later in the poem) and whom the hero will learn to appease only after he finally gets home. Odysseus’ far-flung wanderings over ten years as he struggles to return to his wife, Penelope, and their son—to get back to his family and home—stand in stark contrast to the immobility of the Greeks as they sat before the walls of Troy during the ten years of their war. So, too, does the mutual devotion of the couple at the heart of the Odyssey—Odysseus, whose allegiance to the wife he hasn’t seen in twenty years withstands the seductive attentions of various goddesses and nymphs whom he encounters on his way home, and Penelope, who remains true to him in the face of the aggressive attentions of the Suitors, the dozens of young men who have taken up residence in her palace, intent on marrying her—stand in sharply ironic contrast to the adulterous affair between Paris and Helen that was the cause of the war in the first place: the arkhê kakôn.
Most classicists agree that the proem of the Odyssey consists of its first ten lines:
A man—track his tale for me, Muse, the twisty one who
wandered widely, once he’d sacked Troy’s holy citadel;
he saw the cities of many men and knew their minds,
and suffered deeply in his soul upon the sea
try as he might to protect his life and the day of his men’s return;
but he could not save his men, although he longed to;
for they perished through their wanton recklessness,
fools who ate of the cattle of Hyperion,
the Sun; and so they lost the day of their return.
From some point or another, Daughter of Zeus, tell us the tale.
It is an odd way to begin. After modestly introducing his subject as, simply, “a man”—Odysseus’ name isn’t mentioned—the poet seems to wander away from this “man” to other men: that is, the men whom he had commanded and who, this proem tells us, died through their own recklessness. Just as the man himself had widely wandered, so does the proem.
Perhaps inevitably, in the case of this meandering work about a meandering and unexpectedly prolonged homecoming, some scholars have argued that the proem of the Odyssey itself strays: that, in fact, it runs for the first twenty-one lines of the poem. The eleven additional lines describe the circumstances in which Odysseus’ divine patroness, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, urges her father, Zeus, king of the gods, to bring Odysseus home at last despite the implacable opposition of the enraged sea god:
… tell us the tale.
Now all the others—those who’d fled steep death—
were home at last, safe from war and sea;
but he alone, yearning for home and wife,
was detained—by the Lady Calypso, most heavenly of goddesses,
in her hollow caves: she longed to marry him.
But then the time came in the course of the whirling years
when the gods devised a way to bring him home
to Ithaca; but even there he was hardly free of woe,
even when he was back among his people. All the gods felt pity
for him except Poseidon, who raged hotly against
Odysseus, that godlike man, until he reached his homeland.
And so, again very much like Odysseus, the proem not only wanders, but may wander on longer than it had intended to.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are the most famous epics in the Western tradition, but they are far from being the only ones to come down to us from Greek and Roman days. The landscape of classical Greek and Roman literature, from the two Homeric poems in the eighth century B.C. to Christian verse epics composed in the fifth century A.D., was dotted with epic poems, which reared up from those landscapes much the way that Troy must have risen from its smooth plain above the sea, seemingly unassailable and permanent. Even when the poems themselves were lost over the millennia, as many of them were, the proems often survived, precisely because of their gripping succinctness.
A proem could memorialize other poems. Take, for example, the proem of Virgil’s Aeneid, which knowingly alludes to the opening lines of both the Iliad and Odyssey:
Wars and a man I sing: the first who came
from Troy to Italy and to Latium’s shores,
exiled by Fate: tossed about on land and sea
by the violence of the gods above, all because
of the ever-wakeful wrath of savage Juno;
he suffered greatly too in war, so he could found
his city and bring his gods to Latium, whence arose
the Latin people, the Alban fathers, and the walls of lofty Rome.
The Aeneid revisits the world of Homer’s poems but radically shifts their point of view to that of the losers: it retails the adventures of Aeneas, one of the few Trojans to survive the Greek obliteration of Troy. After escaping the burning wreckage
