Is it really him?

[PocoLoco]

Hey guys, i am new to this, but it seems really cool.

Last semester, my class read the Odyssey. I had read it before in high school but never realized just how much was packed into the book. Anyway, my professor mentioned that there was a reading of the book that suggested that it might not have even been Odysseus that returned to Ithaka. I took it and ran with it. I researched the book and found some pretty startling discoveries that pointed in this direction.

I, myself, called it the Trojan Horse theory. That the person throughout the story was actually like the horse in that he snuck in under the disguise of something else and plundered, or just got some stuff from the islands he visited as he went. There is alot more things that i found, but i want to see if anyone's interested in hearing it before i go and write out everything.

I was just wondering if anyone else had heard of this point of view and had any thoughts on it.

Thanks

[PeterL]

It is easy to believe that Odysseus didn't exist, that he was simply a fictional point of view character. In historical fiction it is very common to insert a character through which the actual history is described. The way that I read the Odyssey is that it is partly historical and partly allegorical. The trip to the various places is essentially allegorical; the places and people encountered are symbolic. Whether the return to Ithica is historical or allegorical, I am not sure. The mentions of the battle of Troy are historic.

[Charles Darnay]

Hey guys, i am new to this, but it seems really cool.

Last semester, my class read the Odyssey. I had read it before in high school but never realized just how much was packed into the book. Anyway, my professor mentioned that there was a reading of the book that suggested that it might not have even been Odysseus that returned to Ithaka. I took it and ran with it. I researched the book and found some pretty startling discoveries that pointed in this direction.

I, myself, called it the Trojan Horse theory. That the person throughout the story was actually like the horse in that he snuck in under the disguise of something else and plundered, or just got some stuff from the islands he visited as he went. There is alot more things that i found, but i want to see if anyone's interested in hearing it before i go and write out everything.

I was just wondering if anyone else had heard of this point of view and had any thoughts on it.

Thanks

I am interested to read what you have found in your researches, so please share.

[bugmasta]

Poco, so you're saying some other soldier assumed Odysseus’s identity and traveled back to Ithaca to live in his house with his wife? I seem to remember a scar from a bore attack and a bow that only Odysseus could string. I also just recently read The Odyssey for the second time and would be very interested in what you have to say on this subject.

[TeacherEmily]

I teach English I and am preparing to teach "The Odyssey." I would love to discuss this idea with my kids. I think it would help them get more interested. Keep me updated on your findings.

[Whifflingpin]

Is not the Odyssey interesting enough already?

Surely it is packed with adventure, humour, history, philosophy, religion and social issues, without throwing in crackpot, unprovable twaddle.

Just start them on a question of "how long would they stay faithful to a husband/wife who went overseas?" A week? A year? ten years? twenty years?

or read the bit of the capture by the Cyclops and ask them to devise ways of escaping.

or "how realistic is a wooden horse?"

or discuss the visit to the underworld, as a lead in to life after death

or

or whatever is appropriate to them

[infangec]

I believe that this theory is garbage given the information you have provided thus far... case and point through Odysseus' proving of his identity through his knowledge of the unmovable bed shared by he and Penelope as he recounted in great detail about how he built it and what it was built from. If you are making the point however that it is not Odysseus that returns to Ithaca in that he has become unto a new stage of himself through his journey, that is a defendable point in that throughout the story there is an underlying theme of development: Telemachus from boyhood to manhood in taking arms and defending his father's house, Penelope from motherhood and fertility to middle-agedness in accepting the maturing of Telemachus and allowing Telemachus develop into manhood, Laertes from senectitude to death, and Odysseus from a man at his prime (physically, mentally, as well as sexually), a sort of "classical playboy" if you will, to middle-agedness. Odysseus realizes through his journey, starting with his time with Calypso, that he isnt the same energy-filled 20-something that he was before leaving for Troy and in his leaving Calypso for Ithaca, marks his acceptance of his deterioration and demonstrates the necessity of maturity for happiness.

[JBI]

What I found interesting was the idea that Odysseus is the one who tells the story of his adventure. Though only 1/6 of the epic, it is the most well known piece. All we know of Odysseus's journey home is told from the point of view of Odysseus, the greatest liar and manipulator the world at that time knew. For all we know he could have made the whole thing up.

[JCamilo]

The idea is non-sense. The people who create Odyssey is not creating a lie or a farse. They knew the difference. Notice how the closer sources do not treat it as that (they do not believe it is true, they believe it represents the truth and tell the truth as far as poetry is concerned).
As not being him, pure garbage, no evidence will dismiss what infagec already pointed - there is a part of the work, the very final, where the only objective is to proove that man is Odysseus.

[HayleySOAD]

Odysseus in real-life is not likely to have existed. He is a fictional character that existed in Greek mythology, which Homer then wrote a poem about. Odysseus may have been based upon a real king of Ithaca who was known for his cunning, but whose skills and talents were exaggerated as a result of oral tradition and time.

In terms of the story, Odysseus has to be the one who returned to his wife as he had the boar scar and was also the only one able to string a bow. His wife also tested him by mentioning the bed which only she and her husband know the secret about (how one of the legs is a tree). She casually mentions how the bed can be moved, which angers Odysseus as it was rooted to the floor when he had left. Telemachus also resembles his father.

[free]

I have read somewhere (on the internet, cannot remember where exactly) that Odysseus was the author himself. I was surprised with that idea because I had never heard it before.

[Pompey Bum]

Odysseus in real-life is not likely to have existed. He is a fictional character that existed in Greek mythology, which Homer then wrote a poem about. Odysseus may have been based upon a real king of Ithaca who was known for his cunning, but whose skills and talents were exaggerated as a result of oral tradition and time.

Homer may also be legendary, but the name provides a convenient way to talk about several early Greek texts and their authors. Whoever wrote the versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have was (or were--it wasn't necessarily the same person) probably redacting and harmonizing other oral epics that had been handed down from the end of the Greek Bronze Age, through the Greek Dark Age (when writing was lost), to the emergence of a new form of written Greek during the Archaic Period.

So technically speaking, the world Homer describes never existed; by which I mean that he didn't really know what he was talking about. How could anyone from the Archaic Period have known what happened in Bronze Age in a historical sense? The Homeric world is a kind of centaur (not to call it a Frankenstein monster), made partly of the contextual world of Homer's own time and partly of the world his oral sources had handed down to him--great Palaces like Pylos, mighty strongholds like Mycenae, bronze weapons, boar-tusk helmets and full-body shields (neither of which were still used in Homer's time), and other relics of the lost Bronze Age. The city Schliemann discovered may or may not have been Troy (opinions differ). And whether figures like Odysseus and Achilles really existed is anybody's guess.

The point that's easy to miss, though, is that "Homer" (or whoever composed the final version) certainly wouldn't have cared about historicity. The notion of history in critical sense would not even exist until the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, still centuries away. (Even the term history is taken from a Greek word Herodotus uses to describe his investigations). Homer knows nothing of that. As Whiff said, the Odyssey contains "adventure, humour, history, philosophy, religion and social issues." Even more significantly, both Homeric epics contain the Greek heroic ideal at the early dawn of western cultural tradition. What we would call Greek civilization is just starting to form; and the Homeric ideal is in some ways going to be its engine.

That civilization, obviously, had a future ahead of it. The Romans later gobbled it up, only to learn that you are what you eat. The memory of that "Greco-Roman" culture (and the recovery of many of its texts after the fall of Byzantium) brought on the European Renaissance. And the classical education of generations of British public schoolboys insured that the British Empire, for good or ill, would export the Homeric ideal (along with many other things) beyond the setting sun.

All that makes the legendary blind poet (or anonymous redactor(s)) important to human history. But "Homer" is poetry, not history (let alone "historical fiction"), and it's really missing the point to reduce the great Epics to either. If Homer did exist, and he was somehow beamed onto the Starship Enterprise, he would be heroically declaiming, "Dammit Jim, I'm a poet not a historian!"

[Pompey Bum]

I have read somewhere (on the internet, cannot remember where exactly) that Odysseus was the author himself. I was surprised with that idea because I had never heard it before.

In the context of my post above, the questions to ask are: was the part of the Odyssey composed in the first person originally a separate poem; and was it written by or based on an account by Odysseus himself? The answer is yes: that section was very likely was an independent epic that was later redacted and harmonized into a whole by "Homer"; but no: it is impossible that Odysseus himself composed it. For one thing, the Odyssey is written in Homeric Greek, a kind of Greek that did not exist in Bronze Age (Odysseus' time, when the Trojan War is supposed to have been fought). And the Greek from that period, Linear B (which lacked the familiar Greek alphabet), was lost by "Homer's" time. So there is no chance that the text as we have it was written by Odysseus. If Odysseus existed, of course, it is not impossible that he, as the only survivor of the events described, could have told his story to oral poets (or even been a poet in his spare time as king); but we don't have any more evidence for that than we do for his having lived in the first place. And the idea that only a "sole survivor" could have told the story, so it must have been Odysseus, won't fly either. Any Dark Age poet could have made it up and passed it on: the most likely explanation by light years.