{"id":31,"date":"2012-08-22T00:10:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-22T00:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/knownworld\/?p=31"},"modified":"2012-08-22T00:10:03","modified_gmt":"2012-08-22T00:10:03","slug":"some-background-on-the-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/2012\/08\/22\/some-background-on-the-odyssey\/","title":{"rendered":"Some background on the Odyssey"},"content":{"rendered":"

I enjoyed meeting you all today and hope you look forward to getting started on the Odyssey<\/em>!\u00a0 Below is some background information that should be especially useful to those of you who have never read the poem, but will hopefully also contain some news to those who have.\u00a0 The comment function has been enabled, so if you have questions or concerns, type away!<\/p>\n

Although the Odyssey<\/em> is a self-contained epic poem, it is also part of a larger tapestry of stories that in ancient times would have been familiar even to small children.\u00a0 The subject of these stories is the Trojan War, a mythical conflict that took place in an age of legends.\u00a0 The Greeks firmly believed that in former times, men had been far more powerful than they are today, and that gods had mingled amongst mortals, choosing their favorites and guiding their destinies.<\/p>\n

Modern scholars aren\u2019t in total agreement whether the Trojan War is entirely fictional or whether the stories about it are rooted in a kernel of truth.\u00a0 If there is some truth about them, then they most likely are dim memories of the dark times during the Dorian invasion (ca. 1100 BC), when migrant peoples from the north pushed down into the Peloponnese and the highly developed Mycenaean culture collapsed.\u00a0 Archaeological digs have indeed uncovered a city in Asia Minor that roughly fits the description of Troy given by Homer and others, and which perished at around this time.\u00a0 Whether this really is the place where Achilles and Hector did battle is anyone\u2019s guess.\u00a0 At any rate, if we accept 1100 BC as the rough date at which the Trojan War took place, then this would place it approximately 300 years before the first appearance of the Odyssey<\/em>, and about 700 years before the golden age of Athens.<\/p>\n

Like almost every other conflict in Greek legend, the Trojan War begins when a mortal foolishly involves himself in the affairs of the gods.\u00a0 The Trojan prince Paris, son of King Priam, is asked to judge a beauty contest between the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite.\u00a0 Instead of politely declining judgment, as would be the smart thing to do under these circumstances, Paris not only participates in the contest, but also follows his baser instincts by picking Aphrodite, the goddess of love, as the most beautiful.\u00a0 His judgment earns him the gratitude of Aphrodite, but the eternal wrath of the vengeful Hera.<\/p>\n

To reward Paris, Aphrodite promises him that he will successfully woo the most beautiful woman on earth.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this woman happens to be the Achaean (i.e. Greek) queen Helena, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta.\u00a0 Paris visits Sparta, abducts Helena, and brings her home with him to Troy.\u00a0 This sets into motion a calamitous series of events, for Helena has a number of self-appointed guardians.\u00a0 Because of her legendary beauty, all the kings of Greece at one point courted her, and formed a pact in which they swore allegiance to whomever she would pick as her husband.\u00a0 This, of course, turned out to be Menelaus, and now that he has been wronged, all of Greece finds itself up in arms against Troy.<\/p>\n

There are innumerable stories about the various Greek heroes that participated in this military exploit led by Menelaus\u2019 brother, the powerful King Agamemnon of Mycenae.\u00a0 At least one of these stories is known by almost everyone even today, namely the tale of how the Achaeans, after ten long years of warfare, eventually managed to conquer their enemy by means of the Trojan horse (a ruse, incidentally, dreamt up by Odysseus).\u00a0 The most important of all the literary renditions of the war, however, is the Iliad<\/em>, an epic poem supposedly authored, like the Odyssey<\/em>, by the Greek bard Homer.[1]<\/a> The Iliad<\/em> is the story of a single crucial episode in the war that took place near its end.\u00a0 Its self-proclaimed subject is the fury of Achilles, the mightiest of the Achaeans, and the destruction it brought upon Greeks and Trojans alike (the very first word of the poem famously is menin<\/em>, or \u201cwrath\u201d).<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the poem, Achilles finds himself at odds with his ostensible commander, Agamemnon, over the exact way in which certain spoils of war are to be divided.\u00a0 Deeply hurt in his pride, Achilles decides to withdraw himself and his troops from the campaign, thereby almost certainly dooming the Achaeans to defeat.\u00a0 Without Achilles\u2019 knowledge, however, his young lover Patroclus steals his distinctive armor and rejoins the fight, trying to raise Greek morale.\u00a0 Patroclus, unfortunately, is an inexperienced fighter, and is quickly killed by the Trojan champion Hector, Paris\u2019 brother.\u00a0 After much gnashing of teeth, Achilles exacts terrible vengeance upon the Trojans, killing Hector and dragging his corpse around the city behind his chariot.\u00a0 In doing so, he also goes to his certain death, for there is a divine prophecy which foretells that he shall not long outlive Hector.\u00a0 The Iliad<\/em> ends with some measure of reconciliation between the warring factions, when a grief-stricken King Priam successfully petitions Achilles to at least return Hector\u2019s body.<\/p>\n

Homer does not tell the story of Achilles\u2019 death or of the fall of Troy in the Iliad<\/em>, though we will get a brief summary of these events in the Odyssey. <\/em>(The Roman poet Virgil also included a much longer account in his Aeneid<\/em>, which tells the story from the Trojan perspective).\u00a0 The Odyssey<\/em>, at any rate, takes place after the te -year war is over.\u00a0 It belongs to a second group of tales\u2013tales just as numerous and diverse as the ones dealing with the war\u2013that take as their subject the homecoming of the victorious heroes.\u00a0 In Greek legend, almost all the returning Achaeans meet a terrible end.\u00a0 Achilles is already dead, as is the second-best Greek warrior, Greater Ajax (there is also a \u201cLesser Ajax\u201d whose story we will hear in the Odyssey<\/em>).\u00a0 Agamemnon will famously be killed by his wife Clytemnestra in his very own bath.\u00a0 The Cretan king Idomeneo will promise the gods to sacrifice the very first living thing he meets upon his return home, only to be greeted on the shore by his own son.\u00a0 Homer will give us a partial survey of these stories in books three and four of his poem.<\/p>\n

The most harrowing homecoming of all, however, is the one endured by Odysseus, the wiliest of all the Achaeans.\u00a0 Odysseus is lord of Ithaca, a small island to the northwest of mainland Greece near what is nowadays the coast of Albania.\u00a0 For all intents and purposes, this is a frontier kingdom, far removed from the cultural centers of Mycenaean Greece.\u00a0 Odysseus wasn\u2019t thrilled when he received the summons to depart for the Trojan War.\u00a0 At the time, he was happily married to the beautiful Penelope, who had recently given birth to his first son, Telemakhos.\u00a0 In an attempt to dodge the summons, Odysseus pretended to have gone mad, running a plow over a barren and rocky field over and over again.\u00a0 The Greek messengers, however, knowing they would never stand a chance against Troy without the smartest of the Achaeans on their side, got the better of him when they placed the infant Telemakhos in the path of the plow.\u00a0 Unable to kill his own son, Odysseus had to drop the pretense and join the military campaign.\u00a0 Little does he know that all the fighting around Troy will account for only half of his troubles\u2026<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> \u201cIliad\u201d means \u201cthe story of Ilium,\u201d which in turn is a synonym for Troy.\u00a0 The two stories were \u201csupposedly\u201d authored by Homer because it is unclear whether a person by that name actually existed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I enjoyed meeting you all today and hope you look forward to getting started on the Odyssey!\u00a0 Below is some background information that should be especially useful to those of you who have never read the poem, but will hopefully … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-odyssey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/34"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/knownworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}