The Makers of the Odyssey: Athena and Odysseus
Katia Mitova
Abstract
Why does the ancient Greek epic, the Odyssey, feel so modern? For example, both
the overarching tale of Odysseus’ homecoming and his false tales embedded in the
story use narrative techniques that may appear strikingly modern to today’s
readers. The plot development, too, seems to exhibit an awareness of the creative
process that is usually associated with modernity. In order to explore the apparent
modernity of the Odyssey, this paper approaches the epic as a work of implicit
metafiction. Thus the relationship between Odysseus and Athena is discussed as a
form of creative collaboration between them in the process of plot-weaving. This
process is shaped by the dominant characteristics of the two characters – cunning
intelligence (metis) and multiplicity (polutropia). It is also influenced by
Odysseus’ ambivalent identity, epitomized by the meaning of his name, which
implies simultaneously being in trouble and causing trouble.
Key Words: Homer, Odyssey, Athena, Odysseus, metafiction, modernity,
homecoming, narrative, creativity, creative process.
*****
Most likely, the question about the authorship of the Homeric epics will remain
unresolved. The Iliad and the Odyssey might have been composed by the same or
different authors, by one poet or a committee of poets familiar with the many oral
versions of the Trojan War story cycle. However, all we have as material for
speculation are the two epics’ versions written down in the 6 c. BC, perhaps about
a century and a half after their composition. The story of the Odyssey, however,
contains a metaphor of collaborative authorship – between goddess Athena and
Odysseus – that is worth exploring as a possible projection of the original
composer’s creative process. It could also be seen as a reflection and an elaboration
of the relationship between the implied poet of the Odyssey and the Muse. The
Odyssey’s awareness of its own plot-weaving makes it the first work of implicit
metafiction in western literature.1
1. Metis and polutropia
The characters of Athena and Odysseus possess particular qualities that make them
well-suited for creative collaboration. Both are multifaceted figures in the
tradition,2 but the Odyssey accentuates their craftiness and creativity. The audience
is made aware of this compatibility in the beginning of Book 13, when Odysseus is
finally brought back to his native Ithaca by a Phaeacian ship. He does not
recognize his native land. The first being Odysseus encounters is a young prince-
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like shepherd. As the audience already knows, this is goddess Athena disguised.
Odysseus quickly makes up a story about himself that aims to provoke sympathy in
the stranger. The goddess, pleased by Odysseus’ inventiveness, changes herself
into a woman, beautiful, tall, and skilled in splendid handiwork (xiii.288-9) –
probably the closest to her divine looks, inaccessible to a mortal. She utters words
of appreciation that no other Greek hero has heard before or after:
Any man—any god who met you—would have to be
some champion lying cheat to get past you
for all-round craft and guile! You terrible man,
foxy, ingenious, never tired of twists and tricks—
so, not even here, on native soil, would you give up
those wily tales that Warm the cockles of your heart!
Come, enough of this now. We’re both old hands
at the art of intrigue. Here among mortal men
you’re far the best at tactics, spinning yarns,
and I am famous among the gods for wisdom,
cunning wiles, too. (xiii.291-9)3
Athena and Odysseus are the perfect partners in the cunning arts (kerdea).
Their association in the Odyssey is distinct from any other liaison between a god
and a mortal in classical literature: 4 they share one special quality of mind: mêtis,
or cunning intelligence. The relationship between Athena and Odysseus can be
defined as a partnership because of its complementariness. Athena and Odysseus
seduce each other’s minds. “I think,” Odysseus says, “you are teasing me when
you say that – to beguile my mind” (xiii.326-7).5 But the goddess’ mind has
already been beguiled by Odysseus’ instant invention. In addition, while Odysseus
needs divine help to return to Ithaca, Athena, needs Odysseus’ collaboration to
fulfill her plan. They meet halfway: the goddess creates or alters the circumstances
to make them suit her goal; Odysseus takes care of the rest of the details, and he
acts.
Storymaking, because of the unlimited potential of its material, more than any
other act of making something new, requires the multiplicity and diversity of mêtis
– mêtis pantoiê, as Nestor calls it in the Iliad (XXIII.314). Odysseus’ main mêtisrelated epithets, polumêtis, polumêchanos, poikilomêtês, and polutropos all suggest
multiplicity of mind, or many wiles or devices. As Pietro Pucci points out, the
epithet polutropos defines Odysseus in an intentionally ambiguous way as a man of
many journeys, of many turns, and of many tropes (figures of speech), or
modulations of the voice. 6 The Sirens address him as poluainos (xii.184), which
can be translated as “much praised,” but also “of many stories.”7
If both Athena and Odysseus are in themselves multitudes of possibilities, how
does the particular story of the Odyssey emerge through their collaboration?
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Around which grain of sand does the pearl grow? As discussed earlier, the story
begins with the moment when the situation of indeterminacy in Ithaca and on
Ogygia has reached a stage that requires a resolution. This resolution, however, is
not Athena’s whim; it is (pre)determined by who Odysseus is, by his fate to return
to Ithaca. Pucci observes that Odysseus’ identity and fate are to a great extent
shaped precisely by his “manyness,” which, as a horizontal structure, means
variety; repetition provides the vertical structure that, in turn, “leads to the notion
of constant accumulation and hoarding.”8 Through the repetitions, a certain pattern
emerges from the text’s pulutropia. A. P. David convincingly links this pattern
with the Odyssey’s dance-rhythm composition, detectable on all levels of its epic’s
structure.9 We can imagine the fabula10 of the Odyssey as a zigzagging line that
begins with the end of the Trojan War and ends in Ithaca, whose population is
shaken by the news of the massacre in Odysseus’ court. The plot, on the other
hand, should be represented as a circle, beginning and ending in Ithaca – not a
smooth circular line, but a dance circle, with rhythmical steps back. Because of the
constant turns, the plot’s line seems to be much longer than that of the fabula. 11
2. What’s In a Name?
The fabula of the Odyssey matches the peculiar character of its hero – a man of
twists and turns. It is almost impossible to tell which shapes which. The grain of
sand we were looking for, however, should be something more compact than the
polutropia of the epic and its hero. The meaning of Odysseus’ name seems to be a
better candidate for the role of this grain of sand. Usually, it is withheld and
revealed only as a confirmation of what the inner or outer audience of the Odyssey
has already heard and imagined. It is missing from the proem and does not appear
until line 21 of Book I. The Phaeacians learn the name of their guest only on the
third day of his stay in their city. Polyphemus learns it after he is blinded. When
narrating his false stories, Odysseus avoids introducing himself by name, even a
false one, which allows him to lie without really lying about his identity. We learn
the story of his name – at least as important as its etymology – only in the scar
recognition scene in Book XIX.
Odysseus’ name is discussed by many scholars as the symbolic core of his
character; it is, in ancient fashion, an onoma eponumon, or appropriate for the
designated object. George E. Dimock, Jr., giving credit to a nameless ancient
commentator for this observation, begins his discussion of Odysseus’ name with
the supposition that the epic shows how Odysseus lives up to the meaning of his
name.12 This meaning of the name, its interpreters agree, 13 comes from ôdusao
(second singular aorist from odussomai, meaning “to be wroth,” “to rage”), which
can have both an active and a passive meaning. Thus, Odysseus is both wroth and
causes rage, or, if we are to find just one English word that would preserve the
ambiguity of ôdusao, the best choice – Dimock, Austin, and Clay suggest – seems
to be “trouble.” If Trouble is one’s name, no successful encounter with strangers
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can begin with a personal introduction. The name has to be withheld until Trouble
is known a little better and his suffering has provoked empathy and understanding.
This strategy worked perfectly well with the Phaeacians who gave Trouble an
escort to his native island, forgetting about the prophecy that escorting strangers
might one day cause serious trouble for them. Thus, as Clay remarks, 14 Odysseus
has two aspects, a victim and a victimizer; he is a curse. But is it not strange that a
cunning and loving grandfather would give such a cursed name to his grandson?
Why not something like Poluarêtos, or “longed-for in many prayers,” a name that
Eurycleia seems to suggest (xix.404)? Yet Autolycus demands:
My son-in-law and daughter, give the name I say:
for I come here a curse (odyssamenos) to many
men and women all over the much-nurturing earth;
therefore let his name appropriately be Odysseus. (xix.406-9)15
Does this mean that Autolycus himself is happy to be a curse and is making sure to
pass this trait to his grandson by naming him “appropriately”? Such a question may
not be legitimate when Autolycus, who has Hermes for a patron and friend
(xix.397), is concerned. He is odyssamenos precisely because he is like Hermes,
the trickster god, famous for his stealthiness and false oaths. 16 However, a strong
tie uniting grandfather and grandson can be perceived in the meaning of
Autolycus’ name and Odysseus’ character. Autolycus means something like “Lone
Wolf,”17 or “Loner.”
Being trouble and a curse certainly alienates one from society. As G. S.
Kirk points out in his comparison of the protagonists of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
Achilles “represents some of the commonest aspirations and failings of human
nature, though on a superhuman scale. Odysseus is a more specialized being, a
curious mixture of heroic and intellectual qualities that can never have been
frequent in any society.”18 Odysseus does not represent “the commonest aspirations
and failures of human nature” – he is like no other mortal man in the Homeric
epics. In cunning, he is like Athena and like Hermes, the patron god of his
grandfather. He is helped by both gods in a way that makes him less of “a hero
developing with his circumstances.”19 To be sure, despite all his suffering,
Odysseus does not seem to change much. He is like one of the immortals in this
respect. However, like the poet of the Odyssey, he is very much concerned with
time – always making sure to create the illusion of real time by mentioning exactly
how many days or years each event took. 20
What kind of hero then is this much-suffering and enduring but unchanging
Odysseus? If he is not a tragic hero, then perhaps he is a comic hero, some
interpreters reason. Or, as Longinus confidently explains, Odysseus is the hero
produced by Homer’s declining poetic genius and calmed passions of an old man,
and the Odyssey is “a comedy of manners.”21 I would like to propose a different
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possibility that becomes apparent if the Odyssey is approached as a work of
metafiction.
3. The Making of the Odyssey
The polutropia of Odysseus’ character, its ambivalences, inconsistencies, and
cautious nobodiness, so pertinent to storytelling, the suffering that he turns into
stories worthy of a bard, his ability to create the illusion of different identities as
the circumstances require it, the impossibility of accounting for the truthfulness of
his fantastic adventures, the dance-like rhythm of his prolonged voyage and its all
too well ordered chiastic structure, and, last, but not least, the difficulties
encountered by anyone who tries to apply a strict moral judgment to the character
of Odysseus – all that, considered together, looks very much like an uncanny
anticipation of the modern writer’s creative potential.
It is clear that, despite the fact that Odysseus is able to charm the
Phaeacians or Eumaeus as if he were a minstrel taught by the god (xvii.518), no
one in the Odyssey mistakes him for a minstrel nor does Athena disguise him as a
minstrel (though this seems to be a possibility with interesting potential). For one
thing, Odysseus is not praying to the Muse for inspiration and he is not using the
lyre. Second, like a modern autobiographical writer, he presents his story as a
personal experience and tells it in a first-person narrative. Third, Odysseus’ stories
and those of a minstrel have radically different purposes. While a minstrel, moved
by the Muse, sings for the song’s sake and to entertain his audience, Odysseus’
stories – all tales of woe – are a “stranger’s stratagem.” As Glenn W. Most
argues,22 the mechanism and economy of the stranger’s stratagem are focused on
winning the audience’s sympathy and obtaining help. Most clearly distinguishes
between the non-aesthetic purpose of the stranger’s story and its aesthetic
reception. But is Odysseus’ situation that different from that of a modern writer
who is always in the position of a stranger aspiring to win his audience? Do tales of
woe not prevail in fiction of quality? A happy ending might work in a story that
has already won the trust of the reader, but success stories belong to the genre of
guidebooks, which does not have aesthetic ambitions. Amazingly, it would seem
then that the image of the modern writer was anticipated in the Odyssey.
The character of Odysseus, however, is only one part of this image. It is
complemented by the character of Athena, whose plan of fulfilling Odysseus’ fate
is in fact the plot of the Odyssey. Kirk seems right in his intuition that Odysseus’
insufficiency as a hero is due to Athena’s role in the Odyssey. If Athena and
Odysseus are projections of the poet’s creative powers, their main concern is not
Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, but the story of this return. To be sure, this goal is
carefully camouflaged. Athena tells her father Zeus, in front of the divine
assembly, that her heart is torn for Odysseus (i.48) and complains that the gods
have forgotten him (v.11). But, as Odysseus plainly puts it, after the sacking of
Troy, Athena herself has disappeared from his life to reappear, disguised, only in
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the tenth year, on the Phaeacian shore and lead him to Alcinous’ palace (xiii, 31624). Athena seems to appear only after a critical amount of material for a story has
accumulated. This explains why Odysseus is first shown on Calypso’s island,
mournfully longing for Ithaca (v.153) and he always says to his hosts he wants to
go home, but in fact he is largely responsible for the twists and turns that prolong
his voyage.
There is enough evidence of Odysseus’ awareness of the making of the
story of the Odyssey, in which he is much more than a hero. For example, at the
end of his nearly twenty-two-hundred-line story told at the Phaeacian court,
Odysseus refers to Calypso, but refrains from telling more about that last
adventure. “It was only yesterday I told it to you and your noble wife. It seems to
me detestable to repeat a story that was already told so clearly” (xii.451-3). We
remember, however, that Odysseus only mentions Calypso when Arete, puzzled by
the fact that the stranger wears some of the finest garments she personally has
made for her daughter’s dowry, inquires who he is (vii.240-66). Odysseus makes it
known that Calypso is the goddess who gave him even better immortal clothes
(vii.260) and whose marriage proposal he refused. But Odysseus did not tell a story
about Calypso to the Phaecians; it was the poet of the Odyssey who told that story
to the audience and it is the poet who does not want to repeat it. By the same token,
it is the poet who makes sure to tell Odysseus’ adventures early in the plot, to an
audience of strangers, in order to avoid telling them in detail at home to Penelope
and his family – a friendly environment in which “the stranger’s stratagem” would
be pointless and the story can never be that enthralling and artful.
Another example of the peculiar role of Odysseus as both a hero and a
projection of the author’s creative intentions is his request to Penelope to order
some older servant to wash his feet. Of course he knows that most probably this
would be Eurycleia and that she would recognize him by the scar. But if he wants
to be recognized, why does he seem to be surprised, why does he threaten his
nurse, if she does not keep the secret, to slay her along with the other serving
women (xix.479-90)? This apparent contradiction could be explained again by the
special function of Odysseus as a director of the plot, in which he is at the same
time an actor. It is the poet of the Odyssey who needs the recognition scene in
order to finally reveal the core of Odysseus’ identity – the story and the meaning of
his name. The plot’s hero, however, in order to fulfill his plan, needs to avoid
recognition – Odysseus the actor contradicts Odysseus the director.
Notes
1
The metafictional quality of the Odyssey is discussed at length in Katia Mitova,
‘Erotic Uncertainty: Toward a Poetic Psychology of Literary Creativity’ (PhD
diss., University of Chicago, 2005).
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2
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, in Cunning Intelligence in Greek
Culture and Society (first French edition 1974), tr. by Janet Lloyd (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 177-258, outline more than a dozen
facets of Athena as a goddess of many minds and many devices (polumêtis and
poluboulos). Paul Friedrich’s comparison of Athena with Aphrodite, Hera, and
Artemis, in The Meaning of Aphrodite (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), shows a continuum of qualities and activities broader than
that of any other goddess.
3
The Odyssey, tr. by Robert Fagles, 296.
4
It is not based on kinship like the association between Thetis and Achilles in the
Iliad or between Aphrodite and Aeneas, in Virgil’s Aeneid, and it is not explicitly
erotic like many other relationships between immortals and mortals. Admittedly,
Athena helps Heracles to accomplish some of his heroic feats – for instance, to
remove the skin from the Nemean Lion or to defeat the Stymphalian Birds. But this
association is episodic. The same can be said about Athena’s support for the
Achaean leaders in the Iliad: she interferes to restrain Achilles, as he is about to
slay Agamemnon (I.194-8), guards Menelaus (IV.128) and Odysseus (XI.437), and
mounts the car of Diomedes (V.837), but she never collaborates with any hero in
the way she does with Odysseus in the Odyssey.
5
The verb êperopeuô, which means to deceive, trick or beguile, can have sexual
connotations. See xv.419, 425.
6
Pietro Pucci, The Song of the Sirens. Essays on Homer (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 25. Pucci discusses Antistenes’ fifth-century
commentary on the “polutropia” of the Odyssey.
7
Of the numerous discussions of Odysseus’ epithets, the following three seem to
treat his multiplicity most thoughtfully: William B. Stanford, “Homer’s Use of
Personal Poly-Compounds,” Classical Philology, 1950, 45.108-10; John H. Finley,
Jr., Homer’s Odyssey (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 34-5; and, especially,
Pietro Pucci, The Song of the Sirens..., 23-9.
8
Pietro Pucci. Ibid., 23.
9
A. P. David, The Dance of the Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming, 2006).
10
Under “fabula,” I understand a reconstruction of the events in the story in
chronological order. See, for example, Mieke Bal, Narratology. Introduction to the
theory of Narrative, tr. by Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1985), 11-47.
11
A closer look at the fabula, however, especially the part of it related by Odysseus
to the Phaeacians, shows that although it is chronologically straight, it exemplifies
the pattern of turns characteristic of the epic’s plot. Thus, instead of going straight
to Ithaca, Odysseus and his fleet turn to plundering the city of the Cicones (a
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second Troy, in a sense). Then they try to go straight to Ithaca, but a two-day storm
changes their course and brings them to the Lotus-eaters, where eating the lotus
turns them forgetful. Odysseus manages to extract his people from this state and
they resume their voyage to Ithaca, but the next adventure – the blinding of
Poseidon’s son Polyphemus – brings about a major turn in Odysseus’ fate. Again,
he tries to go straight home, and – with Aeolus’ help – this almost happens, but his
envious companions open the bag of winds thinking that it contains a treasure, and
the ship is blown back to Aeolus. After being rejected by Aeolus as men hated by
the gods, Odysseus and his companions make a radical turn back in three steps.
First, they go to the Laestrygonians, who very much resemble the Cyclops in their
cannibalism. Then to Circe, where they spent a year, eating and drinking. Finally,
Odysseus descends to the Underworld – a semi-death experience, reminiscent of
the perils of the Trojan War. From this point everything starts again, following the
same pattern of movement forward with one-step turns back, from Circe and the
Sirens through Scylla to Thrinacia, and, after the killing of Helios’ cattle, back, in
two steps, through Charybdis to Calypso, whose world resembles those of the
Lotus-eaters, Circe, Nekyia, and the Sirens. The third step back, to Phaeacia, is
postponed by seven years. But most importantly, because of the chiastic structure
of the story, the second set of three steps back brings Odysseus closer to his
starting point, just after the Trojan War, from where he would have gone straight
home – if the final destination were more important to him than the voyage as it
was, for example, to Nestor
12
George E. Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus” (first published in 1956 in Hudson
Review), Essays on the Odyssey. Selected Modern Criticism, ed. by Charles H.
Taylor, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 54.
13
Elaborate discussions of the meaning of Odysseus’ name can be found, for
instance, in Jenny Strauss Clay, The Wrath of Athena…, 54-74; Norman Austin,
“Name Magic in the Odyssey,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 5 (1972),
1-19; and Simon Goldhill, The Poets Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek
Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 24-8.
14
Jenny Strauss Clay, The Wrath of Athena…, 62, 64.
15
In Jenny Strauss Clay’s translation. Ibid., 59.
16
Norman Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (New York: Vintage
Books, 1969), 8-9.
17
Jenny Strauss Clay, The Wrath of Athena…, 59.
18
“G. S. Kirk on the Odyssey as a Less Tragic Poem than the Iliad,” Homer’s
Odyssey. A Contemporary Literary Views Book, ed. by Harold Bloom (Broomall,
Pa.: Chelsea House Publishers, 1996), 62.
19
Ibid., 63.
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20
A careful analysis of the time-table of the plot of the Odyssey, however, clearly
shows that the poet is interested only in creating the illusion of real time. Irene de
Jong, in A Narratological Commentary…, 588, proposes a time-table according to
which the plot of the Odyssey, from the divine assembly to Odysseus’ reunion with
Laertes, develops within 41 days. Hermes is sent to Calypso on the seventh day,
and the suitors are killed on the fortieth day. However, if Telemachus’ journey is to
really fit in this scheme, it should have lasted 34 days, while from Telemachus’
perspective it lasts about 10 days. Time in the fantastic realm from which Odysseus
returns seems to be more than twice denser.
21
Longinus, “On the Sublime,” tr. by W. R. Roberts, Critical Theory since Plato,
ed. by Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 83.
22
Glenn W. Most, “The Stranger’s Stratagem: Self-Disclosure and SelfSufficiency in Greek Culture,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 109 (1989), 114-33,
and “The Structure and Function of Odysseus’ Apologoi,” Transactions of the
American Philological Association 119 (1989), 15-30.