Odysseus as Culture Hero
The Odyssey is the second of the Homeric epics, the sequel to
the Iliad.
Scholars believe it was probably composed near the end of
the 8th century BCE, somewhere in Ionia.
The Mycenaean Age 1600-1200 BCE
Trojan War 1184 BCE
Homeric epics composed (orally) 8th century BCE (700s)
Homeric epics first written down in late 700s-early 600s BCE
Classical (Hellenic) Period 4th-5th centuries BCE
Ὀδυσσεύς
Odysseus
(Roman name: Ulysses)
The three storylines of the Odyssey:
1. Odysseus's son, Telemachus, searches for his father.
2. Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is besieged by suitors who
think Odysseus is dead.
3. Odysseus’s wanderings: his long journey home.
νόστος
Nostos
Returning home after a long journey
The Homeric epics came to function as important cultural
texts for Archaic and Classical Greek civilization.
Cultural texts function
• as educational tools
• as repositories for the collective history shared by a
people, nation, or group
• as stories which stage, teach, and test the moral
frameworks on which a given culture depends
The Iliad vs. the Odyssey: some important differences
• The Iliad focuses on the events of a few weeks near the end
of the Trojan War.
• The Odyssey tells of Odysseus’s 10-year journey from Troy to
his home in Ithaka.
• The focus of the Iliad is concentrated …
• …whereas the Odyssey is more dispersed, temporally and
geographically.
• Achilles seeks honor and fame on the battlefield.
• Odysseus’s heroic trait is his cunning: careful planning and
strategy.
SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.
Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of
return.
Of these things,
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.
RAGE:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon –
The Greek warlord – and godlike Achilles.
SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.
Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of
return.
Of these things,
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.
Ajax and Odysseus compete for the armor of Achilles
ξενία
Xenia = Code of Hospitality
• A script laying out the responsibilities of hosts and guests
• A divine obligation to Zeus himself
• A way of managing otherness in a period of cultural encounter
Practicing Xenia marks one as a member of the civilized world.
Travel, colonization, and cross-cultural encounters
• From the 8th-6th centuries BCE the Greeks established many
colonies, from the Black Sea to the coast of Spain.
• Technological innovations in ship-building enabled the expansion of
trade routes, and Greeks made contact with Near Eastern
civilization.
• Increased population, transformation of economic institutions, and
overseas expansion took place alongside the development of
poleis, Greek city-states.
• Institutions like the Olympic Games were designed to unite these
disparate Greek communities by reinforcing a shared Greek
(PanHellenic) cultural heritage.
I want to find out what these men are like,
Wild savages with no sense of right or wrong
Or hospitable folk who fear the gods.
A culture hero is a mythological hero (sometimes fictional,
sometimes not) specific to some group – national, ethnic,
religious, etc. – who serves as a representative and exemplar of
that group.
Stories about heroes teach us what it is to be heroic – they
stage the values of the culture that has produced them.
Yet stories about culture heroes also test and redefine the
very heroic virtues they advocate.
… And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
- from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842)
Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea …
- from Wallace Stevens,
“The Sail of Ulysses” (1957)