perhaps because the messages they carry transcend time. Fundamentally many of the old stories we still value have moral or philosophical components that are foundational to our cultures.
I don't think moral and philosophical conclusions are universal in any way. In fact, there's a lot of mismatch between our everyday modern morals and the ancient (or even recent) moral and political religious texts.
I do think there's universality of moral and philosophical questions. King Cyrus and #metoo debated the same questions. Plato/Socrates, René Descartes & The Matrix constructed story worlds to highlight the same epistemological problem (what if the world isn't real).
Good stories give you a richness of scenarios and questions to discuss, whether you agree or dissent to the author's conclusions.
I totally agree. Hence why I didn't say they necessarily provided the answers. Though I think our cultures are often deeply intertwined with their religions, which do provide a framework of answers to many of the questions (whether you actually practice said religion or not).
What does that mean, practically? For Odysseus for example, what foundational message does it have? I read it and it was interesting and even fun, I don't know what philosophical or moral component you have in mind. It had nuanced characters, but even that seems to be ignored by our popular culture which focuses exclusively on sirens and such.
A lot of philosophical and moral questions are fairly universal. They get discussed in ancient law codes, scripture & modern parliaments. Is prostituion immoral? What defines rape? King Cyrus ruled on these. They're discussed in the Bible. You'll find similar debates in modern courts and legislatures.
For Odysseus, some big philosophical themes are hubris/pride, worthiness. Ancient Greek literature is pretty obsessed with these, especially pride.
These aren't really big moral themes/questions today, but they are pretty popular literary themes. Maybe it's universality. Maybe it's Greek influence. Maybe it's coincidence.
I don't think these texts surveillance be because of universality. I do think that because they survived, we learn that some things are pretty universal, that we have deep spiritual similarity to bronze age Aegean pirates.
I think there are some morals in the Odyssey. For example, the assembly at Ithaca in book 2 provides some insight into justice in ancient Greece. Telemachus appears to escalate through three authorities. First, is his own strength, second is the people of Ithaca:
Now we have no man like Odysseus in command
to drive this curse from the house. We ourselves?
We’re hardly the ones to fight them off. All we’d do
is parade our wretched weakness. A boy inept at battle.
Oh I’d swing to attach if I had the power in me.
By god, it’s intolerable, what they do—disgrace,
my house a shambles! You should be ashamed yourselves,
mortified in the face of neighbors living round about!
Fear the gods’ wrath—before they wheel in outrage
and make these crimes recoil on your heads. (2.57-67)
And when the towns people refuse to do anything, Telemachus escalates to the third authority—the gods:
“But if you decide the fare is better, richer here,
destroying one man’s goods and going scot-free,
all right then, carve away!
But I’ll cry out to the everlasting gods in hopes
that Zeus will pay you back with a vengeance—all of you
destroyed in my house while I go scot-free myself!” (2.141–5)
It seems that fear of the gods was the main source of justice in Greek society. Since there were no contracts or court system to build trust between individuals, people relied on oaths—and the fear of the gods if one broke their oath—to build trust. Similarly, if one could not find justice through strength of your fellow men, you could threaten the wrongdoers with a curse. If they feared the gods, they make respond.
In such a society an atheist or godless person could not be trusted. Right after Telemachus threatens the suitors with a curse, Zeus sends a sign down in the form of two eagles. One of the old townsmen, who excelled in reading omens and bird signs, said that the eagles were a sign from Zeus that the suitors would get what is coming to them. And the suitors respond:
“Stop, old man!”
Eurymachus, Polybus’ son, rose up to take him on.
“Go home and babble your omens to your children—
save them from some catastrophe coming soon.
I’m a better hand than you at reading portents.
Flocks of birds go fluttering under the sun’s rays,
not all are fraught with meaning.” (2.177–83)
To the Greeks that read this, I think the Odyssey would be affirmation that the gods did exist and that the suitors were in the wrong. Perhaps this could be interpreted as a moral lesson?
(Quotes are taken from the excellent Robert Fagles translation)
It does not seem that fear of gods would move people in town to do anything there. I read it more as expression of Telemachus anger and helplessness. He can do nothing except threaten gods, people in town know it and don't care. The gods don't come to help either. Only Athena helps them, but it is because Odysseus is her favorite and she is helping him whether he is right or wrong. Poseidon would not help Odysseus, because he blinded his son. Poseidon would not care one bit about what happen in the household and prefers Odysseus dead. Athena don't care about Poseidon son in particular.
It did not seem to me that gods would be source of justice. They are source of power and have own politics that is independent of right and wrong. They just are and are strong and characters invoking them don't necessary mean anything for gods actions. (It was also my impression that characters like to blame gods for their own bad decisions when they are about to talk about their own mistakes.)
You are welcome. I love thinking and discussing mythology and religion.
> It did not seem to me that gods would be source of justice. They are source of power and have own politics that is independent of right and wrong.
In general, I agree with this statement. I think one needs to stretch to find justice in the Odyssey, and even more so in the Iliad. That being said, I do believe there are some early inklings of justice and morality which evolved and grew with Greek civilization, and by the later classical period, Zeus was increasingly associated with Justice.
Also, Hesiod, who wrote at about the same time as Homer, certainly associated justice with Zeus. Here is a quote from Works and Days:
> You too, my lords, attend to this justice-doing of hours. For close at hand among men there are immortals taking note of all those who afflict each other with crooked judgements, heedless of the gods' punishment. Thrice countless are they on the rich-pastured earth, Zeus' immortal watchers of mortal men, who watch over judgements and wickedness, clothed in darkness, traveling about the land on every road. And there is the maiden Right, daughter of Zeus, esteemed and respected by the gods in Olympus; and whenever someone does her down with crooked abuse, at once she sits by Zeus her father, Kronos' son, and reports the men's unrighteous mind, so that the people may pay for the crimes of their lords who balefully divert justice from its course by pronouncing it crooked.
Homer mentions a somewhat similar (although different) idea in book 19 of the Iliad:
"Zeus be my witness first, the highest, best of gods!
Then Earth, the Sun, and Furies stalking the world below
to wreak revenge on the dead who broke their oaths---
I swear I never laid a hand on the girl Briseis
Hesiod wasn't as influential as Homer, but he was still quite influential on Greek culture. There is a story that Hesiod and Homer had a poetry competition, and Hesiod won. Anyway, this idea of justice appears to have been present in both authors to a very limited degree.
The 1951 article, "The Gods of Homer," by G. M. A Grub, has an interesting discussion of morality in Homer and how it evolved. You can read the article for free, if you have a JSTOR account, here:
Grube's main premise is that the gods of Homer came from an earlier conception of the gods as "forces of nature." After Homer, or the poets before Homer, personified the gods, it was inevitable that they would become moralized over time. Grube believes that Homer is near the start of this process. This would explain why some of the stories in the Iliad and Odyssey represent the gods as being essentially unethical; these stores were from before the gods were expected to be moral.
I think most of the lessons from foundational stories are so internalised now that they seem stupidly obvious. To take your example of the sirens, why is that idea one that we resonate with? Because it's valuable as a metaphor and an archetypal example: we even use the term directly (ie. "siren song") to refer to real-life instances of the archetype. Other concepts that refer to the same archetype are the idea of no free lunch, if it's too good to be true then it probably is, and so on.
These archetypes are compounded lessons that we've absorbed culturally for millennia, and continue to reflect on via our own recreations in the various arts.
Frankly, given how small and unimportant sirens incident is, I assume it is because they are tempting and female and thus painters had an excuse to imagine and paint naked women (they are not described naked in the poem). As in, it is short fun part of the poem that sparks imagination.
It is short and more fun to paint or tell then Penelope being helpless alone in her chamber.
Perhaps, for sirens at least. But that was just an example. I haven't read The Odyssey myself so I'm not well placed to give further specific examples but I was trying to point to the idea that old cultural mythos and stories are there to provide instantiations of archetypes.
I'm not sure your disparagement of classical painters holds much weight though, given they painted plenty of naked women without needing an "excuse". The motivations seem more to do with notions of depicting beauty or purity than just being lecherous.
Sirens story as in poem has no beauty nor purity in it. Really. Sirens are not described and promises to give him knowledge, mostly about Trojan war. Nothing beautiful or pure about that.
And I think that some painters liked to paint naked women and customers liked those paintings without it being necessary disparaging. The line between "lecherous" and "beauty or purity" is mostly the one of framing - whether you are determined to see it as good or bad.
Nevetheless, it is a projection of own ideas into old story, because we want to see ourselves in the oldest known poems. People want our civilization to spring from that, so they project onto it. It is not like every sirens painting painter would read the poem, they heard the story as part of their education and imagined the rest.
> Sirens story as in poem has no beauty nor purity in it. Really. Sirens are not described and promises to give him knowledge, mostly about Trojan war. Nothing beautiful or pure about that.
I wasn't claiming they were. Just that that seemed to be the classical framing of them. I can see how luring in sailors with beautiful song could be transferred onto luring with physical beauty and how that could map to classical femininity, but the relation does not affect the original meaning.
> The line between "lecherous" and "beauty or purity" is mostly the one of framing - whether you are determined to see it as good or bad.
I don't think it is. Lechery is linked to sexual gratification, basically voyeurism. I'm essentially saying I don't think these paintings existed for sexual purposes. Beauty is more of an aesthetic appreciation, or can be used as a symbol for higher values (and ugliness as a symbol for moral ugliness).
> It is not like every sirens painting painter would read the poem, they heard the story as part of their education and imagined the rest.
This is why moral tales are a good framework for thinking, rather than always giving you the answer. They give us symbols with which to reason, and so much of our conversational reasoning is performed using metaphors and idioms.
> I can see how luring in sailors with beautiful song could be transferred onto luring with physical beauty and how that could map to classical femininity, but the relation does not affect the original meaning.
That has more to do with artist then original poem. Sirens promiss knowledge, in particular knowledge of who did what and how who ended during trojan war. Odysseus is tempted to learn what happened to his friends during war. The classical feminity of Christian culture is not the same thing as story in original poem. It changes meaning a lot, into a different story. Projection and replacement of original knowledge/war info into "classical feminity" is the sort of thing I was talking about.
As for beauty, I don't see much difference. Or rather, I don't find it important for anything except value judgement of painter. If painter used sirens as excuse to paint nude sirens out of sense of beauty, my original point applies the same. The poem does not really have higher values there anyway. It has less to do with poem itself and more to do with what artists wants to paint for his own reasons.
> This is why moral tales are a good framework for thinking, rather than always giving you the answer.
Why do you think Odysseus is moral tale? It does not read like moral tale. Whatever moral tales are seems irrelevant to original poem. This one is even the part of story told by Odysseus himself when he is trying to please audience instead of by neutral narrator. The poem is pretty clear about Odysseus not being completely reliable narrator. Odysseus lies or pretends to be someone else often, so treating whatever he says as moral tale strikes me as odd.
The most important part of that episode is the way Odysseus develops a plan to hear their song and live to tell the tale. Today it might seem minor, but people have been fascinated by this character for centuries (Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, and so on).
To sum it up, Odysseus is the pursuer of knowledge par excellence, hero and everyman at the same time. And this is arguably one of the cornerstones of the (western, at least) way we see ourselves.
The goddess tells him what to do, he does not devise the plan. Odysseus is not everyman in any meaningful sense nor is he seeking knowledge except that short incident and even there knowledge seem to be info about war he fought in the past. And frankly, I dont think he really represents something you should strive for.
She gives him the choice to steer clear of them, or to risk his life and that of his party to listen to them. He decided to take the risky road just for the sake of knowledge, which was a powerful message in prehistoric Greece. Again, it is so ingrained in today's culture that it seems trivial.
> nor is he seeking knowledge except that short incident
Well let us just agree to disagree here. Most of the episodes boil down to "The gang lands to get (rest/food/water), Odysseus wants to know more about the place, many die".
Just look at Book Nine: the Lotus Eaters and Polyphemus incidents are totally Odysseus' fault. There was no need at all to explore these lands.
> And frankly, I dont think he really represents something you should strive for.
I agree with you: while in the antiquity he has been regarded as a model, today Odysseus represents who we actually are, as beings torn between knowledge and suffering.
1.) Both choices are risky. There is no way for Odysseus to avoid danger. There is high chance the other road would be even more dangerous then sirens.
2.) She tells him exactly what to do. He does not devise plan.
3.) No Odysseus is not seeking knowledge unless you are really trying hard to see it there. Looking what I can steel can be twisted into knowledge seeking, but I don't think it is too good interpretation.
4.) There is no reason to think Odysseus was seen as model in antiquity. That is projecting 19 century adventure books interpretation into much more nuanced and much better written text.
Odysseus is not torn between knowledge and suffering. He seeks to go home plain and simple and weeps when it fails. He wants to go home and he led all his men to death.
I think the big question the Odyssey asks is what does time and violence do to people. What did Odysseus' journey do to him, what did it do to his son who grew up without him, what did it do to his wife and father who had to go on living like he was dead, what did it do the political system back home with their leader and so many young men gone and a void there where the suitors begin to fill. And once they are all reunited after so many years, what then. Athena grants them a happy ending, restoring Odysseus' youth, but what about the rest of us.
Not the OP, but surely one of the most pertinent moral positions of the Odyssey is the idea that justice will prevail: the good guy wins and gets the girl, the bad guys lose.
I don't think that is the message of Odysseus at all. Story and its characters (including Odysseus himself) are way more nuanced then that. It is definitely not the simple cheap good guy wins the day story. And I also think that poem ending is more ambiguous - while it is clear that killing suitors is ok, the killing slave girls is less so.
> surely one of the most pertinent moral positions of the Odyssey is the idea that justice will prevail: the good guy wins and gets the girl, the bad guys lose.
There's nothing good about Odysseus; he's a bad person and, IMHO, one of the most annoying, obnoxious personalities in literature. He leads his group around murdering and pillaging, not to mention using and manipulating - he's renowned for his lying and trickery. He gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego - at one point much of his fleet is sunk and men die because he pointlessly taunts enemies as they sail away. But if someone should act against him, he switches to victimhood and moral outrage - poor Odysseus! All his troubles and tribulations!
In the end he returns home alone, having gotten all his men killed, and encounters the 'suitors', who presume that with him missing for 20 years, likely he won't return. They are peaceably [EDIT: up to a point then that changed; see the reply below], though obnoxiously in some ways, competing to see who gets his throne and his wife's hand - leaving the choice to her [EDIT: though as the reply below states, she is being forced to marry one of them; she can't say no]. He slaughters them all, indiscriminately, for their presumption. The slave girls (did I mention that he takes and keeps slaves?) that are suspected (there is no trial or evidence or anything more than someone's accusation) of the grave crime of dalliances with the suitors, he unceremoniously has a rope wrapped around all their necks and hangs them together. Then he says, we need to replenish our stocks - depleted so unfairly by the mean suitors! - so we'll soon set out to raid and steal them.
Is this a good man? Did the good guy win? The Odyssey is a rich story of and study in personality and in human relations, and in politics; it's not at all about justice.
You left out that suitors are planning to kill Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus. That is not a minor detail. The suitors are described as abusive. Penelope does not want them there and Telemachus does not want them there. Both complain about suitors wasting house resources, killing animals, giving nothing useful in return and slowly bankrupting household. Pretty much any character complains about their behavior.
Penelope does not want any of them, she is however forced to choose. Telemachus ask them to leave the house openly, they refuse and treat him badly.
Penelope wants Odysseus come home soon and hopes for him coming home, because only him is assumed to be able to get suitors out of house. So much for Penelope freely choosing from them.
Odysseus is pirate and warlord through and poem is not hiding it. It is about warlord without glorifying the said warlord the way action movies tend to glorify similar characters.
> You left out that suitors are planning to kill Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus. ... Penelope does not want any of them, she is however forced to choose.
Agreed, those are major omissions on my part (due to writing quickly and not thinking it through, sorry). However, they don't change my overall point. The worst person in the story is Odysseus (unless I'm overlooking some secondary character), who would have done the same and worse, and if there was any justice he would have been captured, tried, and imprisoned long ago - by the Trojans before the story began, in fact.
> Pretty much any character complains about their behavior.
That's not a reason to murder people. Also, the narrator is very sympathetic to Odysseus and makes his enemies unlikable, as narrators do. I take the narrator's depictions of them with a grain of salt.
Only suitors are so unlikeable. The other characters are either described by Odysseus himself or not nearly as much unlikeable. And also, narrator describe moments when one of suitors attempt to calm their behavior. I don't think narrator goes out of way as contemporary "narrators do". This is imo where Odysseus is different then action movies and adventure books, altrough people project that attitude on the poem.
The characters complains are concrete and provide multiple vitnesses to the abuse. The suitors are described to be abusive, threaten people living in house, mistreat them, kill animals and refuse to leave with open threat of violence if you try to make them leave.
The good innocent boys interpretation is not supported by the text, even if you mistrust the narrator. You can make that case about cyclop where Odysseus is intruder, but not about suitors.
I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I also think you need to pay closer attention to the text itself. You say that Odysseus "gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego", but the seventh line of the poem says that Odysseus' men perished because of "their own recklessness" (αὐτῶν ... σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν). Their own recklessness. Not Odysseus' ego.
"It's not at all about justice."
The poem is intensely interested in justice. The very first speech in the poem (1.32ff.) is all about justice, as is the second speech (1.45ff.). Characters in the poem, both gods and mortals, reflect on justice all the time. It may not be what you consider justice, but it's justice in the poem's own terms.
> I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I think you are mistaken to take this cliche and try to apply it to real people. I'm not really interested in your characterizations of me. Stick to the subject and leave other commenters out of it.
It's a mistake to take the narrator at face value. When Odysseus yells his real name to the Cyclops - without which Poseidon wouldn't have had a vendetta and kept them on that long journey - or when he taunts the giants who throw the boulders and kill his men and destroy his ships, it is his recklessness and not his men's that gets them killed. When he dallies in his flings with Circe and Calypso, while others wait and suffer, that's on his lust and ego. His men do some stupid things too, but it would not be hard to attribute that to his leadership - there are no bad followers, as they say ...
The narrator, either in earnest or maybe with some tongue in cheek, loves Odysseus no matter what he does. But if we are to read any story critically, we can't trust narrators any more than the characters they describe, something especially true in epics from the Odyssey to the Inferno to Moby Dick.
In the Odyssey people talk about the politics of power, how angering the gods gets bad results and so you'd better respect them; and they talk about fairness for themselves in the selfish way that everyone does - disregarding how they treat others. But those things aren't morality. The same things others are cursed for are what Odysseus is lionized for by the narrator and others. The only higher 'morality' is the politics on Olympus of Athena's and Poseidon's dispute over Odysseus' fate.
There is much discussion of the treatment of strangers and guests, one of those rules of the gods. However, I see it as more an issue of human relations - what do you do with strangers? whom do you trust? - there is no consistent enforcement by the gods or consequence when the rules are violated.
