If there had been a unique historical human person called ‘Homer’ – like, say, the unquestionably individual human person called Hesiod, who flourished around 700 BC – it’s odd that the Greeks themselves had no solidly authentic record of such a person. Modern scholarly research since about 1700, but more especially since the 1930s, has established beyond a shadow of doubt that ‘Homer’ was a tradition – many bards, over several centuries, perhaps as many as nine – but a tradition with a difference, that difference being the genius of two separate individual master poet-editors. They cut through the mass of traditional songs, lays and verses regarding a war of Greeks against the city of Troy and identified two separate unifying themes: The Wrath of Achilles and The Homecoming of Odysseus. Hence our Iliad and Odyssey.

The ancient Greek language belongs to the family of languages slightly oddly called ‘Indo-European’. In the early 1950s texts from major palace sites written on clay in a script unromantically labelled ‘Linear B’ (syllabic, not alphabetic) were deciphered as the earliest known form of Greek. That put the known origins of Greek back as far at least as 1400 BC. ‘Homer’ (the Iliad and the Odyssey), it is generally thought, was not written down until about 700 BC, in alphabetic script on papyrus, though those two monumental poems could have been created some time before and preserved purely orally. What is certain is that, during the period from about 1200 to 800, Greece was totally illiterate – no more Linear B script, not yet an alphabetic script. During those four centuries, therefore, the epic bardic tradition had to have been carried on purely orally, by word of mouth, by a succession of poet-rhapsodes (‘stitchers of songs’). The dialect of the epics does not, however, exactly reproduce any one of the three main regional sub-dialects: it’s a purely artificial ‘epic’ dialect, one reserved therefore for this very special kind of poetry. 

There unquestionably was a historical city of ‘Troy’ – but it was a new Greek foundation in what is now northwest Turkey not far from and overlooking the Hellespont strait (today’s Dardanelles). Why did Greeks choose to settle there, in about 800 BCE, and call it ‘Troy’? Because that’s where the ongoing bardic tradition of a ‘Trojan War’, i.e. a war of Greeks against the city and kingdom of Troy, placed Troy city. Archaeology and linguistic detective work have confirmed the perception of those Greek settlers: there was a major city there in what we moderns call the Late Bronze Age, a city worthy to be the prompt for, and the setting of, a major war. But – and it’s a huge ‘but’ – to date there’s no evidence to confirm a conflict of the sort and on the scale of Homer’s war actually occurred, fought by Achaeans (Greeks). So, there’s not only no evidentiary confirmation of the war’s alleged motivation, the rescue of the abducted Queen Helen of Sparta, but also no confirmation of any one Greek hero’s Homecoming from Troy including that of Odysseus.

There is internal evidence within the poems, especially the Iliad, for material objects that had already ceased to be in use well before 1300 and for things not invented until well after 1200, and yet all are described as if contemporary and equally ‘ancient’ from the point of view of c. 700. It is quite clear that in terms of material culture and social-political relations there was no single historical ‘Homeric society’. But the Iliad is at least far more ‘realistic’, historically speaking, than the Odyssey – stuffed as the latter is with supernatural phenomena, both divine and monstrous.

Eratosthenes (c. 276-194 BC) came originally from Greek Cyrene in today’s Libya and was the Aristotle or Newton of his day, a polymath based in the Library of Egyptian Alexandria. Not content with measuring (quite accurately) the circumference of planet earth he applied literary criticism and mathematical reasoning to Homer. On the historicity of Homer he was a radical sceptic: show me the cobbler who sewed the leather bag in which all the winds of the world were supposedly retained (Odyssey book 10) and I’ll believe in the literal historical truth of the Odyssey. A tough ask. But even he shared the almost unanimous ancient Greek view that there had once been a real Trojan War, so – using Egyptian and Persian written records, together with Greek generational reckoning – he came up with ‘1184 BC’ for the date of Troy’s fall. Not half bad, according to his modern, scientific scholarly equivalents.

In some sense and at some level of interpretation, ‘knowledge’ of Homer demands the ability to read, fluently, the original language. But no one today, anywhere, is a ‘native’ reader of Homer, so translation into other modern vernaculars, including Greek, is not just a luxury add-on but a basic necessity. The nature and quality of literary translations matter a great deal. How many people now even read in hard copy? Screens are the thing. Films – also screens, but different idiom – are another kind of ‘translation’ altogether, and the development of digital technology, such as CGI, has transformed the moviemaker’s possibilities of rendition or interpretation of the ancient myths.

Myth can be variously defined but I see it essentially as a set of traditional tales which contain matter of significance to wider society outside the limits of the mythical stories themselves. Take Penelope: whatever else she was, or is, she is a mythical archetype of a certain type of femininity. By no means the ‘helpless little woman’ or subservient helpmate of some male fantasies – although her only child, a son, does treat her in a classically patronising, male-chauvinist way – Penelope proves herself just as resourceful in resisting her 108 suitors as her definitionally wily husband – and a good deal less bloodthirsty, too.

Nostos – from which we get our English ‘nostalgia’ (pain concerning nostos) – means return journey, in this case from Troy in north-west Turkey to a small island (not certain which) off the west coast of mainland Greece, in the Adriatic. That took Odysseus ten years, exactly the same time as the Trojan War itself. Coincidence? Of course not: the length of the nostos draws attention to how much it cost, how tough it was, even for ‘much-suffering’ Odysseus, the lone survivor of all the Ithacan comrades with whom he’d set out. As to what his personal odyssey (we’ve borrowed the word) was about, I’d say the epic contained three main overarching messages or themes: first, ‘home sweet home’ (see further below); second, hospitality rules ok (ditto); and third, what it is to be Greek and how to live the best Hellenic life.

The Odyssey (like the Iliad) belongs to the literary category or genre of heroic epic – one that includes both the prehistoric Gilgamesh story and the medieval Viking sagas. Heroes – and heroines – are by definition super-normal, larger than life, for bad as well as good. And for them to exist – since often they’re purely fictional – they must be constantly remembered, their stories re-told. In ancient Greek myth, the nine Muses including Calliope (Muse of epic poetry) were all daughters of goddess Mnemosyne (Memory) by lord high god Zeus.

The Odyssey is full of so many monsters there’s not space to mention them all individually, but Scylla can’t be omitted. A female monster with six heads atop six long necks each with three rows of teeth lurking in the straits of Messina between Italy and Sicily. Sicily is a good candidate for the island inhabited by the Cyclops (‘Circle-Eye’, singular – the plural is Cyclopes), who was humanlike (apart from his single eye) but ginormous – and immortal (son of Poseidon).

The Cyclopes as a group lived together as a normal sort of community but the Cyclops, Polyphemus, was anti-social, lived apart with his flock of sheep and abhorred not only all company but especially foreign strangers – such as Odysseus and his companions. Eating people (cannibalism) is wrong – we all know that. To eat them even raw, without cooking them first, was to Greek eyes much worse. ‘Omophagy’ was what only wild or mad people did. So, yes, Polyphemus was a monstrous abomination, but Odysseus didn’t cover himself in glory in his reactions. Burning Polyphemus’ one eye out of its socket was cruel, but using ‘No Man’ as an alias and then revealing his true name was unnecessarily risky and dangerously boastful.

There’s a sliding scale of divinity. At the top comes Athena, second only to Zeus’s sister-wife Hera because not only was she a daughter of Zeus but she was also literally born ‘of’ her father, out of his (split) cranium. Abnormal in her birth, so in her life: though female by gender, she was the least feminine of females, bearing many of the warrior-attributes of a male god, and a perpetual virgin, never therefore subdued, deflowered, by a male. A useful protectress for a vulnerable seafarer like Odysseus to have, she saved him over and over again.

En route home, as noted, the Ithacan king encountered many monsters and many different kinds of monsters. The most seductive were the immortal singing sisters called the Sirens. Cunning and ever-curious, Odysseus wanted to hear the song the Sirens sang, so he made his ship’s ordinary seamen plug their ears with softened wax and then ordered them to tie him to his ship’s mast but leave his ears unplugged. As the ship was rowed past the Sirens, Odysseus implored his men to cut him free but they did not hear him – thereby avoiding the fate of less canny shipmates with whose whitened bones the shore was littered.

Circe and Calypso were both island goddesses, unrelated to each other and of diametrically opposed character and personality. Circe, a witch, was the classic ‘bad girl’, sleeping with all and sundry, including Odysseus, and literally bewitching them. Calypso – whose name was derived from a Greek verb meaning ‘to hide’ – was far more restrained. Why exactly she’s my favourite character in all the Odyssey is hard to say, but it’s something to do with the fact that her charms – intellectual as well as corporeal – were sufficient to persuade Odyssey to remain with him on Ogygia for seven whole years, as if husband with wife. So she was a sort of anti-Penelope – and in a way it’s thanks to her that there was, eventually, a nostos for Odysseus at all. For she reluctantly, but in the end graciously, gave in to orders from above, conveyed by Hermes, to let Odysseus go. One of her ‘arguments’ was that she would make Odysseus godlike – immortal, ageless – if he stayed. That he refused even that demonstrated the irresistible pull of home – Penelope, kingship and a future life of ease, such as that enjoyed still by his aged father Laertes.

In book 11, Odysseus comes as near as possible to being immortal without being so, since he goes down to Hades (‘The Unseen’), the realm of the dead, not the living, and yet comes back up alive on to the earth’s surface. His chief motivation for this unusual but not unique (Orpheus) trip was to say a last fond farewell to his mother Anticleia, who had died after he’d left Ithaca for Troy. What he actually encountered, however, was not a simulacrum of her corpse but merely her shade, a gibbering spirit, a ghost, requiring to be fed blood in order to be enabled to speak. Other shades he met down below included the intersex Theban prophet or seer Tiresias, his former Ithacan comrade Elpenor, who had died by misadventure on Aeaea, Circe’s island, and three Trojan War heroes: C-in-C Agamemnon of Mycenae, Agamemnon’s – and Trojan Hector’s – foe Achilles, and the next fiercest Greek warrior after him, mighty Ajax.

The wooden horse full of Greek warriors masquerading as an offering to the sea-god Poseidon was a ploy of Odysseus: the only workable way for the otherwise impregnable city gates of Troy to be breached. His love for his wife and son was, shall we say, patchy, but it shone through at the end. And it was during the endgame – after sole survivor Odysseus has finally made it back to Ithaca with both human and, crucially, divine aid – that the episode with a dog is so memorably recorded (in book 17). Not just any dog: Argos had been Odysseus’ favourite, leader of his pack of hunting hounds, now aged a remarkable 20. Even though Odysseus was in disguise, even though Argos was feeble, tick-ridden, neglected and blind, he recognised his master by smell. But the effort of recognition was too great and proved fatal. Odysseus shed some silent tears. I wept buckets out loud when I first read the story – in English, of course, aged eight.

Recognition – and deception – were also at the heart of the climax, the human culmination, of the nostos tale. Having triumphed, brutally, over the Suitors, having revenged himself, also brutally, on disloyal palace maidservants, Odysseus faces one last test: to persuade Penelope that he really is who he says he is (unlike the returning medieval fraudster ‘Martin Guerre’). The test consists of his knowing the peculiar if not unique nature of their marriage-bed. Built by Odysseus the handyman himself, it had been constructed somehow around the roots of an olive tree. Presumably Penelope’s own maidservants knew that – but they’d been put to death for treachery. Perhaps son Telemachus had been told, but, if so, he’s not in the picture now. So when Odysseus gets the answer right, cunning Penelope at last resists no more – but is reconciled on her, not her husband’s, terms.

Among the many important devices employed by the bardic poets I would cite the following techniques: cross-cutting, plunging in medias res, flashback, foreshadowing. And the following themes: homecoming, love and war, fate and free will. Since I’m a believer in the ‘one great monumental poet’ responsible for ordering a mass of independent tales under one overarching theme, it was for me the genius of that poet to tell the story of The Homecoming of Odysseus using all those techniques and themes just mentioned.

The plots of both the Iliad and the Odyssey depend on hospitality – or rather inhospitality, on breaches of the hospitality code: Paris abducts his host’s wife; the suitors grossly abuse Odysseus’ involuntary hospitality. Whether islands were or are differently or differentially hospitable is harder to say, but it’s possible that a greater feeling of positive insularity lends itself to a greater openness to visits from strangers.

The censorship of Homer sadly began as early as Plato (427-347 BC), who didn’t like the idea of fictionality in itself and, in particular, disliked what he considered the immoral behaviour of gods and goddesses as well as of mortal humans in Homer, e.g. Circe’s transforming men into swine and Calypso committing adultery – for seven years – with Odysseus, and Odysseus habitually telling lies. But the Odyssey does also include the best along with the worst, and among the best is its one overall messages as a tale of marital harmony restored and reinvigorated. Few things in human existence, it’s said in Odyssey Book 6, rival that sort of stable mutually reinforcing relationship.

This essay is edited from remarks made by Paul Cartledge in conversation with Richard Marranca, whose collection, Speaking of the Dead: Mummies & Mysteries of Egypt, will be published soon by Blydyn Square Books.