Homer s Odyssey: Ruse and Narration

A reading of Homer’s Odyssey with a focus on seminal episodes having to do with the construction of the plot, and the intricate relationship between the Homeric narrator, his characters, and internal and external audiences. The Odyssey famously contains comparisons of its polytropos character (var. reading polykrotos) to a poet, both explicitly (11.363ff.) and implicitly (19.203 with Hesiod, Theogony 26-9). We will consider how the quality of being polytropos (including a tendency towards ambiguity and indirection) factors into the ethics of narration in the poem, at every level of the narrative. We will also consider the ethics of narration in the poem in relation to its importance in the subsequent Greek rhetorical tradition. Archaic poetry, and the Homeric poems, often suffer from the implicit bias associated with being the earliest extant Greek literature, leading to the view that their content is naïve when compared against the literary developments of the fifth century and the Hellenistic period. This seminar will approach the Odyssey as a foundational text for Greek rhetorical culture, with particular attention to what it offered the rhetorical culture of classical Athens.