The cave of the Nymphs: Odyssey 13.96–112

The Phaiakes deliver Odysseus to his home island, Ithake, leaving him asleep on the shore. When he wakes up, he hides their gifts to him in a nearby cave:

At the head of the harbour is a long-leafed olive tree;
and near it, a cave, lovely and shaded,
sacred to Nymphs, who are called Naiads.
In it there are jars and amphoras
of stone; and bees store honey in them.
And there are stone looms, long, where Nymphs
weave cloths of shimmering sea-dye, a wonder to see;
and ever-flowing waters. And there are two entrances.
The one to the north is where humans gain access,
the one to the south is more divine: not that way
do men enter — that is the path for immortals.

The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry famously wrote an essay on this passage, interpreting it in allegorical terms (Lamberton 1983). There’s no good reason to think it’s a real cave: even Porphyry reports that no ancient geographical writer could identify it. And the Odyssey’s sense of geography is unrealistic at the best of times.

Real caves

That hasn’t stopped the modern trend for identifying real places as the setting for scenes in the Odyssey. Fans have identified the cave of the Nymphs with multiple real caves: Loizos’ Cave, at Polis Beach; Marmarospilia (‘marble cave’), near Vathi; and Lake Melissani on Kefalonia.

Ancient people left religious votive offerings in these caves, dedicated to a range of divinities, and in a few late cases they seem to have done so under the influence of the Odyssey. But that was centuries later. It doesn’t mean the Odyssey itself is thinking of realist landscapes: as we saw in looking at the wanderings, the Odyssey’s idea of prehistory is related to reality, but it’s a fictional alternate prehistoric reality.

Still, here are a few more details on these candidates.

Polis Beach, Ithaki. Until 1953 Loizos’ Cave was on the north side of the bay, at top. (Image source: DiscoverGreece.com)

Loizos’ Cave was destroyed by the 1953 earthquake, but in the 1930s it had been surveyed by the British School at Athens. This cave did have older votive offerings, some Iron Age, and a few from the Bronze Age. Where it’s possible to identify the divinities that votive offerings are dedicated to, they’re mostly Olympian gods, especially Hera and Artemis. Finds relating to nymphs or Odysseus are late: there are some Hellenistic-era nymph reliefs; and, among a hundred-odd clay masks found in the cave, there’s one mask of a female face, dating to the 2nd/1st century BCE, with ‘prayer to Odysseus’ written on the back. These don’t suggest the Odyssey had this cave in mind in the 7th century BCE: they suggest people in the Roman era were influenced by Homer. The main attraction of this cave as a candidate actually lies in twelve 9th century BCE bronze cauldrons, though they aren’t specific to any divinity, and the context suggests that if they were dedicated to a specific divinity it would most likely be Hera. See further Antonaccio 1995: 152–155. Note that some finds were apparently stolen by Schliemann, who visited the cave in the 1860s, and are presumably lost forever.

Marmarospilia near Vathi, Ithaki, photographed by Teun de Visser, July 2026. (Image source: Google Maps)

Marmarospilia (‘marble cave’) is signposted locally as ‘Cave of Nymphs’ (Σπήλαιο Νυμφών), with UNESCO endorsement — in spite of the fact that it’s 190 metres above sea level, more than a kilometre from the head of the bay where Vathi is located, and the entrance faces away from the bay. It is widely claimed — falsely — that there used to be a second entrance downhill by the bay: that’s wishful thinking, trying to make it sound more like the cave in Odyssey 13. In reality the cave extends about 25 m into the hillside, sloping upwards to the east. The identification with the Odyssey’s cave was proposed by Anna Petroheilou in 1971. The cave is normally closed because of damage done by archaeological excavations in 1998–2002, which left the cave unsafe, and reportedly destroyed many of the cave’s speleothems.

Map of Marmarospilia, rebranded as ‘Cave of Nymphs’: sign located at cave entrance, photographed by Teun de Visser, July 2026. The scale (at right) appears to be in decimetres: another part of the sign reports that the ‘big chamber’ is 10 by 13 metres. (Image source: Google Maps).

Melissani is actually an underground lake in a sinkhole, which was exposed when the roof collapsed in the 1953 earthquake. No scholars have identified it with Odysseus’ Nymph cave (so far as I know), but some tourism materials do, probably because it is extremely colourful with the roof gone. A cave on Kefalonia is under consideration thanks to the theory that ‘Homer’s Ithake’ shouldn’t be identified with modern Ithaki but with the Paliki peninsula of western Kefalonia (though Melissani is not on Paliki).

The Paliki theory is associated with Spiridon Marinatos and Robert Bittlestone. It’s motivated by two false assumptions: (1) Homer is always realist, and the job of modern researchers is to find the reality that corresponds to Homer; (2) geographical descriptions in the Odyssey are always rigorously accurate. Bittlestone, for reference, localises Odysseus’ cave at a hypothetical cave that he thinks must have once existed at Atheras Beach, which he calls ‘Phorcys Bay’ in anticipation of his own theory (Bittlestone 1998: 418–431).

Homeric allegories

When Porphyry wrote his essay on the cave, there was already a long-standing tradition of interpreting Homer allegorically. Where some modern fans like to pretend everything in Homer is literally real, the ancient allegorists liked to treat the poems as hidden knowledge in code. A notable work is Herakleitos’ Homeric problems (1st/2nd century CE), which sees all kinds of meteorological, psychological, and cosmogonic symbolism in Homer. But the tradition goes back centuries: way back in the 6th century BCE Theagenes of Rhegion was already interpreting Homer’s gods as metaphors for natural forces — Hera = air, Hephaistos = fire, and so on.

Herakleitos: see Russell and Konstan 2005. Theagenes: schol. B on Iliad 20.67 (= Porphyry, Homeric questions on the Iliad ad 20.67–75 ed. MacPhail).

In reality, the Odyssey is a fictional narrative designed to be transparent. A sane reading shouldn’t be either realist or allegorical.

Having said that, there are cases of symbolism in Homer. But to look for legitimate cases, we have to explain Homer from Homer. If there’s symbolism, we find it by comparing how Homer operates in other contexts.

For example, hospitality is genuinely symbolic. It’s a cipher for virtue or vice. We know this because it’s a common pattern: a character’s behaviour in a hospitality type scene shows whether they are a good civilised person (they welcome guests into their home properly, they behave well when they visit others) or an uncivilised threat that has to be eliminated (they abuse their host or their guests). Homer uses formulaic scenes to send very specific ethical messages.

What about the cave? Is there legitimately any coded symbolism, whether or not it agrees with Porphyry’s analysis? Well, let’s review the physical features of the cave:

• located next to an olive tree at the head of a bay
• stone ‘jars’ and ‘amphoras’ that act as beehives
• stone ‘looms’ with colourful ‘cloths’
• running water
• two entrances, to north and south

We don’t need to imagine that this is realist in the sense of being a specific real cave on Ithaki; but individual features in isolation may be inspired by features that exist in real caves.

The text specifies that the Nymphs are Naiads: that implies that the running water is a freshwater spring. Some modern readers have reasonably interpreted the stone jars, amphoras, and looms as stalagmites or stalactites. That’s clearest in the case of the ‘looms’: the ‘cloths’ must surely be inspired by flowstone formations.

Flowstone: travertine drapery, also known as cave ‘bacon’, photographed by James St. John in Shenandoah Caverns, Virginia, USA. Pure travertine is white; the coloration here is produced by iron oxides. (Image source: Flickr.com)

No symbolism so far: this is just the text’s direct meaning. I don’t see any clear signs of symbolism in the olive tree, the speleothems, the bees, or the spring.

But the two entrances, one for mortals and one for gods? That’s definitely symbolic. Because it fits into a pattern that appears elsewhere in Homer and in other Archaic poetry.

Dualities: mortal and immortal, real and unreal

The closest parallel for the cave’s two entrances is in Penelope’s account of how dreams work (Odyssey 19.560–569).

Stranger, dreams are stories impossible to work out,
and not all of them work out for humans.
For fleeting dreams have have two gates:
one is made of horn, and the other of ivory.
The ones that come through the sawn ivory,
those ones cheat you: their words are irrelephant.
But the ones that come through the door of sawn horns,
truth is deer to them, whenever someone sees one of them.
I do not think my strange dream came from there,
though it would be good news for me and my son if it did.

By the way, the wordplays aren’t jokes: in Greek, the ‘ivory’ (elephas) dreams are cheaters (elephairontai), and the ‘horn’ (keras) dreams accomplish things (krainousi). In early Greek literature, wordplay is word magic.

Poems, dreams, and oracles are regularly cast in terms of two types of knowledge: truth and falsehood, divine and mortal, day and night, reality and opinion. The divine knowledge of the Muses is real, while mortal knowledge is just rumour or kleos (Iliad 2.484–486). At the same time, the Muses know both how to say false things that sound real, and also how to declare the truth (Theogony 27–28). Apollo warns that mortals who rely on valid omen birds will do well, but those who trust in vain birds will achieve nothing (Hymn to Hermes 543–549).

Gates and doorways are a particularly vivid bit of imagery for the two types of knowledge. In Penelope’s account, and in the cave of the Nymphs, one door is reserved for the mortal and the unreal. The other is for truth, the divine, and the real.

Compare how Parmenides passes the gates of Night and Day on his journey along the ‘road of the divinity’, travelling the path of knowledge:

Hastening to guide me to the light
the daughters of the Sun left the house of Night,
lifting the veils from their faces with their hands.
Here are the gates of the paths of Night and Day:
they have a lintel, and a stone threshold,
and the gates of aither fill the great doorframe.
Justice, goddess of payment, holds the keys of exchange.

Parmenides, On nature fr. B1.8–14

Rather than one gate for each type of knowledge, these gates are the barrier between day and night. Parmenides goes on to talk at length about the relationship between what is and what is not, and between truth and opinion. He does not name the goddess who instructs him in these things: the role of an oracle would typically be played by Night, as in the Derveni Theogony. When Justice allows him through the gates, it is ambiguous whether he is passing from day to night or from night to day; Hesiod, too, talks of Night and Day ‘exchanging’ as they pass the threshold of their house (Theogony 748–754).

Porphyry suggests that the mortal entrance to the cave of the Nymphs is for entering the cave, and the divine entrance for ‘those ascending to the gods’ (On the cave of the Nymphs 23). He singles out Parmenides, saying that Parmenides was thinking of Odysseus’ cave when he wrote about the gates of Night and Day. The symbolism is a bit more widespread than that. But Porphyry is certainly right in seeing that they’re related.

On the motif of ‘two types of knowledge’ see Gainsford 2015: 48–50. On mortal-immortal dualities in Parmenides, see Tor 2017: 227–250, with discussion of links to Porphyry and the cave of the Nymphs at 247–248.

References

• Antonaccio, C. M. 1995. An archaeology of ancestors. Tomb cult and hero cult in early Greece. London.
• Gainsford, P. 2015. Early Greek hexameter poetry. Cambridge. [Cambridge Core]
• Lamberton, R. (tr.) 1983. Porphyry. On the cave of the Nymphs. Barrytown (NY). [Internet Archive]
• Russell, D. A.; Konstan, D. (ed., tr.) 2005. Heraclitus: Homeric problems. Atlanta.
• Tor, S. 2017. Mortal and divine in early Greek epistemology. Cambridge.

Odysseus’ wanderings

Odysseus’ wanderings are the most famous sequence in Homer’s Odyssey. The Cyclops, the Lotus-eaters, and Circe are some of the epic’s most memorable parts, even though the wanderings as a whole occupy only one sixth of the poem.

On one level, they’re pretty clearly envisaged as taking place in an Otherworld, like a portal fantasy or isekai. On another level, they have strong links to real geographical locations. The Otherworld isn’t totally unreal. But the real places aren’t anything like how the Odyssey describes them. (For one thing, Sicily doesn’t have real Cyclopes.)

Real places, mythical footprints

The most straightforward example is Circe, the sorceress who uses magic potions to turn sailors into pigs. In Odyssey 10, Circe lives on an island in some indefinite location. But throughout antiquity, Circe’s home was always imagined to be at Monte Circeo in Italy, 90 km southeast of Rome.

Monte Circeo as seen from Terracina (image source: Wikimedia)

An epilogue to the Hesiodic Theogony has Circe and her family there ruling over the Tyrrhenians (a general Greek term for the people of western Italy); in the 500s BCE Rome founded a colony at Monte Circeo named after her, Circeii; a fragment of Aeschylus’ poetry refers to the Tyrrhenians as a ‘pharmakon-making race’, referring to Circe’s potions.

Hesiod: Theogony 1011–1016. Circeii: Livy 1.56.3; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 4.63.1. Aeschylus: eleg. fr. 2 West2.

Circe leaves footprints on the real place, even though she’s mythical. Her association with the area never faded: Apollonius again has her living in Italy in the Argonautica, she and her descendents are linked to founding legends for several cities in the area, and a Roman-era folktale gives her an Italian apprentice named Hals (‘sea’) who ends up turning Odysseus into a horse for the rest of his life.

Apollonius: Argonautica 3.310–313. Foundation legends: Telegonus as founder of Tusculum and ancestor of the gens Mamilia (Dionysius of Halicarnassus 4.45.1; Horace, Epistles 1.29–30; Livy 1.49.9; etc. etc.) and, in isolated sources, Praeneste (Aristokles, FGrHist 831 F2) and Caere (Servius on Aeneid 8.479); Telemachus as founder of Clusium (Servius on Aeneid 10.167). Hals turning Odysseus into a horse: Ptolemaios Chennos, in Photius’ Myriobiblon 190, 150.i.12–19 ed. Bekker; Sextus Empiricus, adversus Mathematicos 1.267; Servius auctus on Aeneid 2.44; schol. V on Odyssey 11.134.

So, an Otherworld, but also not. It's more like an imaginary prehistory: like Tolkien’s legendarium, or Robert E. Howard’s ‘Hyborian Age’ — except that Homer doesn’t redraw the coastlines of entire continents. He limits himself to relatively minor things like imagining that Monte Circeo was once an island.

‘Localisations’ baked into the Odyssey ... sort of

Similar things apply to the other stopovers in Odysseus’ wanderings. It’s just that they aren’t so well attested, or attested so early. There was some variation in where ancient people imagined each stopover as taking place, but many of them are pretty consistent:

• (book 9) Kikones — Thrace.
• Cape Malea, Kythera (specified by name in the Odyssey).
• Lotus-eaters — usually localised in Djerba (Tunisia).
• Cyclops — Sicily.
• (book 10) Aeolus — Isole Eolie (islands north of Sicily).
• Laestrygonians — Sicily.
• Circe (Aia) — Monte Circeo, Lazio.
• (book 11) soul-summoning, Nekyia, or ‘land of the dead’ — doublet: stated in the text to be beyond Oceanus among the Cimmerians, but soul-summoning was historically practised at Lake Averno, Campania, and Ephorus located the final home of the Cimmerians in Campania.
• (book 12) Sirens — Li Galli (islets south of Sorrento).
• Scylla and Charybdis — Strait of Messina.
• Cattle of the Sun (Thrinakia) — apparently Sicily (Thucydides gives Trinakria, ‘three-cornered’, as an old name for Sicily)
• Calypso (Ogygia) — various; sometimes localised in Atlantic Ocean

Sources: Kikones: Ismaros (Od. 9.39–40) is named for Lake Ismaris, Thrace. Malea and Kythera: Odyssey 9.79–81. Lotus-eaters: Polybius apud Strabo 1.2.17. Cyclops, Laestrygonians: Thucydides 6.2.1, etc. Aeolus: Thucydides 3.88. Circe: see main text. Nekyia beyond Oceanus: Od. 10.511, 11.13–22, 11.638–12.1. Nekyia among Cimmerians: Od. 11.14. Nekyia at Averno, in Campania among Cimmerians: Ephorus FGrHist 70 F 134a = Strabo 5.4.5; see further Ogden 2001: 23–24, 61–74. Sirens in Tyrrhenian Sea: Hesiod fr. 27 M-W (schol. on Apollonios Argonautika 4.892 states that Apollonios localises the Sirens on the same island as Hesiod), calling their island ‘Anthemoessa’. Sirens at ‘Seirenoussai’ (= Li Galli): Strabo 1.2.12, etc. Scylla and Charybdis at ‘Scyllaeum’, i.e. Strait of Messina: Polybius apud Strabo 1.2.15 (see further Phillips 1953: 59 n.66). Thrinacia: Sicily = Trinakria, Thucydides 6.2.2.

Odyssean Italy. In red: real Greek colonies that existed by ca. 650 BCE, around the time the Odyssey was composed (pale colour denotes doubtful cases). Blue: sites of Odyssean significance, either associated with the wanderings in the Odyssey, or linked to foundation legends involving Odysseus’ and Circe’s children.

Scholars tend to take the position that in the Odyssey itself, the wanderings are set in a purely imaginary Otherworld, and localisations for Odysseus’ stopovers are later developments. That's the position taken by Jonathan Burgess in his 2025 book The travels of Odysseus.

I mostly disagree. But in a nuanced way. To Greek colonists in Italy and Sicily, the ‘localisations’ of Odysseus’ wanderings felt very real. If you superimpose them on a map of Greek colonies that existed at the time, the wanderings look like a checklist of Greek colonies (in red, in the figure above) and trading partners (further north, especially in Etruria).

But this needs nuance. It’s instructive to look at Strabo’s long discussion of the geography of the Odyssey (Geography 1.2.7–33), and how it was treated by earlier scholars like Eratosthenes. It’s no good to say Homer’s geography is wholly fictional, as Eratosthenes did; but is equally wrong to say it’s strictly realist, as Strabo does.

You will find where Odysseus wandered when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds.

Eratosthenes, Geographica F5 Roller (= Strabo 1.2.15)

Eratosthenes is right to the extent that Homer’s geographical knowledge is poor, so poor that it barely counts as real. The myths are mythical. But they still echo real places.

First, as we’ve just seen, Circe was always placed at Monte Circeo. The setting for the Sirens is early too: from the 9th to the 5th centuries BCE, the Greek colony of what is now Naples was named Parthenope. Either Parthenope was considered to be one of the Sirens all along, or she became identified as a Siren sometime within that period.

The ‘localisations came later’ position is true in the sense that the Odyssey is mostly ignorant of the real geography. But it’s a bit like Dan Brown writing about Paris in The Da Vinci Code: the landmarks are real, but ... they’re wrong. Contemporary Greek colonists knew their way around Italy and Sicily; some sailors made it as far as Gibraltar. The epic knows these places exist. But it doesn’t have a clear idea of where they are or what they’re like. It doesn’t even know Ithaki!

Some of the Ionian islands as seen in Google Earth, looking westward (annotations in large type are mine). The real Ithaki is in the middle of the group; by contrast, the Odyssey thinks that Ithakē ‘lies furthest out in the sea towards the sunset, and the other islands are towards the dawn and the sun’ (9.25–26). If you think Homer’s geographical information is realist and accurate, you might want to instead localise ‘Ithakē’ on the Paliki peninsula of Kefalonia, as Marinatos did. But the Odyssey is an epic, not a carefully-researched geographical survey.

The colonists who lived in these places couldn’t help but find the story real — just as Homer’s Ithaca, even with its wild inaccuracies, feels real to the people who live on Ithaki today. Modern tourism maps of Ithaki are studded with Odyssey-themed locations.

In that nuanced sense, the localisations were baked in right from the start. The Odyssey isn’t clear on where Monte Circeo is, but it knows Circe lived somewhere along the Italian coast. It doesn’t know the Bay of Naples, but it knows that soul-summoning was practised at a lake near Cumae. It doesn’t know the layout of Sicily, but it knows that there are Greek colonists living on an island called Trinakria ‘three-cornered’ (or Thrinakia, adjusted to make it fit into dactylic hexameter).

Modern Odysseus-hunters love to come up with their own localisations, of course. That kind of mindframe takes a realist reading of the Odyssey, confident that every geographic detail is literally true — well, except the inconvenient details, naturally. I recommend against engaging with them (unless it’s to plunder them for citations of ancient geographical sources).

Lycophron’s Odyssey

The Odyssey’s understanding of Italian geography is shaky, but the 3rd century BCE poet Lycophron has much more detailed knowledge.

Lycophron’s Alexandra is a 1474-line mythological poem in iambic trimeter. It’s framed as a prophecy uttered by Cassandra about the horrible fates that await the Greeks who are going to destroy Troy. Lines 648 to 819 deal with Odysseus’ wanderings and his death.

For commentaries on the Odyssean part of the poem, see Schade 1999; Hurst 2008: 190–228; Hornblower 2015: 273–317. On Odysseus’ attachments to Italy more generally, see Phillips 1953.

The Alexandra is framed in obscure language, and densely packed with outrageously esoteric allusions. Here’s a taster, the bit about Odysseus’ death at the hands of Telegonus:

Finally, like a bird running on the waves,
worn down by brine on all sides like a shellfish,
finding his wealth squandered in the feasting of the Pronians
along with the fiercely raging Lacaenian woman,
wrinkled after escaping the sea’s shelter, he will die
with weapons, a crow, near Neritonian groves.
A deadly point will strike his side and kill him
with the sting of a Sardinian fish, impossible to heal.
His offspring will be called his father’s butcher,
the maternal cousin of Achilleus’ bride.

Lykophron, Alexandra 789–798

There are many obscurities to explain here:

• ‘Pronians’: Penelope’s Cephallenian suitors. The Prōnnoi were the people of a city on Cephallenia (Thucydides 2.30).
• ‘Lacaenian woman’: Penelope as Laconian. Her father Icarius was the brother of Tyndareus of Sparta.
• ‘fiercely raging’: in some non-Homeric variants, Penelope actively colluded with the suitors, or even had sex with all of them (thereby engendering the god Pan).
• ‘escaping the sea’s shelter’: a kenning for a ship; i.e. escaping a life at sea.
• ‘crow’: emblematic of extreme old age.
• ‘Neritonian groves’: Mt Neriton, on Ithaca. This line seems to presuppose a story that Odysseus is warned by an oracle or a dream that his son will kill him, and he goes into hiding in the hills (this story appears explicitly in ‘Dictys of Crete’ 6.14, 1st/2nd century CE).
• ‘sting of a Sardinian fish’: Telegonus uses a spear tipped with the venomous sting of a ray. Other sources don’t discuss the ray’s origin. ‘Sardinian’ (across the Tyrrhenian Sea from Lazio) evokes a story that the Sardinians allegedly euthanised their elderly, using a poison that produced a rictus grin known popularly as the ‘Sardonic smile’.
• ‘His offspring’: Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Circe.
• ‘maternal cousin of Achilleus’ bride’: cousin of Medea. Medea is in fact Circe’s niece, and in some traditions she marries Achilleus in the afterlife. (This translation interprets αὐτανέψιος as ‘maternal cousin’ by analogy with αὐτοκασίγνητος and αὐτάδελφος, ‘brother by the same mother’.)

As you can imagine, this is a poem that really needs accompanying notes.

It’s also controversial whether it’s really by Lycophron, and whether it’s the work of a single poet or a synthesis written in multiple periods. To my eyes, most of the doubts are motivated by a refusal to accept that Odysseus’ wanderings were deeply embedded in the Italian landscape all along.

Lycophron’s version of the wanderings covers most of the same ground as the ‘standard’ localisations above, though in a different sequence:

• Alexandra 648. Lotus-eaters: Odysseus will visit Syrtis (Gabès, near Djerba) and ‘the plains of Libya’ (not the modern country but the ancient Greek name for all of northern Africa).
• 649–652. Scylla: the ‘hybrid’ at the ‘Tyrrhenian strait’ (Strait of Messina).
• 653. Sirens, the ‘harpy-limbed nightingales’ on their rocks.
• 659–661. The Cyclops, the ‘fierce one-eye’ who will drink Odysseus’ wine.
• 662–665. Laestrygonians, the ‘remnant’ left unslain by Heracles.
• 666–672. Further references to Charybdis, Scylla, and the Sirens.
• 681–693. Consultation of the dead, set close to Ischia (‘the island that crushed the back of the Giants’) and the Greek colony at Pithecusae (where Zeus put ‘a race of apes’, pithēkoi).
• 694–711. Baiae, Cumae, and Lake Averno. Odysseus passes the tomb of his steersman Baius; the ‘Cimmerians’ (placed at Cumae also by Strabo, Geography 5.4.5); and the ‘Acherousian waters’, i.e. lakeside oracle of the dead, at Aornos, the Greek name for Averno.
• 712–737. The death of the Sirens, throwing themselves into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Parthenope washes ashore near the river Clanio (north of Naples) and receives cult honours from the Neapolitans; Leucosia washes ashore at ‘the rock that bears her name’, i.e. Licosa, south of Paestum; Ligeia washes ashore at Terina, an ancient city near the coast, west of Catanzaro.
• 738–748. Calypso, the ‘daughtter of Atlas’. Location not specified; but the relationship with Atlas implies somewhere near or beyond the Atlas mountains and Gibraltar.
• 749–761. A non-Homeric interlude where Odysseus visits the sea god Glaucus. Location not specified, but Glaucus has links of his own to Italy.
• 761–765. Cercyra (often regarded as a localisation of Homeric Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians): the ‘isle of the sickle’.
• 766–788. Return to Ithaca: the events of Odyssey 13–24.
• 789–798. Odysseus’ death at the hands of his and Circe’s son Telegonus.
• 799–811. Odysseus in both northwest Greece and Italy: he receives cult honours among the Eurytanians and Trampya (Aetolia and Thesprotia, in Greece), and is buried at ‘the hill of the Tyrrhenians in Gortynaia’ (Cortona, in Italy). This geographical duality mirrors a similar duality in the lost Telegony, whose first part was set in Thesprotia, with the second part beginning and ending at Circe's home in Italy.

Later in the poem at lines 1236–1245 there’s also a scene where Aeneas encounters Odysseus while travelling in Etruria, and they combine forces. This alludes to an eccentric tradition attested in fragments of Hellanicus and Damastes that the two of them founded Rome together (New Jacoby 4 F 84, 5 F 3). The context for these fragments is obscure, but sits well with the other foundation legends associated with Telemachus and Telegonus dotted around Latium and Etruria.

References

• Burgess, J. 2025. The travels of Odysseus. Oxford. [DOI]
• Hornblower, S. 2015. Lykophron. Alexandra. Greek text, translation, commentary, and introduction. Oxford.
• —— 2018. Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic world. Oxford.
• Hurst, A. 2008. Lycophron. Alexandra. Paris.
• Ogden, D. 2001. Greek and Roman necromancy. Princeton.
• Phillips, E. D. 1953. ‘Odysseus in Italy.’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 73: 53–67. [JSTOR]
• Schade, G. 1999. Lykophrons ‘Odyssee’. Alexandra 648–819. Berlin. [DOI]

The Odyssey on screen: a catalogue

A catalogue of onscreen versions of the Odyssey. This list includes metatheatrical versions, parodies, and adaptations of parodies (including James Joyce’s novel Ulysses).

Dan Renalds as Telemachus, Kelly B. Jones as Penelope, and Dylan Vox as Odysseus (Troy: the Odyssey, 2017)

Year	Title	Director / medium	Country	Actors: ‘Odysseus’, ‘Penelope’, ‘Telemachos’
1905	L’île de Calypso – Ulysse et le géant Polyphème	Georges Méliès	France	Georges Méliès, —, —
1909	Le retour d’Ulysse	André Calmettes	France	Paul Mounet, Régina Badet, —
1911	L'Odissea	Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan	Italy	Giuseppe De Liguoro, ?, ?
1918	Die Heimkehr des Odysseus (parody)	Rudolf Biebrach	Germany	Bruno Decarli, Henny Porten, —
1922	Die Heimkehr des Odysseus	Max Obal	Germany	(?)Luciano Albertini, (?)Claire Lotto, —
1954	Ulisse	Mario Camerini	Italy	Kirk Douglas, Silvana Mangano, Franco Interlenghi
1962	Ulisse contro Ercole (parody)	Mario Caiano	Italy, France	Georges Machal, —, —
1963	Le mépris (meta)	Jean-Luc Godard	France	Michel Piccoli, Brigitte Bardot, —
1965	Il ritorno di Ringo (alternate setting)	Duccio Tessari	Italy	Giuliano Gemma, Hally Hammond, —
1967	Ulysses (Joyce adaptation)	Joseph Strick	Ireland, UK, USA	Milo O’Shea, Barbara Jefford, Maurice Roëves
1968	L’Odissea	TV series	Italy	Bekim Fehmiu, Irene Papas, Renaud Verley
1982	Ulysses 31 / 宇宙伝説ユリシーズ31 (alternate setting)	TV series, anime	France, Japan, Luxembourg	Osamu Kobayashi, —, Yū Mizushima
1988	James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Joyce adaptation)	TV episode (The modern world: ten great writers)	UK, Ireland	David Suchet, Sorcha Cusack, John Lynch
1989	Nostos: il ritorno	Franco Piavoli	Italy	Luigi Mezzanotte, ?, ?
1993	Naked (meta)	Mike Leigh	UK	David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, —
1995	Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (meta)	Th. Angelopoulos	Greece	Harvey Keitel, Maia Morgenstern, —
1995	Homer sweet Homer	TV episode (Wishbone)	USA	Larry Brantley, —, —
1997	The Odyssey	TV miniseries	USA	Armand Assante, Greta Scacchi, Alan Stenson
1997	Ulysses	TV episode (Xena: Warrior Princess)	New Zealand/USA	John D’Aquino, Rachel Blakely, —
2000	O brother, where art thou? (alternate setting)	Joel Coen, Ethan Coen	USA	George Clooney, Holly Hunter, —
2000	Sans plomb (parody)	Muriel Téodori	France	Alexis Loret, Emma de Caunes, —
2003	Bloom (Joyce adaptation)	Sean Walsh	Ireland	Stephen Rea, Angeline Ball, Hugh O’Connor
2003	Mission Odyssey	TV series, animated	France, Germany	Cyrille Artaux, Sophie Arthuys, —
2008	Odysseus and the isle of mists	TV movie	USA	Arnold Vosloo, Leah Gibson, —
2011	Keyhole (alternate setting)	Guy Maddin	Canada	Jason Patric, Isabella Rosselini, —
2017	Troy: the Odyssey	TV movie	USA	Dylan Vox, Kelly B. Jones, Dan Renalds
2017	Prison break, season 5 (alternate setting)	TV series	USA	Wentworth Miller, Sarah Wayne Callies, Christian Michael Cooper
2018	Odysseus	TV episode (Superhelden)	Germany	not credited, —, —
2021	Les grands mythes, season 3	TV series, animated	France	—, —, —
2024	The return	Uberto Pasolini	Italy, Greece, UK	Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer
2026	The Odyssey	Christopher Nolan	USA	Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland

Matt Damon as Odysseus (The Odyssey, 2026)

The highest-profile productions listed here are the Kirk Douglas Ulisse (1954); the fondly remembered Italian series L’Odissea (1968); the US miniseries The Odyssey (1997); and the most recent renditions, Pasolini’s The return (2024) and Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026).

Since ethnicity in the Odyssey is a hot topic at the moment, I’ll note that there is only one Greek actor in this list, Irene Papas as Penelope in L’Odissea (1968); she also played Odysseus’ mother Anticlea in The Odyssey (1997). Almost all the other actors represented here have northern and/or western European backgrounds. The exceptions are Osamu Kobayashi and Yū Mizushima, the original voice actors for Yurishizu and Teremaku in Ulysses 31 (1981–1982); Maia Morgenstern as the various women in A’s life in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995); and Kelly B. Jones as Penelope in Troy: the Odyssey (2017).

History and the Odyssey

The Odyssey is coming out soon, a feature film starring Matt Damon, and directed and written by Christopher Nolan.

Various online pundits have already criticised it, focusing on historical authenticity — faithfulness to some preconceived idea of how the world in the film ought to look. Why isn’t Odysseus’ armour consistent with Bronze Age armour? Why does his ship look like a viking longship? And above all, how dare they cast some actors of non-northern-European extraction!

Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops. If you use Homer’s Odyssey as the one true measuring stick, you will find multiple ‘anachronisms’ and ‘inauthenticities’: (1) the tool used to blind the Cyclops is a metal implement (either a forked cooking spit or a spear with a leaf-shaped blade), not the sharpened log used in Odyssey 9; (2) the drinking cup that the Cyclops is holding is a precursor to the Type A kylix, which only came into use in the 500s BCE; (3) Odysseus is helped by only two men instead of four (Od. 9.334–335). (Protoattic amphora, Eleusis Museum, ca. 650–625 BCE; figures are about 42 cm high)

Two kinds of response:

1. There’s no sense in which the Odyssey is set in the Bronze Age. It is set at some indefinite point in a fictional past, but it’s totally flooded with classical-era motifs and preoccupations, with a smattering of archaic touches for decoration.
2. Myths are always tailored to contemporary audiences. They always have been — including Homer. There’s no canon of how things and characters ought to look: Homer wasn’t ‘authentic’ in that sense, and if Homer isn’t, no one is.

1. There’s nothing Bronze Age about the Odyssey

Recently a popular religious historian on Youtube said: ‘the Odyssey is set at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE’ (Henry 2026). Andrew Henry is a deeply knowledgeable scholar, but for this point he made the mistake of relying on common wisdom.

Many people are taught that Homer ‘remembers’ a story that was repeated over generations. There was an Odyssey tradition: a story transmitted orally for centuries, containing a fossilised core of Bronze Age elements.

The trouble is, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that. It’s entirely based on an analogy with the metrical formulaic system. The formulaic system did indeed exist for some period before 700 BCE: the style of language reflects a tradition more than a hundred years old at the time, possibly a lot older. But the same thing doesn’t automatically apply to the story.

There’s nothing Bronze-Age-specific about the Odyssey. By contrast, there’s a torrent of material that is 8th/7th-century-specific. So I don’t just mean it’s Iron Age: it’s classical era. There are reasons to think the story is a bit older than the Odyssey itself, but probably not by much: some aspects of the Trojan War myth presuppose the existence of the 8th century BCE Greek colony at Troy.

Note. For clarity: here ‘classical era’, with a small c, means the historical era, starting in the early 700s BCE with the development of the classical alphabet. This includes the Archaic period (traditionally 776–480 BCE) as well as the Classical period proper (480 BCE onwards).

Even if we granted the idea of a long-standing ‘Odyssey tradition’, no material can be shown to have entered that tradition earlier than the late 700s BCE. The Iliad does have a handful of Bronze Age motifs — the Odyssey has none at all — but even in the Iliad cases, we can be extremely confident that those motifs entered a purported ‘Iliad tradition’ at a late date.

The most famous example is a boar’s tusk helmet described in Iliad 10.261–265. Boar’s tusk helmets are a real Bronze Age thing, associated especially with the 15th–14th centuries BCE. But Iliad 10 was inserted into the Iliad after the rest of the epic was already in place, probably in the decades on either side of 600 BCE. This Mycenaean boar’s tusk helmet is in the latest part of the Iliad. And because it’s an insertion, it tells us nothing at all about the setting of Iliad 1–9 and 11–24.

Note. See e.g. West 2011: 233–235. Recently I covered a bunch of other supposedly Bronze Age elements in the Iliad in more detail.

How to make sense of a Mycenaean artefact in that context? Well, there’s a conversation to be had about that, but here and now, the point is this. However that artefact or that description was transmitted, it wasn’t as part of an Iliad tradition. There are no elements that can be shown to have entered an Iliad tradition at an early date.

The Odyssey has no notion of what the Mycenaean palace culture was, nor of a Bronze Age. (‘Bronze Age’ is a modern periodisation: it was invented in the early 1800s CE.) But it is stuffed with story elements, cultural trends, and preoccupations that are firmly embedded in the classical era.

• The story of Penelope and the Suitors dramatises a problem with classical-era inheritance law, specifically a practice that Athenians called the epiklerate. When a man died without a male heir, his wife would become epikleros (‘attached to the estate’) so that the estate could be passed on by marrying her off to a male relative. The Odyssey creates an intractable legal situation by closing off all standard inheritance scenarios. Telemachos cannot inherit because he’s a minor (or treated as one), so Penelope becomes epikleros. But Odysseus has no brothers or male uncles that Penelope can be married off to (Od. 16.116–120). The Suitors are the only people available to marry her: and they’re unrelated to the household, and vicious thieving murderers. But because there’s no alternative, Penelope’s father and brothers want her to marry one of the Suitors (Od. 15.16). The standard inheritance model is only salvaged by Odysseus’ surprise return.
• Metal artefacts in the Odyssey are normally made of iron (axes, weapons, arrowheads, ploughs, shepherds’ tools, etc.). The exceptions are a handful of prestige items. A couple of passages in the Odyssey treat the iron trade as commonplace, and describe aspects of iron production processes.
• Bronze, by contrast, is a prestige material. And it’s only in the centuries after 900 BCE that both of the following were true: (a) bronze was a prestige material, and (b) iron was not a prestige material. For fuller details, and for a full listing of references to iron, see this piece, in the section ‘Bronze weapons and armour’.
• Frequent references to Phoenician traders require a setting after 800 BCE, after the rise of Phoenician trading dominance and Greek-Phoenician trading relations. Trade in the Odyssey generally has a colonisation-era look and feel.
• The assembly plays a key role in civic life and government, meeting in the agora: see especially Odyssey 2.1–259, 8.4–25, 16.361–406, 20.144–146 (there are also multiple assemblies in front of Odysseus’ house). The assembly and agora are distinctively classical-era political features.
• In Odysseus’ wanderings, most stopovers are envisaged as fictional prehistoric versions of Greek colonies founded in the 700s and 600s, notably in Sicily and up the west coast of Italy. This has the effect of making Odysseus an archetype for real colonists, paving a mythical path for them.

John Waterhouse, ‘Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses’ (1891; image source: Wikimedia). This too is not a Bronze Age scene: the cup is a Type C kylix, no earlier than the 400s BCE; glass mirrors didn’t begin to come into use in the Mediterranean world until the 1st century CE; Doric columns put us in the Archaic period or later (700s BCE onwards).

Now, there are archaising elements too. But the archaification is mostly artificial.

Imagine it’s 2026 and you’re watching a fantasy movie set in a quasi-mediaeval past. You don’t expect to see authentic mediaeval warfare, because film-makers have no idea what that looked like. You don’t expect to see 2026-style warfare either, because drones blowing things up would ruin the atmosphere. What you expect is warfare that’s archaic in flavour, without being authentic; but which is still cool according to 2026 tastes.

And that’s exactly what Homer provides. A faux archaic flavour, but completely framed around contemporary practices and motifs.

Naturally this creates lots of anachronism. In book 2, when Telemachos presents his case against the Suitors before the assembly, he’s taking part in a 7th century political process, with heralds and standardised seating arrangements. But in book 3 when he goes on a voyage in search of his father, the idea is that we’re in ‘olde times’: there are no modern mechanisms for travelling between cities or finding housing in a different city. The story transitions back and forth between the contemporary and the purely mythical.

The world-building is comparable to that of Game of Thrones. They’re both versions of an imaginary past, but the archaism is inconsistent, anachronistic, and there’s a hefty dose of fantasy. (Except Homer is the more unreal of the two — George R. R. Martin at least had the option of being more ‘authentic’, if he felt like picking up a book about the Wars of the Roses.)

2. Myths are always contemporary

A myth is a story with a purpose. It has to be contemporary. If it isn’t, if it has no contemporary purpose, then it’s just a sterile relic behind glass.

Every iteration of the story of Odysseus has always looked wildly different, and has been tailored to the time the story was being told. There have been between 25 and 30 previous onscreen versions of the story of Odysseus, ranging from Georges Méliès’ L’île de Calypso (1905) to Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024). Some reproduce aspects of the epic relatively literally, like the Italian TV series L’Odissea (1968), and the US TV movie The Odyssey (1997). Others transplant it into a different setting, like the anime series Ulysses 31 (1981–1982) and season 5 of Prison Break (2017). Some take a metaphorical approach, alluding to Homer’s epic in a metatheatrical way, like Godard’s Le mépris (1963) and the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Then there are the musical versions, like Rivera-Herrans’ Epic: the Musical (2022–2024), Symphony X’s The Odyssey (2002), and a bunch of classical operas.

Not even the most literal of these is ‘faithful’ by the standards of 2026 pundits. The thing is, even Homer isn’t ‘faithful’, in the sense of being historically realistic. It’s turtles all the way down.

Isabella Rosselini in two Odyssean roles: left, as Athena in The Odyssey (1997); right as Hyacinth, a Penelope analogue, in Keyhole (2012).

Every iteration has looked wildly different. As the Homer scholar Joel Christensen pointed out earlier this year, in Euripides there’s a Helen made of clouds; in the 6th century BCE poet Stesichoros, Helen is a pornographic painting, which Paris used to ‘assuage his passion’.

Stesichorus in his poetry tells that when Alexander had seized Helen and was making his way through Pharos [in Egypt] he was robbed of her by Proteus and received from him her portrait [eidōlon] painted on a panel, so that he could assuage his passion by looking at it.

Note: Euripides, Helen 29–36; Stesichoros, Palinode fr. 192 ed. and tr. Campbell (= scholion on Aelius Aristides, Oration 1.128; iii.150 ed. Dindorf).

Homer’s Helen is human, but she too is a contemporary figure. She’s tailored to a 7th-century-BCE story about inheritance law. Her marriage with Menelaos holds up a mirror to Odysseus’ household: Odysseus’ estate is in legal limbo because of a lack of heirs, but when we first see Helen’s and Menelaos’ family in the Odyssey, they’re celebrating their daughter’s wedding — they’re ensuring continuity to the next generation. There will be someone to inherit their estate. This is a very classical-era preoccupation: it’s contemporary. There’s no such thing as ‘historical Homer’ (as Christensen also pointed out).

Exactly the same is true in all the modern treatments. None of them adheres strictly to Homer. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Poseidon is a ruthless American sheriff. In Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), the Cyclops is a statue of Lenin carried up the Danube on a barge. In The Odyssey (1997), Teiresias is Christopher Lee sitting in a fiery cave next to a river of lava. In Keyhole (2012), the Suitors are ghosts that haunt Odysseus’ house. In Epic the Musical (2022–2024) Aiolos lives on a floating island, but it’s floating in the sky. In Fauré’s Pénélope (1913), Penelope is friends with Eumaios, and Eumaios is a shepherd.

None of these is faithful. And that’s fine. That’s in spite of the fact that these variations are more significant than the kinds of axes that 2026 pundits like to grind.

No treatment could, or should, try to reproduce Homer with complete fidelity. That’d be crazy. Even if they wanted to, what should they emulate? Which period? You need to find a period when Phoenician merchants dominated international trade, when implements were standardly made of iron, Greek sailors were venturing as far as the Atlantic Ocean, and Greek cities were governed by assemblies. That’ll be in the 600s BCE, then. So no Bronze Age gear please, and Troy had better look like the 7th-century-BCE Greek colony. (Which is what the Iliad envisages, anyway: it has the Greek cult of Athena Ilias.)

Does it also have to be a period when there are monsters and cannibals traipsing about in Sicily, mermaid-monsters lurking on the islands off the coast of Campania, and witches turning people into pigs in Lazio? That’ll be a little trickier.

The upshot is that, even when an artist puts a high priority on authenticity — and most of the time, that isn’t the case — even then, the ordering of priorities is entirely an artistic choice. And every artistic choice is motivated by contemporary priorities. Certain 2026 pundits really really want everyone’s top priority to be skin colour, because that’s the thing they care about. Fortunately, there are plenty of artists out there with more diverse ideas about how old stories can become relateable to a contemporary audience.

References

• Henry, A. 2026. ‘What the Odyssey gets wrong about Bronze Age Greek religion.’ ReligionForBreakfast. [Youtube]

For further references to support the claims made here, see this two-parter from April.

Silences in the Homeric Odyssey

In the Odyssey, the following kind of thing is absolutely normal. For a regular novelist this scene would be a triumph. For Homer, it was Tuesday.

Silent silence

We’re in Odyssey book 16. Odysseus has been separated from his family for twenty years. He’s back, disguised as a beggar, doing some reconnaissance. At the moment he’s visiting with Eumaios, an enslaved herdsman. Suddenly, with no warning, his son Telemachos appears at the door. Odysseus hasn’t seen Telemachos since he was a baby.

[Odysseus] hadn’t finished speaking when his own son
stood at the front door. Surprised, the herdsman got up.
Out of his hands fell the bowls he was working with,
mixing glistening wine. Eumaios went straight to his lord,
kissed his head and his two bright eyes,
and both hands; and he burst into tears.

As when a father who loves his son greets him
returning home from a far-off land after ten years
separated from his only son, and he endured many labours for him,
so it was with the good swineherd and godlike Telemachos.

He poured kisses all over him, as if he had escaped death,
and weeping he spoke winged words to him:
‘You’ve come! Telemachos! Sweet light! I thought I’d never
see you again, after you sailed away to Pylos.
Come, come inside, dear son, so that I can
enjoy looking at you, you new arrival!’ . . .

To him thoughtful Telemachos spoke in turn:
‘Let’s do that, papa. It was for you that I came here,
so I could see you with my eyes and hear your words ...’

Odyssey 16.11–32

This is third-person narrative, not theatre. You can’t see where the characters are standing, their movements, their faces. They aren’t present in the way that an actor is.

So imagine, if you will, Odysseus’ face as he watches these things in silence.

As when a father who loves his son greets him ...

‘Come, come inside, dear son ...’

‘Let’s do that, papa. It was for you that I came here ...’

How’s he going to feel, hearing his long-lost son treating a slave as his father? We aren’t told. Presumably, if he has a reaction at all, he’s keeping it well hidden because he’s still in disguise.

Odysseus loses an awful lot of points for being a slave owner, but you can’t say he isn’t stoic.

Telemachus (Alan Stenson) refuses to believe Eumaeus (Tony Vogel) that Odysseus (Armand Assante) has returned. In this version there’s no silence at all, Telemachus and Eumaeus don’t address each other as ‘son’ and ‘father’, Eumaeus knows Odysseus’ true identity already and tells it to Telemachus straightaway. (The Odyssey, dir. Andrei Konchalovsky, 1997)

The question is, is he actually being stoic? Or is his reaction just glossed over, because it’s third-person narrative? Do we ignore Odysseus’ feelings because they aren’t mentioned, or do we imagine him staring fixedly at the others in agony, holding back tears?

Basically, what kind of silence is it?

Explicit silence

Here’s another scene where Odysseus maintains a stoic silence, concealing his emotion. But this time, it’s something we’re explicitly told. The storyteller directly mentions Odysseus’ reaction, and his silence. It’s the scene where Odysseus is recognised by his old dog, Argos.

And a dog lifted up his head and ears as he lay:
Argos, dog of enduring Odysseus, whom he himself
raised; but he didn’t get the benefit, for first he went away
to holy Ilion. Formerly young men used to lead him
after wild goats and deer and rabbits,
but by this time he lay unwanted, his lord absent,
on a pile of dung heaped in front of the gates
from asses and oxen, for slaves to take
to manure Odysseus’ great estate.
There the dog lay, Argos, covered in dog-ticks.
But then, when he recognised Odysseus was near,
he wagged his tail and pricked up his ears,
no longer able to come closer to his lord.

He looked at Argos from a distance, and wiped away a tear,
easily concealing it from Eumaios, then asked him out loud:
‘Eumaios, what an amazing sight, this dog lying on the dung. ...’

So he spoke, and went into the well built house
and walked straight to the hall with the noble suitors.
As for Argos, the fate of dark death took him,
as soon as he had seen Odysseus in the twentieth year.

Odyssey 17.291–305

Argos recognises Ulisse (Kirk Douglas). Again there’s no silence in this version: Ulisse speaks directly to Argos, and the two openly greet each other, thereby accidentally revealing Ulisse’s identity to his son Telemaco (Franco Interlenghi). (Ulisse, dir. Mario Camerini, 1954)

The focus is still firmly on what Odysseus is seeing, not on Odysseus himself. But we do get one line where he conceals a tear, and he makes a speech to conceal his emotion. This is one of the most memorable and moving scenes in Homer. And that’s partly because Argos’ and Odysseus’ reactions are so muted.

Muted, but not nearly as muted as in our first example. Here, the emotion is boiling under the surface. We’re shown glimpses.

There’s a similar effect in Odysseus’ late-night conversation with Penelope, his wife, in book 19. There too he hides his feelings, keeping up the pretence of being a beggar. It isn’t nearly as vivid as in the Argos scene, or as sudden as the Telemachos scene: Penelope and Odysseus have been communicating, or in each other’s presence, for some time. Still, we watch him hide his emotions as he watches her express hers.

None of this happens in the first scene we looked at, with Telemachos. There, if there’s an emotional scene at all, the emotion is purely in our imagination.

Concretised silence

The Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden coined a term for when a reader forms a firm mental picture of what’s going on in the world of a story: ‘concretisation’.

No author gives complete information about their world — not even Tolkien. As a result, concretisation comes partly from information that the story gives, partly from the reader’s inferences and imagination about things that the story doesn’t say.

If, for instance, the color of Consul Buddenbrook’s eyes were not mentioned in Buddenbrooks ..., then he would be completely undetermined in this respect. We know implicitly, through context and by the fact that he is a human being and has not lost his eyes, that his eyes are of some color; but we do not know which.

Ingarden 1973 [1937]: 50

The reader doesn’t need to pin everything down. No one cares about this character’s eye colour: it can stay indeterminate. That’s something the reader will just gloss over, elided as though it were filled in, but without actually filling it in.

Then there are will be areas where a reader will use their imagination a bit more. Some scholars love trying to reconstruct the layout of Odysseus’ hall, and where the doors are. Many readers of The Lord of the Rings will visualise an Aragorn that looks like Viggo Mortensen, even though the description of him in the book is fairly general.

Note. Sometimes the reader’s imagination may even contradict things that the book says — like imagining Frodo as a twenty-year-old, or imagining Sparrowhawk in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea stories as white — but there’s a sense in which that kind of concretisation is a mistake. Not bad reading, necessarily, because there are reasons for those concretisations, but still a mistake. Let’s not distract ourselves, though.

Odysseus’ and Argos’ emotion, in the book 17 scene, will be firmly concretised. It’s a vivid, memorable moment.

But in the Telemachos scene, in book 16, Odysseus’ silence may or may not be concretised. Some readers may simply not notice that it’s Odysseus’ first time seeing his son. Others may read between the lines and realise that Odysseus is going to have a strong reaction.

Delayed-effect silence

Here’s one more example, where a ‘silent silence’ — a silence where we aren’t even paying attention to Odysseus — suddenly turns into an explicit silence. It’s unconcretised at first, then the camera suddenly cuts to Odysseus, and his silence becomes concretised retroactively.

In book 18, the goddess Athena puts it into Penelope’s mind

to appear to the suitors, so as to open wide
the suitors’ minds, and so that she’d be honoured
all the more by her husband and son than she was before.

Odyssey 18.160–162

Athena makes her even more beautiful while she sleeps, then Penelope comes downstairs to the hall. The sight of her drives the suitors crazy. After some talking, she tells a story: when Odysseus departed twenty years ago, he told her

‘ “... But when you see that our son has grown a beard,
you must marry, whoever you wish, and leave your house.”
That’s what he told me: that’s what’s going to happen now. . . .
But a terrible pain comes over my heart and soul:
this wasn’t the custom for suitors in the old days
when they wanted to court, and compete with each other
for a noble woman and daughter of a rich man.
No, they’d bring oxen and rich sheep
as a feast for the girl’s family. They’d give precious gifts.
They didn’t eat someone else’s property unfairly.’

Odyssey 18.269–280

So she wants marriage-gifts, then she’ll obey her husband’s command and marry one of the suitors. For all a first-time reader knows, her plan may be to do exactly what she says.

How would Odysseus feel if he were to hear this? Would he feel disappointed? Betrayed? Would he sadly agree that she’s doing exactly what he asked?

Oh, wait, he does hear it. He’s right there. Keeping silent.

So she spoke. And long-suffering Odysseus laughed,
because she tricked gifts out of them. She flattered their hearts
with smooth words, but her mind intended something else.

Odyssey 18.281–283

Up to this point, his silent presence was very similar to the first scene we looked at. It was a ‘silent silence’. But now the scene is transformed, in a few words. The omniscient narrator had given no clues that Penelope was planning something other than what she said: it’s only Odysseus’ laugh that tells us how we’re supposed to interpret her words.

At this moment, where we suddenly concretise Odysseus’ reaction, we also concretise the entire episode and context — Penelope as trickster, the suitors as patsies, Odysseus’ and Penelope’s likemindedness.

Penelope (Greta Scacchi) comes face-to-face with a disguised Odysseus (Armand Assante). (The Odyssey, dir. Andrei Konchalovsky, 1997)

Silence isn’t just a tool for emotional effect, in other words. In Homer’s hands, it’s a storytelling tool.

And it’s a terribly sneaky tool. Consider this: when is the first time that Odysseus and Penelope interact in the Odyssey? It’s an interesting question because there’s a whole series of interactions before they ever have a conversation. Their interactions begin late in book 17, when Penelope three times asks people to invite the disguised stranger to come and speak to her (Odyssey 17.505–550); they don’t actually speak to one another until over 600 lines later (19.103 onwards).

That is, they never really meet for the first time. They’re insinuated into each other’s presence. It’s a quiet, subtle process.

Scholarship on Homeric silences

Siegfried Besslich (1966) has written an entire book on silences in the Odyssey. His focus is on dialogues: where one character ignores or omits to respond to something the other character says, or where a character stays silent while deciding what to say.

Egbert Bakker (1997: 86–122) looks at characters’ activity or inactivity in a scene in narratological terms, expanding on the work of Wallace Chafe. Characters who are directly participating in a scene are ‘active’, those who are not present are ‘inactive’, and there are intermediate ‘near-active’ and ‘semiactive’ states. Bakker’s focus is on how the narrator refers to characters in these states, and the wording associated with each state. A ‘silent silence’ of the kind we looked at here has no associated wording, though. The whole point is that it’s about a character not being mentioned..

A book chapter by myself (Gainsford 2001) looks at the way that Odysseus and Penelope are gradually inveigled into one another’s presence, and Homer’s use of elisions and backtracking to disguise the process.

References

• Bakker, E. 1997. Poetry in speech. Orality and Homeric discourse. Ithaca (NY), London.
• Besslich, S. 1966. Schweigen – verschweigen – übergehen. Die Darstellung des Unausgesprochenen in der Odyssee. Heidelberg.
• Gainsford, P. 2001. ‘Cognition and type-scenes: the aoidos at work.’ In: Budelmann, F.; Michelakis, P. (eds.) Homer, tragedy, and beyond: studies in honour of P. E. Easterling. London. 3–21. [DOI]
• Ingarden, R. 1973 [1937]. The cognition of the literary work of art. Tr. R.A. Crowley and K.R. Olson. Evanston (originally published as O poznawaniu dzieła literackiego, Lvov, 1937).

Ancient Greek puns

Puns may be the lowest form of humour these days, but in early Greek literature, they’re more like word magic.

... τὸν δορίγαμβρον ἀμφινεικῆ θ’
Ἑλέναν; ἐπεὶ πρεπόντως
ἑλέναυς ἕλανδρος ἑλέπτολις.

(Who was it that named) that spear-bride,
that bone of contention, Helen? A fitting name!
Ship-destroyer, man-destroyer, city-destroyer.

Aischylos, Agamemnon 688–690

In the last line Helen is helenaus, helandros, heleptolis. This kind of wordplay is a formidable translation problem. Later in the play, Kassandra complains that the god Apollo has destroyed her: apollōn emos, apōlesas gar ‘my destroyer, for you have destroyed (me)’ (1080–1081).

‘Greek vase’ meme. Transcription: ‘Oh you hate ancient Greek puns? My Apollogies.’

This is one of the grimmest plays in the corpus of Athenian tragedy. It doesn’t do humour. No one in the audience in 458 BCE groaned or cracked a smile at this line.

It’s about word magic. Many Greek thinkers believed there was an inherent link between language and the things it refers to. Logos literally means ‘word’, but its connotations could go a lot further. For 5th century BCE Greeks, there was a deep importance to the contrast between logos and ergon: speech and action, theory and practice, intent and outcome. The Stoics went further and used logos to refer to the principle that the universe behaves intelligibly and self-consistently.

Wordplay in Homer

So when we find wordplay in Homer, don’t assume it’s for laughs. There’s one story that explains that Odysseus’ grandfather chose his name because the grandfather was always getting people angry at him (odyss-amenos, Odyssey 19.407). That episode is memorable because it’s precisely about the wordplay.

But the most famous pun is the ‘nobody’ trick that Odysseus uses to fool the Cyclops.

Then from the cave strong Polyphemos addressed them:
‘O friends, Nobody [Outis] is killing me by trickery or violence.’
In answer they spoke winged words:
‘If nobody [mē tis] is doing violence to you on your own, —
well, there’s no way to avoid a plague sent by great Zeus!
Go and pray to your father the lord Poseidon.’
So they spoke and went away. And my own heart laughed,
at how my name deceived them, and my excellent trick [mētis].

Odyssey 9.407–414

The fake name Outis is simply the Greek for ‘no one, nobody’. Ou tis (οὔ τις) and mē tis (μή τις) are grammatical variants of ‘nobody’. And mētis (μῆτις) is the word for a cunning trick, something particularly associated with Odysseus. He even has his own stock epithet polymētis ‘full of tricks’.

I can’t say that there’s no hint of humour at all — Odysseus does mock the Cyclops at certain moments — but that isn’t what this moment is about. When Odysseus gave the fake name in an earlier scene, it wasn’t mockery, it was a meaningful statement about his own isolation.

‘Nobody [Outis] is my name. Nobody is what they always call me —
my mother, my father, and all my other friends.’

Odyssey 9.366–367

Odysseus is stuck in No Man’s Land during his ten years of wandering, isolated from the community that frames his personal identity. He’s the original Man with No Name.

Note. If he were really pushing the grammatical ambiguity the second ‘Nobody’, in the accusative form, could have been followed by a word starting with a vowel: then it’d be ambiguous whether he was saying Οὖτιν as a proper name or οὔ τιν’ meaning ‘no one’. The Cyclops does use the accusative form ambiguously in this way, at line 369. (I’m over-analysing this, I know. I’m not alone, at least: Eustathios makes similar comments.)

What, you think it’s a coincidence that the first line of the epic just refers to Odysseus as ‘a man’, without mentioning his name? Moments where Odysseus’ name is revealed are significant moments.

When Odysseus starts revealing himself to his family, the moment is packed with wordplay. Here’s how he introduces himself to his son Telemachos:

οὔ τίς τοι θεός εἰμι· τί μ’ ἀθανάτοισιν ἐΐσκεις;
ἀλλὰ πατὴρ τεός εἰμι.

‘I am nobody’s god. Why compare me to the immortals?
But I am your father.’

Odyssey 16.187–188

At no point does he actually tell Telemachos his name. Just like in the first line of the Odyssey, he’s a nameless man. Instead, we get wordplay linking these two lines together: ou ... tʰeos eimi ‘I am not a god’, teos eimi ‘I am yours’. At the same time, he echoes the Outis/Nobody trick from the Cyclops episode: ou tis tʰeos eimi ‘I am Nobody-god, I am no(body’s) god.’

He goes on to say, ‘no other Odysseus is going to come’ (16.204). But he never comes out and says ‘I am Odysseus’ to anyone on Ithaca. He doesn’t say ‘Odysseus’ when he’s being reunited with anyone in his family or household, and he doesn’t say it when he reveals himself to the suitors.

An article by Norman Austin (1972) looks into how Telemachos, Penelope, and the others also avoid using his name. Austin interprets them as trying to protect Odysseus by concealing his identity; Douglas Olson (1992) shows that it’s deeper than that. It’s about ‘name-magic’.

Groaning statue meme. Transcription: ‘εἰ πυρὸς αἰθομένου μέσσην ἑκατοντάδα θείης, / παρθένου εὑρήσεις υἱέα καὶ φονέα’ ‘If you put a hundred in the middle of a blazing fire, you’ll find a virgin’s son and a murderer’ (Greek anthology 14.20). The wordplay in this riddle is in a more modern vein: it’s entertainment, not word magic. The solution is to insert the Greek numeral ρ into the word for ‘of fire’. In Greek legend Pyrrhos is the bloodthirsty son of Achilleus and Deidameia. (NB: this isn’t actually a Greek statue. It’s Henri Vidal’s ‘Cain’ (1896) in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris.)

But there’s wordplay on Odysseus’ name in the Odyssey’s very first scene, too. When Athena is trying to persuade Zeus that it’s time for Odysseus to be allowed to go home, her speech is full of his name.

‘For me it’s about Odysseus, dystroyer in battle; my heart is dystracted;
a dysolate man for dysperately long, in agony away from his family ...
Atlas’ daughter (Kalypso) holds him dystressed, so dyspondent,
constantly with soothing and seductive words. ...
By the ships of the Argives he pleased you with sacrifices
in broad Troy: why are you so dysgusted now, Zeus?’

Odyssey 1.48–62

Yes, this translation is rather contrived. The Greek is too. It’s full of words like dysmorōi, dystēnon, odyromenon, and ōdysao, as well as a cluster of da- and dē- sounds in the first two lines.

The same wordplay turns up in the Cyclops episode, too. Straight after the mētis/outis ‘trick/nobody’ punchline, the very next line describes the Cyclops’ agony from being blinded —

Κύκλωψ δὲ στενάχων τε καὶ ὠδίνων ὀδύνῃσι ...

But the Cyclops, groaning and dystressed in his dyscomforts (ōdinōn odynēisi) ...

Odyssey 9.415

There are no thorough monographs on wordplay in Homer, but there are several articles (Dimock 1956; Austin 1972; Olson 1992; Louden 1995; Ahl 2002). There’s a lot to choose from. There’s wordplay on the name of Achilleus, who brings akʰos to the laos, pain to the people, a motif echoed implicitly in the opening lines of the Iliad, and more explicitly elsewhere (e.g. 6.413–414, 16.21–22, 23.136–137). There’s play on the prophet Teiresias, whose name is evoked by the weariness of Odysseus’ men (teireto ... eiresiēs ‘(their heart) was worn by rowing’, Odyssey 10.78). Penelope’s story of the Gates of Horn and Ivory has a bundle of wordplays on elepʰas ‘ivory’ (Odyssey 19.563–565), as well as a day ‘of dysonant name’ (dysōnymos, Odyssey 19.571). And so on.

Aischylos’ heavenly pisspot

There’s a wordplay — possibly two — in two fragments of Aischylos’ lost plays, which I’m fairly sure have never been noticed in any scholarly publications. The plays are part of Aischylos’ lost Odysseus tetralogy, specifically, the Psychagōgoi and Ostologoi (‘soul-summoners’ and ‘bone gatherers’). The tetralogy as a whole related Odysseus’ consultation of Teiresias, his return home, his confrontation with Penelope’s suitors, and probably, his death.

In one fragment of the Psychagōgoi, the ghost of Teiresias prophesies the future:

For a heron flying on high
will strike you with dung, the excrement of its bowels;
after this, a sea beast’s spine
will corrupt your skin, ancient and shedding hair.

Aischylos fr. 275 Radt

There was a genre of Greek poetry in the 6th–5th centuries BCE called chresmologic poetry, or ‘oracle collecting’, which purported to consist of prophecies about the future. Only fragments survive, but those fragments are couched in enigmatic references, obscure symbolism, and sometimes, wordplay. Aischylos’ surviving plays sometimes adopt this style — notably in Agamemnon, in the opening chorus and in the Kassandra scene (especially 133–137, 147–155, 1219–1225) — and this fragment fits right in. What are the enigmatic references here?

The ‘sea beast’s spine’ is the only bit where there’s widespread agreement. This is usually thought to prophesy Odysseus’ death, killed by his illegitimate son Telegonos, using a spear tipped with the spine of a poisonous ray. The satyr play of the tetralogy is named after Telegonos’ mother, Kirke, and other sources for the Telegonos story refer to Odysseus’ extreme old age at the time, so this is a very good bet.

What about the first two lines? Some 20th century commentators were so revolted by the supposed violation of tragic propriety by mentioning faeces that they insisted they must be the kind of thing you’d find in a vulgar satyr play.

But this is chresmologic poetry. Aischylos mentions birds a lot, and they’re nearly always omens, or symbolic (Pollard 1948). There’s wordplay here — word magic. It pains me that most scholarly articles about this fragment are earnestly certain that it’s about a poisonous spine literally embedded in a literal heron’s faeces. It’s like saying that the opening chorus of Agamemnon really is just about some eagles eating a rabbit.

Note. I won’t name names. Instead, for decent overviews of the Odysseus tetralogy see Gantz 1980: 151–153; Katsouris 1982.

Here’s a fragment from a subsequent play in the tetralogy, the Ostologoi. Odysseus recalls how one of the suitors once mistreated him:

[Eurymachos] is the one who once, for a joke,
threw a foul-smelling pisspot at me.
He threw and did not miss! And about my head
it crashed and was wrecked in shards,
and it gave me a stench, the opposite of myrrh ...

Aischylos fr. 180 Radt

Fr. 179 also refers to the incident. It echoes similar incidents in the Odyssey, where various suitors throw objects at the disguised Odysseus.

Note. Threats of throwing a stool at Odyssey 17.229–246, 405–412; stools actually thrown at 17.458–491, 18.394–404; a cow’s foot thrown at 20.299–319.

The word magic is on the word for ‘pisspot’, ouranē. This must be what Teiresias is referring to when he mentions excrement coming ‘from on high’ — because ouranos is the standard word for ‘sky’.

Ouranē ‘pisspot’ and ouranos ‘sky’ aren’t etymologically related to one another. (If you’re interested, they are related to English ‘urine’ and the planet ‘Uranus’, respectively.) But obviously there’s room for wordplay. The excrement that strikes Odysseus is ‘from on high’ because it was inside an ouranē.

So Teiresias is actually prophesying two separate incidents: (1) Eurymachos throwing the pisspot — excrement coming ‘from on high’ and out of an ouranē — and (2) afterwards, Odysseus being killed by a poisonous spine in old age.

What about the heron? This is more obscure and speculative. The key, I suspect, lies in geography, though this is only an inference. My sense is that it’s related to the city of Ardea in central Italy. This is because (a) we know that by the 6th century BCE Kirke’s home was imagined as being in central Italy at Monte Circeo; (b) numerous cities in Latium and Etruria had foundation legends involving children of Odysseus, Kirke, or both, including both Telegonos and Telemachos (see Phillips 1953; the second half of this piece); (c) one of these is the city of Ardea, whose name is the Latin for ‘heron’. Ardea even had herons on its coinage.

Note. The heron–Ardea link was pointed out to me more than a decade ago by Alison Griffith. I apologise to her for still not getting it into a proper publication.

So an enigmatic reference to a heron could suggest children of Odysseus and Kirke. In principle it could also be less specific, linking these children to augury (ancient augurs saw a flying heron as a good omen). It’d be very much in keeping with Aischylos’ style to have a single passage carrying many meanings at once. Still, I’ll allow that this wordplay is less clear-cut. For the ‘excrement from on high’ wordplay, we have fragments explcitly reporting the payoff of the prophecy: we don’t have that for the heron.

Word magic and the gods

The important thing is that something like an οὐράνη οὐράνια, a ‘heavenly pisspot’, is no joke. It represents a prophet’s mastery of the relationship between language and reality. That relationship is enigmatic, and that’s why Greek chresmologic poetry is couched in enigmas. If words are linked to real objects, then wordplay is a statement about links between things in the real world.

This became important in literary criticism, and even theology, in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. There was a vogue for treating the sounds of gods’ names as meaningful.

This isn’t the space for a wide-ranging review, but we touched on it at the start with Kassandra’s wordplay on ‘Apollo’ and apollōn ‘destroyer’. The Homeric commentator Theagenes of Rhegion interpreted the battle of the gods in Iliad 20–21 in naturalistic terms, each god representing a force of nature; and for two of the gods, the symbolism lies in their name, Hera = ἀήρ ‘air’ and Leto = λήθη ‘forgetfulness’. Then there are several theological wordplays in the Derveni papyrus, which states that ‘Rhea’ and ‘Hera’ are one and the same because they contain the same letters (at least in the pre-Ionic Attic alphabet), that Demeter is also called ‘Deio’ because she was ‘torn’ (ἐδηιώθη) by sexual intercourse, and that Kronos is a primordial ‘colliding mind’ (κρου- + νοῦς). This kind of mysticism is the proper context for wordplay in Greek literature up to the 5th century BCE.

References

• Ahl, F. 2002. ‘Wordplay and apparent fiction in the Odyssey.’ Arethusa 35: 117–132. [JSTOR]
• Austin, N. 1972. ‘Name magic in the Odyssey.’ California studies in classical antiquity 5: 1–19. [DOI | JSTOR]
• Dimock, G. E. 1956. ‘The name of Odysseus.’ The Hudson review 9: 52–70. [DOI | JSTOR]
• Gantz, T. 1980. ‘The Aischylean tetralogy: attested and conjectured groups.’ American journal of philology 101: 133–164. [JSTOR]
• Katsouris, A. 1982. ‘Aeschylus’ “Odyssean” tetralogy.’ Dioniso 53: 47–60.
• Louden, B. 1995. ‘Categories of Homeric wordplay.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 125: 27–46. [DOI | JSTOR]
• Olson, S. D. 1992. ‘“Name-magic” and the threat of lying strangers in Homer’s Odyssey.’ Illinois classical studies 17: 1–7. [JSTOR]
• Phillips, E. D. 1953. ‘Odysseus in Italy.’ Journal of Hellenic studies 73: 53–67. [DOI | JSTOR]
• Pollard, J. R. T. 1948. ‘Birds in Aeschylus.’ Greece & Rome 17: 116–127. [DOI | JSTOR]