![]() Corresponding to the symmetry of the Odyssey and the Iliad is a symmetrical set of differences between the two main heroes in the narration of each epic, who are Odysseus and Achilles respectively. The surviving “modern” text of our Odyssey is monumental in size, containing over 12,000 verses, nearly matching the even more monumental size of the Iliad, containing over 15,000 verses. The text of the Iliad and Odyssey as edited by Aristarchus has not survived, but the transmission of that text, including records of textual variants resulting from oral tradition, has ultimately led to the existing editions of “our” Iliad and Odyssey as published by editors in the modern era, that is, starting in the Renaissance and continuing all the way into the present. ![]() Eventually, a textual tradition started to take hold for the Odyssey as well as for the Iliad, culminating in a definitive text of the two epics, edited by Aristarchus at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt around the middle of the second century BCE. This evolution can be traced forward in time, from the “prehistoric” era of the Mycenaean Empire in the second millennium BCE all the way into the historical period of the Greek-speaking world in the sixth century BCE and later. The ancient Greek epic known as the Homeric Odyssey is symmetrical with another epic, the Homeric Iliad, and it evolved, as an oral tradition, symmetrically with that other epic. Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). But at least one thing is for sure: Odysseus clearly avoided the doom of falling victim to the song of his own Sirens. But here is a relevant question, which makes the text of my essay here more playful than the text I submitted for World Epics: am I now falling victim to a “siren song”? I leave it to my readers to decide. And I am starting to think that such a predicament is inevitable, since my aim in writing my essay on the Odyssey is to provide a companion-piece to the essay by Casey Dué on the Iliad, already mentioned, which as I should now add is another work that I very much admire. In writing my essay, I found myself in a predicament: it seems to me that I need to say as much about the Iliad as I am saying about the Odyssey. She had asked me to submit a brief essay on the Homeric Odyssey that matches another essay, written by Casey Dué, on the Homeric Iliad. That essay (Nagy 2020) appears in World Epics, an on-line site edited by Jo Ann Cavallo, whose own work on comparative epic I very much admire. But it is based on an even shorter essay that is quite serious in intent. ![]() This short essay about the Odyssey of “Homer” is a playful experiment. ![]()
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