A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald by Ralph J. Hexter, Robert Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

choice of theme could go far to explain. Many comparisons with more contemporary writers are dredged up, usually to bolster the unitarian side of this debate: if you didn’t know it to be the case, would you dare attribute both
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and
King Lear
to the same poet? Most poets change over the courses of their careers, others do not. Already the ancient author of the treatise
On the Sublime
(“Longinus” he is called, although we do not know his name) proposed to solve the problem by having Homer write the fiercer and more concentrated
Iliad
as a young man, the more episodic and romantic
Odyssey
at an advanced age. But while some poets grow more diffuse and sentimental with age (e.g., Wordsworth), we can easily think of many more artists who grow both subtler and stronger with advancing years (e.g., Horace, Vergil, Dürer, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Verdi). Such analogies will never help us answer the question, because there are too many variables for the equation. Nor would I base my argument on what I havedescribed as the more complicated, more artful structure of
The Odyssey
, for that very structure may, for all we know, come with the theme of Odysseus’ homecoming.
    Ultimately, I see the difference most clearly in what, with conscious anachronism, I would call the “theological.” The gods of
The Odyssey
are not the gods of
The Iliad
. They have, to be sure, the same names, and they take the same sides in traditional quarrels. And there is a great deal of overlap, which is not surprising, since the two poems emerge from the same culture. However, in the main action of
The Odyssey
, the gods seem more concerned with ultimate justice. On the whole they exhibit less of the “furious self-absorption” which characterizes, as Bernard Knox so well describes it, the gods of
The Iliad. 11
This can also, of course, be argued as a consequence of a different theme. But this difference inclines me to believe they were likely composed by different authors.
    This division proposed and debated by scholars nevertheless can and should fade into relative unimportance for us as
readers
of either poem. What is important is to realize how the poet of
The Odyssey
depends on
The Iliad
and what differences obtain between the two.
The Odyssey
certainly presents itself as post-Iliadic, just as the story it relates is subsequent to the action of
The Iliad
. As the Commentary will frequently note, the characters and predicaments of
The Odyssey
are regularly presented against a backdrop we know best from
The Iliad
. (We can only speculate on the shape of many of the other epics then circulating.) The Helen of
The Odyssey
must be read against the Helen of
The Iliad
. The same goes for Akhilleus, whose appearance and words in Hades take their very point from their distance from those which characterized the hero of
The Iliad
. Scholars may or may not want to “separate” the author of
The Iliad
from that of
The Odyssey
, but, considering the cumulative and communal working of oral tradition and the intertextual relationships between the two poems (i.e., the allusions and references from one to the other), we are well advised to
read
them as the products of one Homer. 12

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
     
    It is in light of the archeology of the Homeric poems that the archeological reader must approach the history and geography represented in them. History and archeology can tell us much about the worlds in which the poems took shape, but to go back from the world described in
The Iliad
or
The Odyssey
to reconstruct a coherent picture of Homer’s time is not possible. I noted earlier that Parry’s oral-formulaic theory outstripped the discoveries of archeologists as a source of insights into the world of Homer’s poems. These discoveries are real, but as our understanding of Minoan-Mycenaean and other first-and second-millennium B.C.E . Mediterranean civilizations has advanced, it has become clear that the relationship of the Homeric