The Homeric Odyssey - The Mary Flexner Lectures Delivered at Bryn Mawr College Pennsylvania

195 Pages·1955·3.009 MB·English

by  Denys Page

THE
HOMERIC ODYSSEY

THE
HOMERIC ODYSSEY
The Mary Flexner Lectures
delivered at Bryn Mawr College
Pennsylvania
BY
DENYS PAGE, F.B.A.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK
AND FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE
CAMBRIDGE
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1955
Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C. 4
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI CAPE TOWN IBADAN
Geoffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
Tuts book represents substantially the text of the Mary Flexner
Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in February and March
1954, divested only of a few improvisations and hilarities and
amplified only by a number of paragraphs giving detail for which
neither the time was sufficient nor the occasion suitable.
My audience included such connoisseurs of Homeric poetry as
Rhys Carpenter and Richmond Lattimore: I must make it very
clear from the start that I was addressing myself not to them but
to their students. It was my intention to provide a general intro-
duction to the problems which present themselves in the study of
the composition of the Odyssey: to write (in short) the kind of
book which I myself as an undergraduate should have found
interesting and useful. The subject has been so much neglected
in Great Britain and the United States that the student must
return to D. B. Monro’s Appendix to his edition of the Odyssey,
published in 1901, to discover (in any but a foreign tongue) many
of the most elementary facts.
At the beginning it seemed to me that, after taking into account
the Odyssean researches of a long and distinguished line of pro-
fessional scholars, it was possible to separate a little grain from a
great deal of chaff and to discern amid the grain a few pieces of
much greater size and higher quality than the rest. There are
certain arguments, touching especially the Journey of Tele-
machus, the Visit to the Underworld, the last 634 lines of the
poem, and a few other passages, which appeared on investigation
to constitute a strong prima facie case against unity of authorship
for the Odyssey. There was a great deal more to say; but most of
it could easily be postponed until the primary questions had
been answered. If the testimony of these parts of the poem does
not convince, it is very improbable that the secondary witnesses
will be heard with favour, however numerous and eloquent they
may be.
It proved very difficult to confine myself within the limits of
vi PREFACE
six lectures and to remember that I was not addressing an audi-
ence devoted to the study of the Homeric Question to the exclu-
sion of all other interests. It was my principal object to state
facts clearly and briefly in a sternly practical manner, reporting
what is immediately given by the text of the Odyssey, and contri-
buting little of my own except (occasionally) a glitter of rhetoric
round the fringes of the self-evident. The farther I progressed,
the harder I found it to be brief without being superficial, to be
lucid without over-simplifying, to be persuasive without being
unduly partial; and I confess that where the claims of the spoken
and the written word were at variance, the former constantly
prevailed.
I express most cordial gratitude to the President and Faculty
of Bryn Mawr College for their abundant hospitality and great
personal kindness; to Mr. G. S. Kirk, of Trinity Hall, who read
a first draft of these lectures and made numerous important
observations, almost all of which persuaded me; to Mr.
W. A. Camps, of Pembroke College, who read and further
improved the typescript after delivery of the lectures, when it was
too late to make changes of substance; and, finally, to my wife,
who typed the whole book and read the proofs.
D. L. P.
TRINITY GOLLEGE
CAMBRIDGE
CONTENTS
ODYSSEUS AND POLYPHEMUS I
. ODYSSEUS AND THE UNDERWORLD οἱ
. THE BEGINNING OF THE ODYSSEY 52
THE MIDDLE OF THE ODYSSEY 82
THE END OF THE ODYSSEY ΙΟΙ
THE METHOD, TIME, AND PLACE
VI.
OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE
ODYSSEY 137
APPENDIX 165
INDEXES 183

I
ODYSSEUS AND POLYPHEMUS
THE story told in the Odyssey is a popular folk-tale of a type
which recurs in different places at different times.! The hero has
been many years away from home; his wife is surrounded by
impatient suitors; his son has gone abroad in search of him;
after many adventures he returns home in disguise, rescues his
wife at the eleventh hour, kills her suitors, and proves by means
of trials and tokens that he is what he claims to be, hcr husband.
That, in a few words, is the main theme of the Odyssey, one of
the two Epic poems which emerged from the Dark Ages into the
dawn of Greek history, bringing with it no reliable record of the
period of time within which it was composed ; or of the manner
of its composition—whether oral or written, whether by a single
author or by several—or of the place or places where it was created.
The folk-tale adopted as the theme of the Odyssey has been
detached from its natural setting and transferred to a person
believed to be historical, Odysseus. It is therefore largely adapted
to the world in which we live: in the background is the Trojan
War, which the poet, if he spoke in such terms, would call the
most important of all historical events ; some of the places (espe-
cially Ithaca and its neighbouring islands; Pylos and Sparta) are
real places ; and much of the detail of social, domestic, and econo-
mic life correspond to what the earliest audiences found familiar
or at least credible. But this real world is hazy on its horizon:
there is no clear division between it and a very different world,
a kind of fairyland where magic and mumbo-jumbo abound, a
world of witches and ogres, of miraculous sea voyages, of trans-
formations with a fairy wand.
Now the treatment of the folk-tale in the Odyssey is curiously
complex. Into the framework of the main theme, the folk-tale of
the Returning Hero, are fitted certain other folk-tales which,
before their inclusion in the story of Odysseus, had nothing
6772 B
2 ODYSSEUS AND POLYPHEMUS
whatever to do with that theme. The stories of Circe and of
Polyphemus, for example, are themselves (like the story of the
Returning Hero) Weltmdrchen, universal folk-tales, independent
of each other and of the main theme of the Odyssey.
Still more remarkable, under this heading, is the transference
to Odysseus of a whole cycle of Adventures which had hitherto
belonged not to a more or less unidentified hero of folk-tale but
to a semi-legendary person; adventures which were not merely
the subject of common talk but actually fixed and glorified in an
Epic poem familiar to the audience of the Odyssey.—I mean the
Argonautic adventures recounted in the Tenth and Twelfth
Books.?
When Odysseus left the island of Aeolus he was in the Far
West of the world: quite suddenly (and without warning to the
audience) he finds himself in the Far East,3 consorting with
persons whose only place in legend is the story of Jason and the
Argonauts. Circe is sister of Aeetes, the guardian of the Golden
Fleece; she lives on the remotest eastern verges of the world
(12. 1 ff.), as far from Odysseus’ route as possible. The Wandering
Rocks belong only to the story of the Argonauts; they too were in
that same region, the Black Sea. The Laestrygones have a fountain
called Artakia: that is to say, they live at (or near) Cyzicus, in
the Propontis, where the fountain of that name was, and still
is, to be found. On the island of Thrinakia the companions of
Odysseus kill the sacred cattle—of what god ἢ Of Helios, the Sun,
so important in the story of the Golden Fleece, quite foreign to
the story of Odysseus; the arch-enemy in our poem was hitherto
Poseidon, and will be again, so soon as we have finished with
these Argonauts in disguise. The Sirens too were at home in the
story of Jason long before they transferred their affections to
Odysseus. In short the poet has taken a large part of the story of
Jason and the Argonauts and transferred it bodily to Odysseus.
And this he has done with the most disarming candour: when he
comes to the Wandering Rocks he reminds his audience expressly
(12. 69 ff.) that these belong to the story of the vessel Argo and its
hero Jason, a tale (he says) which everybody knows, Apyw πᾶσι
μέλουσα.4