The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Homer · an epic poem in twenty-four books · 12,107 lines of Greek hexameter · in the Greek of Murray’s text, with Murray’s prose translation (1919) for sense and Pope’s verse translation (1725–26) for quotation
Mode
Epic of return; sea tale, household drama and recognition play in one plot
Mythos
Nostos and recognition; the disguised king, the son in search of the father, the descent to the dead, the bow only the lord can string
Phase
The return in the twentieth year; the wanderings told by the wanderer inside it, two plots joined in the swineherd’s hut
Presentation
Poem; twenty-four books, 12,107 lines of hexameter in Murray’s text, nearly a fifth of them repeated verbatim within it
Register
From the Cyclops’ cave to the swineherd’s hut; two-thirds speech, and the four books of wonders in the hero’s own voice
Scale
One man, one house, the sea between, twenty years
Governing Proposition
A man twenty years from home comes back unknown to a house that has stopped expecting him, and must be known again by each of its people in turn, each by a sign that person can trust. The wager of the poem is that a man is who his own people can recognise: the hero who refused a goddess’s offer of deathlessness is proved king by a bed that no one alive has seen but his wife, himself and one servant.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The poem’s first word is andra, “man”, and it does not give his name until the twenty-first line. What the opening does name is a law. The companions perished, it says, by their own atasthaliēisin, Murray’s “blind folly” (I.7). When Zeus opens the council of the gods he uses the same word for all mortals: they blame the gods for their evils, but have sorrows beyond their lot by their own folly (I.32–34). The word comes back at the end, said twice of the suitors in the hall where they die (XXII.317, 416). The poem states its justice before it shows its hero.
The first four books are a house without its master, which the suitors eat bare. A bard sings them the return of the Greeks from Troy, and when Penelope begs him to stop, Telemachus defends the song: “For novel lays attract our ravish’d ears” (I.351–352). Over one dinner Helen and Menelaus tell two tales of Odysseus at Troy that cannot both be true. In hers he comes into the city disguised as a beggar, and she alone knows him, bathes him and keeps his secret (IV.244–256). It is the poem’s second half told in small, by a woman, before the hero has appeared.
The narrator first shows him at the start of the fifth book, after 2,302 lines, nearly a fifth of the poem: sitting on Calypso’s shore, weeping, looking out over the sea (V.81–84). The goddess offers to make him deathless if he stays (V.203–213). He answers that his wife is less than she in beauty and stature, and that he longs all the same to go home (V.215–220). Wrecked on the way, he comes ashore and buries himself in fallen leaves as a man on a lonely farm keeps his fire alive: “In embers heap’d, preserves the seeds of fire” (V.488–491). The thicket that shelters him is described in the lines the poem will use for the thicket of the boar that gave him his scar (V.478–483, XIX.440–443).
Movement II
Among the Phaeacians a bard sings of Troy twice, and the poem frames both songs with the same lines: the bard sang, Odysseus wept, and Alcinous alone noticed (VIII.83, 93–95; 521, 532–534). The second song is of his own victory. He weeps at it like a woman who has seen her husband fall before his city and is driven off by spears: “A widow, and a slave on foreign shores” (VIII.523–531). The victor is compared to his victim. Then, a third of the way through the poem, he gives his name:
eim’ Odyseus Laertiadēs, hos pasi doloisin / anthrōpoisi melō
“I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, who am known among men for all manner of wiles” (IX.19–20). His fame rests on craft, not force.
Then he tells the story himself, four books in his own voice. In the Cyclops’ cave the name is the weapon. He tells the giant “Noman is my name” (IX.366), and when the blinded Cyclops cries out that Noman is killing him, his neighbours answer that if no one, mē tis, is harming him he must be ill; Odysseus laughs that his name and his cunning, mētis, had deceived them (IX.405–414). Leaving, he shouts his true name, and the Cyclops prays to Poseidon. In the land of the dead Tiresias repeats the curse almost word for word, and what was a wish becomes a prophecy:
opse kakōs elthoi, olesas apo pantas hetairous (IX.534)
“late may he come and in evil case, after losing all his comrades”
opse kakōs neiai, olesas apo pantas hetairous (XI.114)
“late shalt thou come home and in evil case, after losing all thy comrades”
Both go on: in a ship that is another’s, to find woes in his house. That is the plot of the poem’s second half.
In the land of the dead his mother slips from his arms three times: “Thrice through my arms she slipp’d like empty wind” (XI.206–208). The telling nests: the poet tells of Odysseus telling of Agamemnon’s shade telling of his own murder (XI.405–434). On the way home Scylla takes six men from the ship. They call him by name for the last time, exonomaklēdēn, tote g’ hystaton (XII.250), and are drawn up aspairontes, writhing like fish on a line (XII.255), the word the widow simile used of the dying husband (VIII.526). It was the most piteous thing he saw (XII.258–259). At the numerical centre of the poem (XII.296), on Thrinacia, he gives way to his crew:
Euryloch’, ē mala dē me biazete mounon eonta
“Eurylochus, verily ye constrain me, who stand alone” (XII.297)
After it he will come home alone.
Movement III
The Phaeacians carry him home asleep: “Wrapp’d in a pleasing, deep, and death-like rest” (XIII.79–80). He wakes on Ithaca and does not know it. Athena has shed a mist about him, and the paths, harbours and cliffs of his own island look strange (XIII.187–196). His first act on his own land is to count what he has been given: “The gold, the vests, the tripods number’d o’er” (XIII.217–218). Athena comes to him in disguise and he lies to her; she smiles, and tells him he did not know her (XIII.287–300). Then she makes him an old beggar (XIII.429–438). The rest of the poem, nearly half of it, is set in the swineherd’s hut and the hall.
On the island he lies. The man who told the wonders of the middle books in the first person now tells false life-stories in the same voice, to five listeners from Athena to his father: more than four hundred lines in all. Alcinous had praised him as a teller “Unlike those vagrants who on falsehood live” (XI.363–366), and the praise now hangs over every tale, the true ones included. To Penelope he invents a Cretan who once entertained Odysseus, and the narrator gives the verdict: “Thus the fam’d hero, perfected in wiles, / With fair similitude of truth beguiles” (XIX.203). She weeps for her husband, who is sitting beside her: “She to her present lord laments him lost” (XIX.209). He pities her, holds his eyes as still as horn or iron, and hides his tears by guile (XIX.210–212).
The swineherd keeps the faith the house has lost. He kills two of his own pigs for the beggar at his door (XIV.72–79). The narrator speaks to him, and to no one else in the poem, in the second person, fifteen times:
prosephēs, Eumaie sybōta
“To him then, swineherd Eumaeus, didst thou make answer and say” (XVII.311)
When Telemachus comes back from Sparta, Eumaeus greets him “As some fond sire who ten long winters grieves” greets an only son (XVI.17–19), while the real father sits by unknown. At the palace door the old dog Argos lies neglected in the dung. He knows his master, wags his tail, and has no strength to come nearer (XVII.290–304). Then the dog “Takes a last look, and having seen him, dies” (XVII.326–327). The Greek line ends eeikostōi eniautōi, “in the twentieth year”.
Movement IV
The recognitions climb through the house, and each is made in its own way. To his son, in the swineherd’s hut, he has no sign at all. Athena restores his looks, the boy takes him for a god, and he answers:
ou tis toi theos eimi … alla patēr teos eimi
“Be sure I am no god … Nay, I am thy father” (XVI.187–188)
A line completes the claim, and it will be heard again:
ēlython eikostōi etei es patrida gaian
“am come in the twentieth year to my native land” (XVI.206)
In the second book Halitherses recalls his prophecy that Odysseus would come home in the twentieth year, unknown to all (II.174–176). Odysseus speaks the line to his son, to the nurse (XIX.484), to the two herdsmen (XXI.208) and to his father (XXIV.322), and twice it is said of him in the scenes with his wife (XXIII.102, 170).
The nurse knows him by touch. Washing the beggar’s feet she finds the scar, and the word for her knowing, egnō, comes at XIX.392. The poem then stops and tells where the scar came from: the hunt on Parnassus, the boar in its thicket, and, further back, the naming of the child, when his grandfather Autolycus, as one “angered with many”, odyssamenos, called him Odysseus (XIX.407–409). Only when that story is done does the sentence come back to her hands, with the same verb, gnō (XIX.468): “Down dropp’d the leg, from her slack hand released”. The foot falls into the basin, the bronze rings, the water spills. To the herdsmen he shows the same scar, and the poem names it in the same words each time, the boar and its white tusk (XIX.393, 465; XXI.219; XXIV.332).
The bow is the suitors’ sign. He strings it without effort, as a man skilled in the lyre stretches a string about a new peg (XXI.406–409), and when he tries it the string
hypo kalon aeise, chelidoni eikelē audēn
“sang sweetly beneath his touch, like to a swallow in tone” (XXI.411)
He gives the signal in words the poem has used before. At the suitors’ first feast the narrator called song and dance ta gar t’ anathēmata daitos (I.152); now Odysseus says it is time for supper and then for song and the lyre, “for these things are the accompaniments of a feast” (XXI.430), and the killing begins. He spares the bard, who has laid down his lyre to beg for his life (XXII.330–353), and the herald. The maids are hanged in a row from a ship’s cable, like thrushes or doves caught in a snare, hopōs oiktista thanoien, “that they might die most piteously” (XXII.465–473). The poem names the pity and does not question the act.
Movement V
Penelope holds out longest, and tests him with the bed: let it be set outside the chamber for the stranger (XXIII.177–180). He breaks out in anger. No man could move it, “unless a god himself should come and easily by his will set it in another place” (XXIII.185–186), and the words are the ones with which his son had refused to believe that a mortal could change shape as he had:
hote mē theos autos epelthōn / rhēidiōs ethelōn theiē (XVI.197–198; XXIII.185–186)
He built the chamber round a living olive and cut its trunk for a bedpost: “This hand the wonder framed; an olive spread” (XXIII.190). Her knees give way, and the line that marked her recognition of the true details in the beggar’s false tale, and will mark the father’s, closes this one:
sēmat’ anagnousēi ta hoi empeda pephrad’ Odysseus
“as she knew the sure tokens which Odysseus told her” (XXIII.206; XIX.250; XXIV.346)
She runs to him, and the poem turns a simile round. As welcome as land to men who swim from a wreck, so welcome to her was her husband (XXIII.233–240). The simile opens, hōs d’ hot’ an aspasios, as the one did that welcomed land to the shipwrecked man himself in the fifth book (V.394, XXIII.233); now the wife is the swimmer. On the last day he goes out to his father, who is digging round a plant in the orchard in a patched tunic (XXIV.226–231). He tests him first, with praise for the garden: “Nothing neglected, but thyself alone” (XXIV.244–249). Laertes grieves, and Odysseus springs to him and says the line for the last time, ēlython eikostōi etei es patrida gaian (XXIV.322). The old man asks for a sign. He shows the scar, and then names the trees his father gave him as a child, walking behind him through the garden: thirteen pear-trees, ten apple-trees, forty fig-trees and fifty rows of vines (XXIV.336–344).
The poem ends in the open. The kinsmen of the dead come armed, and three generations stand together against them (XXIV.514–515). Zeus decrees a forgetting of the killing, “And o’er the past Oblivion stretch her wing” (XXIV.485), and Athena stops the fighting. The feud is ended by a god, not settled. The last line sets her among them in the likeness of the old friend whose shape she took in the second book to send the son to sea:
Mentori eidomenē ēmen demas ēde kai audēn
“in the likeness of Mentor both in form and in voice” (XXIV.548; II.268, 401)
The poem began with a man whose name it held back. It ends on a goddess in a borrowed shape, in the words with which the son’s search began.
Act III · The Twelve
The design resists subtraction. The first four books show the house the hero’s absence has made, set Orestes as the pattern, and grow the son who will stand at the threshold. Nearly a fifth of the Greek lines recur verbatim, and by the subtractive test that is not padding: the speech introductions are how the medium marks speech, and the lines repeated at the recognitions make them recognitions. “And what so tedious as a twice-told tale?” (XII.452–453). What holds this axis lowest is small: the catalogue of heroines (XI.225–332), Theoclymenus’ pedigree and part of the second descent to the dead, under three per cent, with an epithet fitted to its slot (I.29) and a dropped plan (XVI.295–298).
Score: 9.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a person exists as recognised, and the way a house treats the stranger at its door is the measure of what it is. Zeus states the law before the hero appears: mortals blame the gods, and suffer beyond their lot by their own folly (I.32–34). Servitude is shown from inside: “Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away” (XVII.322–323). Achilles would labour for a landless man “Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead” (XI.489–491). The poem limits vengeance, sparing the bard and the herald, but not for the maids, hanged hopōs oiktista thanoien, “that they might die most piteously” (XXII.472). That cost is the work’s own.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Height comes often and in every register. In terror: the Cyclops’ eye hissing round the stake like quenched iron (IX.389–394); Scylla’s six men calling Odysseus by name for the last time (XII.245–259); Theoclymenus seeing the walls sprinkled with blood while the suitors laugh (XX.345–357). The Greek tells these plainly, and the plainness is the force: Elpenor’s neck breaks from the spine and his spirit goes down to Hades (X.559–560). In beauty and grief: the seed of fire under the leaves, the mother slipping three times from her son’s arms, the dog that dies on seeing him. Frequency drops at Pylos and Sparta and in the beggar books, XIV–XVIII, low on purpose, and that holds the axis below the top.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The structure is archetype: the disguised king’s return, the son in search of the father, the descent to the dead, the nymph who offers deathlessness and is refused, the bow only the rightful lord can string. Each pattern carries the plot, and each figure stays particular. Set down on his own island, the wanderer counts his tripods on the beach to see whether he has been robbed (XIII.215–218). The faithful dog lies on a dung-heap. The king proves who he is with a bed built round a living olive (XXIII.183–204). Odysseus became the archetype of restless, crafty intelligence, and Dante’s last voyage, Tennyson’s monologue and Joyce’s Bloom each rebuild him.
Score: 9.8 / 10
The turn from the war epic is deliberate: cunning for force, the household for the field, survival for glory. The poem names its own novelty, “For novel lays attract our ravish’d ears” (I.351–352), rests its hero’s fame on wiles (IX.19–20), and gives epic dignity to a swineherd, a nurse and a dog. It builds a narrative no surviving earlier poem has: the hero absent for four books, two plots joined in the sixteenth, four books and his lies in his own voice. It shares 506 whole lines with the Iliad. The stake is the weakness: the poem is anonymous, the other homecoming poems are lost, and what the turn cost cannot be recovered.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Tell the story in order, from Troy to Ithaca, and the poem loses what it knows. Opening on the absence lets the absence define him first. His lies on Ithaca are told in the same first person as the wonders, so Alcinous’ praise of a teller “Unlike those vagrants who on falsehood live” (XI.363–366) hangs over every tale. The second half climbs a ladder of recognitions graded by intimacy, son, dog, nurse, herdsmen, suitors, wife, father, each by a different sign, the last two by things only the household knows. The numerical centre falls where the leader yields to his crew, mounon eonta, “who stand alone” (XII.297): the hinge between return with companions and return alone.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: twenty-seven centuries of re-examination, from the allegorists’ Odysseus as the soul and Plato’s myth of Er through Dante, Tennyson and Joyce, to Horkheimer and Adorno’s first bourgeois self, Auerbach on the scar, and recent readings of the hanged maids. The poem’s own pairings keep yielding. The victor weeps at the song of his victory like a widow led into slavery. The swineherd greets Telemachus as a father greets a son, while the real father sits by unknown (XVI.17–21). Helen and Menelaus tell two stories of Odysseus that cannot both be true (IV.240–289). The bard begs for his life after the hero strings his bow like a lyre. None is explained, and none is used up.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Intrinsic force: the poem reorganised what long narrative could do. It is the earliest surviving epic told largely in flashback by its own hero, with parallel plots joined midway and recognition as structure, and it made the household and the low-born the matter of epic. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: in the Latin West, from late antiquity to the fourteenth century, Homer was largely unread, known through Virgil and Latin epitomes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Virgil built the first six books of the Aeneid on it, the Greek romance of travel, disguise and recognition descends from it, and the line runs through Lucian, Dante, Fénelon, Tennyson, Kazantzakis and Joyce, until the title became a common noun.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-seven centuries: papyri, Byzantine manuscripts, the first printing at Florence in 1488, and continuous translation into every major language. The surface is less fixed to its moment than that of most long works of its age: no contemporary is named, and the world is a household, a sea and a handful of islands. What is fixed is the social order. Telemachus sends his mother back to her loom: speech is for men, and the authority in the house is his (I.356–359). The servants are property, and justice is the master’s. The poem has outlived these conditions and is read partly against them. That is survival, but the surface still costs a step.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Judged on the Greek, on what can be seen and counted, not on the sound of the hexameter. The formula system is whole, and made into structure. One line marks the recognitions by son, nurse, herdsmen and father (XVI.206, XIX.484, XXI.208, XXIV.322); another closes all three recognitions by told sign (XIX.250, XXIII.206, XXIV.346); the shipwrecked man’s thicket is drawn in the lines of the boar’s (V.478–483, XIX.440–443). The scar digression is held between egnō and gnō (XIX.392, 468). Similes run at half the Iliad’s rate, placed and often reversed. The costs are in the joins: the dropped plan for the arms (XVI.295–298), Aegisthus given the epithet of praise (I.29), the second descent to the dead joined awkwardly (XXIV.1–14).
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Cyclops’ cave and the swineherd’s hut. They obey one law, the reception of the stranger. The Cyclops scorns Zeus, the strangers’ god, and eats his guests (IX.266–280); the swineherd kills two of his pigs for a beggar (XIV.72–79); the suitors die because they honoured no one who came to them (XXII.413–416). Zeus’s opening principle governs the companions at Thrinacia and the suitors at the feast, and both are warned. The law carries strains the poem leaves standing. Poseidon’s grudge is personal, and the Phaeacians’ ship is turned to stone for their hospitality (XIII.159–164). The feud ends by decree: “And o’er the past Oblivion stretch her wing” (XXIV.485).
Score: 9.4 / 10
The orders are held in one structure, the household, and one journey passes through them all. Consciousness: Odysseus deliberating on the breaking raft (V.354–364), Penelope’s dream and her doubt at the bed. The family: three generations armed together (XXIV.514–515). Labour is held better than in almost any epic: the raft built timber by timber (V.243–261), the swineherd’s farm, the weakest woman at the mill praying for the suitors’ last feast (XX.105–119), Laertes digging round a plant. The state: the assembly, the Phaeacian council, the Cyclopes with neither assemblies nor laws (IX.112). The dead fill the eleventh book; sea, storm and garden the rest. The city is held more thinly, its politics settled by fiat.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.5 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 9.8, with Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.7. A myth built into its own plot, twenty-seven centuries of return without exhaustion, a form that made the told return and the recognition into the shape of long narrative, and a survival that has outlived the order the poem was made in.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 9.1, held by a few seams and a few passages the poem could lose: the catalogue of heroines, Theoclymenus’ pedigree and part of the second descent to the dead, under three per cent in all, with an epithet fitted to its slot and a plan for the arms that is dropped. Below the rest besides, The Swerve at 9.2, where the turn from the war epic is plain but the stake of an anonymous, traditional poem cannot be recovered.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.6, The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.8, Pressure on Tradition at 9.7, The Imperishable at 9.7, The Unconcealment at 9.3 and The Swerve at 9.2 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 9.1, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.6. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · Homer’s Greek, in Murray’s text of the Odyssey from the Perseus Digital Library — twenty-four books and 12,107 numbered lines against the standard 12,110; the text leaves out X.456, XVI.101 and XXIII.49 and prints III.305 before III.304. Every judgement is made on the Greek, and every reference is to its book and line. Books I–III were read whole in Greek, and elsewhere every passage the page rests on; counts of lines, repetition, speech and simile are taken from the whole text. The sound of the hexameter is not judged, and is neither credited nor charged.
Translations · for sense, A. T. Murray’s prose (Loeb, 1919), chosen because it is complete and close, marks every fifth Greek line and keeps the repetitions where the Greek repeats; it is given beneath the transliterated Greek wherever a point turns on the Greek words. For quotation, the verse translation published under Alexander Pope’s name (1725–26), made with Elijah Fenton and William Broome, Project Gutenberg e-text #3160, chosen as the best English poem among the translations at hand and the only one in verse, keeping every episode and simile in Homer’s order. Pope varies the repeated lines and sometimes the sense, so he is quoted only where his English holds to the Greek as Murray renders it, and cited by the Greek passage he translates. His Latin names, such as Jove, are kept.