The Real Heroism of Odysseus

Homer was a poet with an agenda. While it is fashionable to sideswipe Homer as having never existed, serious classicists, like M.L. West, know that Homer—“the poet”—was real. A careful study of Homer’s language and epic composition suggests that a final redactor almost certainly stood over the finished product of the Iliad with a significant contribution to its final form and message. The verdict is outstanding on the Homer of the Odyssey, to which I agree—the poet of the Odyssey is not the same as the poet of the Iliad—but pedantic concerns of authorship distract us from the content and message of the Odyssey and the fact that the final redactor also stood over the final composition of that great work, which bears Homer’s name. We should address the content of the Odyssey rather than the endless questions about Homeric authorship, which bore people away from the remarkable story.

It is deeply lamentable that in our iconoclastic age Homer is being pillaged by our supposed guardians of culture. W.H. Auden must be weeping in his grave. It is commonplace to hear how Homer glorified violence, “toxic” male masculinity, and how he represents the fountainhead of everything to be despised in today’s humanities department: the dead, white, European male. Such views do a great injustice to Homer, for Homer soars above all later literati because of his upending the Hesiodic masculine fantasy and giving to posterity the quintessential heroic ideal of love embracing death that has moved all subsequent great art and stories. The Homeric revolution was, first and foremost, a call to the power of love: Achilles and Patroclus, Hector and Andromache, Priam and Hector, Achilles and Priam, and of course the most famous of all: Odysseus and Penelope.

The Homer of the Iliad, as I have written, is the first humanist in the West and advances a song of love and forgiveness. The Homer of the Odyssey, as we know, articulates the song of the returning husband and the restoration of the family. Taken in continuity, the Trojan War begins in marital infidelity and is only ended through marital fidelity. Quite the odyssey, all things considered. The humanism of the Iliad is retained in the humanism of the Odyssey; our epics sing of mortal men and the deeply flawed passions rather than the gods and immortality (as Hesiod does in the Theogony). The torch of human love is passed from Hector, Priam, and Achilles to Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope in this continuity of heroic humanisms in the Homeric epics.