Selected Themes in Homer's Odyssey

The purpose of this research is to examine selected themes in Homer's Odyssey. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas and events in The Odyssey in general terms and then to discuss how the poem treats the idea of justice, the question of identity revelation and testing, the notions of hospitality and inhospitality, the roles of the gods in the work, the portrayals of women, and the means by which epic similes emerge in the work.

The action of The Odyssey involves the wanderings of Odysseus, who travels by an extremely indirect route back to home and hearth where his faithful and patient wife Penelope awaits him and where he kills all the suitors who have been courting her in his absence. The journey takes twenty years because Odysseus is repeatedly thrown off course, wandering the Mediterranean area in a series of extraordinary adventures. The content of those adventures, which appear to digress from Odysseus's principal objective, is the content of ideas contained in the work, as either understood or enacted by Odysseus.

Book I decisively establishes the range of human choices and dilemmas, both ethical and cultural, that permeate the entire work. This is important because it serves as an introduction to means by which multiple conflicts have to be resolved in the course of the narrative. Odysseus has a comrade in a portion of his travels, notably his grown son Telemachus, who has attempted without success to drive Penelope's suitors away (I.32-

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eds destroyed them; for they respected nobody on earth, bad man or good, who came among them. So through their own perversity they met a dismal doom" (XXII.273-4). The generational and experiential difference between Telemachus and Odysseus does not prevent the younger from feeling the injustice of the suitors toward Odysseus and Penelope so strongly that he sets sail to search for his father and "will try to bring upon [the suitors'] heads an evil doom" (II.45). Lacking joy in the estrangement between father and son, Telemachus seems to take emotional refuge in the undoubted affection for his absent father. Trapped in a boisterous, adolescent-humor living environment with suitors who have grown increasingly crude and mocking over the years, Telemachus acts out a reformist agenda, attempting to seize control of a family life that his mother cannot control because she is a woman and he cannot control because he is not yet a man. The only solution is to bring Papa home to set things right. Papa will know what to do. Now only an experienced plotter like Odysseus could accomplish the wholesale slaughters required on the great sea journey and at home in Ithaca; Odysseus has had a good deal of practice by the time he touches home shore

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