A captain and his sailors are trapped in a giant’s cave. A single slab of rock blocks the entrance, and the giant has been eating the men two at a time. The captain offers him wine, and when the giant asks his name, he says it is Nobody. The poem behind that scene runs to more than 12,000 lines, composed by a poet we can barely name, in a Greece that had only just learned to write again. This episode asks who made it, how anyone could make a poem that long without writing it down, and what world was listening. Then it tells the whole story in Homer’s order: a house full of strangers eating someone else’s food, a man who says no to a goddess, and a king who comes home to his own hall dressed as a beggar. It ends in arguments that have never been settled. Is this hero admirable, or a liar of real skill? Is the poem an old man’s advice to stay home? And when his wife finally tests him, does she already know who he is? Part 1 — A Man Who Said His Name Was Nobody (Saba) * The cave — Odysseus and twelve of his sailors walk into the cave of Polyphemus, a Cyclops, hoping for the old rule of a meal and a gift for strangers. The giant says the Cyclopes care nothing for Zeus and eats the men two at a time. The captain cannot kill him, because if Polyphemus dies, nobody can roll the stone away. So the giant has to live and only stop seeing. * Nobody — The giant drinks three bowls of strong wine and asks: “What is your name, stranger? Tell me, and I will give you a guest-gift.” The answer is Nobody, and the gift is to be eaten last. The men drive a stake of green olive wood into his single eye. When his neighbours call through the stone, Polyphemus screams: “Nobody is killing me, friends! Nobody, by trickery!” The neighbours go home to bed. * The pun — The Greek words the neighbours use for “nobody”, “may tis”, run together into “metis”: cunning, the quality Odysseus is famous for. The poet does not point it out. He just lets Odysseus laugh. * A poet without a life — The ancient world agreed only that Homer composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. The blind Homer seems to come from a hymn once credited to him, whose singer is “a blind man who lives on rocky Chios”. Seven cities claimed his birthplace. Herodotus put him in the ninth century BC; modern scholars mostly place the poems in the late eighth or early seventh, the Odyssey after the Iliad. * The poem of old age — The critic known as Longinus said Homer made the Iliad in the full heat of his genius and the Odyssey in old age, like the setting sun, as large as ever but without the burning heat. Longinus had no information about Homer’s age at all. But Saba hears what he heard: a man who has seen everything a war can do and wants only to get home and find some peace and quiet. William Gladstone, who led four British governments, believed that by studying the two poems one could develop the entire moral code needed to live a good and just life. * Singing without writing — A little over 12,000 lines in 24 books, all in one six-beat metre, full of phrases that come back word for word: “rosy-fingered” Dawn, the “wine-dark” sea. In the late 1920s Milman Parry showed that these formulas form a system for composing aloud, at speed. In what was then Yugoslavia he found Avdo Medjedovich, a former butcher from Montenegro who had never learned to read. In July 1935, over about a week, Avdo dictated a song of more than 12,300 lines and said he knew longer ones. That does not prove one man made the Odyssey we have. It shows one man could have. * From Troy to home — The Iliad’s first word is “menin”, rage, and it ends before Troy falls. The Odyssey’s is “andra”, a man, a man “polytropos”, of many turns: driven this way and that, or turning things himself. The poem does not say which. * A reluctant soldier — Agamemnon’s ghost remembers that it took a whole month to win Odysseus over to the war. A later story, told outside Homer, has him feigning madness until Palamedes sets his baby son in front of the plough. Ten years at war, then ten more getting home, because the gods turned against the Greeks on the way back. Part 2 — A World Without a State (Ibsa) * Two worlds — The Odyssey is set in one age and was sung in another, perhaps four or five centuries later. * The palace that burned — In the poem, Pylos is the home of old King Nestor. In 1939 Carl Blegen began digging there and on the first day found a palace archive of clay tablets, baked hard by a fire around 1180 BC. In 1952 Michael Ventris showed that their script, Linear B, was an early form of Greek. The tablets are inventories: rations, bronze for smiths, offerings to gods. A world run by clerks. * The collapse — Around 1200 BC palace after palace across the eastern Mediterranean fell. In Greece, for roughly 400 years, nobody seems to have written anything down. What survived was song. The poem remembers that a king lived at Pylos, but not the clerks. * The Greece that listened — The listeners lived in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BC. The Greeks had borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels, and were sailing west to southern Italy and Sicily. On Ischia, a cup from around 730 BC carries a joke about the cup of Nestor in Homer’s metre. And when Odysseus looks at an empty, fertile island off the Cyclopes’ coast, Ibsa hears “a settler looking at real estate.” * The open door — On Ithaca there has been no assembly for twenty years: no king, no council, no court, no police. What holds the world together is xenia, guest-friendship. You bring the stranger in, wash and feed him, and only then ask his name; when he leaves, you give him a gift. Anyone might be the stranger next month, Zeus protects strangers, and a ragged traveller might be a god. Xenia can fail from the guest’s side too, and almost every scene in the poem tests it. * The gods — The poem opens with Zeus complaining that mortals blame the gods for their own recklessness. Athena, who loves Odysseus because he is like her, wants him released. Poseidon is in the way, because Polyphemus is his son. And the gods are not tidy: Zeus lets Poseidon punish the Phaeacians, who carried Odysseus home and kept every rule of xenia. The poem does not explain why. * The singer in the hall — Demodocus, the Phaeacians’ singer, is blind; the Muse took his eyes and gave him sweet song, which may be where the blind Homer came from. For four books Odysseus himself becomes the singer, telling his adventures after dinner to hosts whose ship he needs. Part 3 — From the Empty Chair to the Orchard (Abeba) Abeba tells the poem in Homer’s order, from the suitors in the hall to the pact in its last line. Ithaca Without Him * The house — Dozens of young nobles have been eating in Odysseus’ hall for years, waiting for his wife, Penelope, to choose one of them. His son, Telemachus, was a baby when he left twenty years ago. * The son — Athena, disguised as an old friend of the family, tells Telemachus his father is alive. At the assembly Antinous, the boldest suitor, tells how Penelope wove a shroud for Laertes by day and unpicked it by night for three years. At Sparta, Menelaus says Odysseus is held by the nymph Calypso. Antinous sets an ambush to kill Telemachus. The Last Shore * Calypso — After seven years of weeping on her shore, Odysseus is released on Zeus’ order. Calypso offers immortality one last time. He answers that Penelope is less than her in beauty, and that he still wants, every day, to go home. * The Phaeacians — Poseidon wrecks his raft, and he crawls ashore on Scheria. Nausicaa sends him to the palace, and King Alcinous feeds him without asking his name. When Demodocus sings of the wooden horse, Odysseus weeps like a woman over her husband’s body, and Alcinous at last asks who he is. The Tale at the Table Every event here is Odysseus’ own account. * From Troy to the cave — “I am Odysseus, son of Laertes,” he begins. Twelve ships; the Cicones; the Lotus-Eaters. Out of the cave, tied under the rams, he shouts his real name at Polyphemus, who prays to his father that Odysseus come home late, alone, on a stranger’s ship, to trouble in his house. The sea god hears him. * Winds, giants and a witch — Within sight of Ithaca he falls asleep and his crew open Aeolus’ bag of winds. The Laestrygonians destroy eleven ships. Circe turns half the crew into pigs, but the herb moly protects him, and they stay a year. * The dead — Tiresias tells him to spare the cattle of the Sun, then to walk inland with an oar until someone calls it a winnowing fan, and death will come to him “from the sea”. His mother, Anticleia, died of missing him. Agamemnon warns him to come home in secret. Achilles would rather be a poor man’s hired labourer than king of all the dead. * The cattle of the Sun — Past the Sirens and Scylla, the starving crew kill the Sun’s cattle while he sleeps. Zeus destroys the ship, and Odysseus alone drifts to Calypso’s island. The hall sits spellbound. A Stranger in His Own House * Ithaca — Set down asleep on Ithaca, he lies at once to Athena, who smiles at him and disguises him as an old beggar. The swineherd Eumaeus feeds him, because all strangers come from Zeus. Telemachus escapes the ambush, and father and son weep like sea eagles robbed of their young. There are 108 suitors. * Argos — On a dung heap at the gate lies the old dog Odysseus raised. Argos wags his tail but cannot come to him, and dies as soon as he has seen his master again in the twentieth year. * By the fire — Antinous throws a footstool at the beggar. Odysseus warns the kindly suitor Amphinomus, who does not leave. That night the stranger describes to Penelope the brooch she fastened on Odysseus herself, and his eyes stay as steady as horn or iron while she weeps. The old nurse Eurycleia finds his scar, and he grips her throat to keep her quiet. Pe
