The Odyssey is an object lesson in the power of human cunning. Undercover, he scopes out his palace, his domain, works out what he has to do to regain his kingdom and sets about it carefully, cleverly and ruthlessly. Instead of arriving all puffed up and victorious, he disguises himself as a beggar. Having found himself washed up – after 10 years of trying to get there – on the shores of his beloved Ithaca, he manages to avoid the pompous mistake that got Agamemnon killed. For Odysseus, half the adventure continues after he has seen off Scylla and Charybdis, the Cyclops and Circe, the Lotus Eaters and the Cattle of the Sun. Homecoming is more than a physical arrival. Like the myriad literary successors that have grown like branches and leaves from the great trunk of this epic poem, the Odyssey is a story about the journey through life and time, as well as through space. The perilous maritime journey was not only a Greek poetic theme, but part of Greek lived experience. A fragment of Sappho, discovered on papyrus last year, has the narrator-poet anxiously awaiting her brother Charaxos’s return from a voyage. Aside from the Odyssey, in antiquity there existed an epic account, called Returns, of other Greek heroes’ homecomings from Troy, thought to have included the stories of Agamemnon’s catastrophic return to Argos, only to be slaughtered by his wife Clytemnestra, and Menelaos’s journey back to Sparta, via a long detour to Egypt.
The trackless wastes of the sea were the Greeks’ element. One Marseillais, Pytheas, circumnavigated Britain and perhaps got as far as Denmark and Iceland, and wrote about it in his lost book On the Ocean. They were traders and colonists and explorers. Edith Hall’s book Introducing the Ancient Greeks reminds me that Plato said his people liked to live “like frogs or ants around the pond”. Banish the thoughts of modern nation-state Greece and think instead of the Hellenes as they were, a widely scattered, littoral people, linked by language and custom, spread thinly from Massilia (now Marseille, founded by the Greeks in about 600BC) to the Black Sea. ( Robert Fagles’ translation for Penguin, which I recommend.) Homer’s poem tells of Odysseus’s decade-long attempt to return to his home island of Ithaca – a “man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy”. This is the first one, the big one, the ur-road movie: the Odyssey.
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