What is it?

How do you evaluate the standard?

Recently, we’ve become aware of two students who have been reading the Odyssey in school.  One is the daughter of a long-time friend and correspondent, and she didn’t like it.  That opinion brought us up short.  Didn’t like it?  Well, we know plenty of reasons students wouldn’t enjoy the work: it’s long, and literary, tedious in places, and often utterly alien in outlook.  But she has a strong literary background; she’s read and enjoyed War and Peace on her own.  She is certainly a capable and motivated student.  But she didn’t like it.

That made us re-examine our whole idea of what the work is.  For a long time our contact with it has been as a sort of mine, where people dig for information on certain themes, mostly those for which few or no other contemporary sources are available.  Obviously there are things like the ideal of hospitality toward strangers, the proper ways to sacrifice to the gods, good and evil actions, wisdom and folly, even the characters of the gods themselves. The tales of wonders in distant lands were no doubt prompted by the voyages of Greeks in the ninth and eighth centuries BC, which took them to the Black Sea and throughout the Mediterranean and maybe beyond.  There are connections with other stories of the Greeks, some found in later dramas and poems, some lost except for their mention here.

Mining, however, is problematic if we take it too seriously.  The society and situation it depicts never existed.  It is based on a sort of folk memory of the Mycenaean Age, centuries before its composition, when there were true heroes and fabulously rich kings.  It was even composed in a special dialect of Greek that no one actually spoke.

Obviously, if we expect it to be something it’s not, we’re going to be disappointed.  It is not a romance, a drama, a novel, a lyric poem, an essay.  It fails to be something one can read at a sitting, like a short story; but then it’s not a short story.  It’s an epic; but that does us no good, because the very term “epic” was invented to cover this and the Iliad.

In antiquity they were considered the greatest of Greek works.  (A major reason, the quality of its poetry, is inaccessible to most of us now.  Comparing translations reveals how much we lose by reading an English version.)  Indeed, they were the standards by which any Classical Greek composition was judged.  How do you judge a standard?

Maybe we can start with a comment by the other Odyssey-reading student, one of our tutor’s regulars.  He had been set to annotate, that is, find passages illustrating certain themes (chosen by his teacher).  He had no difficulty with this task, though it was sometimes tedious.  Our tutor asked, out of curiosity, what he thought of the work.  The student said it was pretty good, but he’d rather just read it as a story.

So perhaps we should just judge the Odyssey as a story.