The_Odyssey_-_Homer_Emily_Wilson
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HOMER
THE
ODYSSEY
TRANSLATED BY EMILY WILSON
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To my daughters,
Imogen, Psyche, and Freya
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
MAPS
1. The World of The Odyssey
2. The Aegean and Asia Minor
3. Mainland Greece
4. The Peloponnese
THE ODYSSEY
BOOK 1The Boy and the Goddess
BOOK 2A Dangerous Journey
BOOK 3An Old King Remembers
BOOK 4What the Sea God Said
BOOK 5From the Goddess to the Storm
BOOK 6A Princess and Her Laundry
BOOK 7A Magical Kingdom
BOOK 8The Songs of a Poet
BOOK 9A Pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave
BOOK 10The Winds and the Witch
BOOK 11The Dead
BOOK 12Difficult Choices
BOOK 13Two Tricksters
BOOK 14A Loyal Slave
BOOK 15The Prince Returns
BOOK 16Father and Son
BOOK 17Insults and Abuse
BOOK 18Two Beggars
BOOK 19The Queen and the Beggar
BOOK 20The Last Banquet
BOOK 21An Archery Contest
BOOK 22Bloodshed
BOOK 23The Olive Tree Bed
BOOK 24Restless Spirits
NOTES
GLOSSARY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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INTRODUCTION
The Odyssey is, along with The Iliad, one of the two oldest works of
literature in the Western tradition. It is an epic poem: “epic” both in the
sense that it is long, and in the sense that it presents itself as telling an
important story, in the traditional, formulaic language used by archaic poets
for singing the tales of gods, wars, journeys, and the collective memories
and experience of the Greek-speaking world.
Modern connotations of the word “epic” are in some ways misleading
when we turn to the Homeric poems, the texts that began the Western epic
tradition. The Greek word epos means simply “word” or “story” or “song.”
It is related to a verb meaning “to say” or “to tell,” which is used (in a form
with a prefix) in the first line of the poem. The narrator commands the
Muse, “Tell me”: enn-epe. An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that is
told.
The Odyssey is grand or (in modern terms) “epic” in scope: it is over
twelve thousand lines long. The poem is elevated in style, composed
entirely in a regular poetic rhythm, a six-beat line (dactylic hexameter), and
its vocabulary was not that used by ordinary Greeks in everyday speech, in
any time or place. The language contains a strange mixture of words from
different periods of time, and from Greek dialects associated with different
regions. A handful of words in Homer were incomprehensible to Greeks of
the classical period. The syntax is relatively simple, but the words and
phrases, in these combinations, are unlike the way that anybody ever
actually spoke. The style is, from a modern perspective, strange: it is full of
repetitions, redundancies, and formulaic expressions. These mark the
poem’s debt to a long tradition of storytelling and suggest that we are in a
world that is at least partly continuous with a distant, half-forgotten past.
But in some ways, the story told in this long piece of verse is small and
ordinary. It is a story, as the first word of the original Greek tells us, about
“a man” (andra). He is not “the” man, but one of many men—albeit a man
of extraordinary cognitive, psychological, and military power, one who can
win any competition, outwit any opponent, and manage, against all odds, to
survive. The poem tells us how he makes his circuitous way back home
across stormy seas after many years at war. We may expect the hero of an
“epic” narrative to confront evil forces, perform a superhuman task, and
rescue vast numbers of people from an extraordinary kind of threat. Failing
that, we might hope at least for a great quest unexpectedly achieved, despite
perils all around; an action that saves the world, or at least changes it in
some momentous way—like Jason claiming the Golden Fleece, Launcelot
glimpsing the Holy Grail, or Aeneas beginning the foundation of Rome. In
The Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure is
simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back
to the way it was before he went away. For this hero, mere survival is the
most amazing feat of all.
Only a portion of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey describes the
magical wanderings of Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca. These
adventures are presented as a backstory partly told by the hero himself (in
Books 5 through 12). The poem cuts between far-distant and diverse
locations, from Olympus to earth, from Calypso’s island to the palace at
Ithaca, from the underworld to the cottage of the swineherd. Sometimes the
setting feels entirely realistic, even mundane—a world where a mother
packs a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where there
is a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and play
checkers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together. At
other moments, we are in the realm of pure fantasy, inhabited by cannibals,
witches, and goddesses with six barking heads, where it is possible to cross
the streams of Ocean (the mythical river that encircles the known world),
and come to the land of asphodel, where the spirits of dead heroes live
forever. Different characters tell their own inset stories—some true, some
false, of past lives, adventures, dreams, memories, and troubles. The poem
weaves and unweaves a multilayered narrative that is both simple and artful
in its patterning and composition.
The story begins in an unexpected place, in medias res (“in the middle
of things”—the proper starting point for an epic, according to Horace). It is
not the start of the Trojan War, which began with the Judgment of Paris and
the Abduction of Helen and was fought for ten years. Nor does the poem
start at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey home, which has been in
progress for almost as many years as the war. Instead, it begins when
nothing much seems to be happening at all; Odysseus, his son, and his wife
are all stuck in a state of frustration and paralysis that has been continuing
for years and is becoming unbearable.
Odysseus, at the start of the poem, is trapped by the goddess Calypso,
who wants to have him stay there as her husband for eternity. He could
choose to evade death and old age and stay always with her; but movingly,
he prefers “to see even just the smoke that rises / from his own homeland,
and he wants to die.” Odysseus longs to recover his own identity, not as a
victim of shipwreck or a coddled plaything of a powerful goddess, but as a
master of his home and household, as a father and as a husband. He sits
sobbing by the shore of the island every day, desperately staring at the
“fruitless sea” for a boat that might take him back home.
Meanwhile, in Ithaca, Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is surrounded by
young men who have forced their way into her home and are making merry
with daily feasts, wasting the provisions of the household, waiting for her to
agree to give up on Odysseus and marry one of them. Penelope has a deep
loyalty both to her lost husband, for whom she weeps every night and
whom she misses “all the time,” and also to the “beautiful rich house” in
which she lives, which she risks losing forever if she remarries. She has
devised clever ways to put off the suitors, but it is clear that she cannot do
so forever; eventually, she will have to choose one of them as her husband
and perhaps leave the household of Odysseus for a new home. When that
happens, either the suitors will divide the wealth of Odysseus between them
—as they sometimes threaten—or the dominant suitor may gain the throne
of Ithaca for himself. The ambiguity about what the suitors are seeking
matches an even more central ambiguity, about what Penelope herself
wants. Indefinitely, tearfully, Penelope waits, keeping everyone guessing
about her innermost feelings and intentions. As the chief suitor complains,
“She offers hope to all, sends notes to each, / but all the while her mind
moves somewhere else.” This premise allows for artful resonances with
earlier moments in the myth of Troy. Much-courted Penelope resembles
Helen, the woman to whom all the Greek heroes came as suitors (Menelaus,
her husband, eventually won her hand by lot), and whom Paris, Prince of
Troy, later stole away. Like Paris, Penelope’s suitors threaten to steal away a
married woman as if she were a bride. Penelope’s house also echoes the
besieged town of Troy, when the Greeks were fighting to take Helen back
home—but there is here no strong Hector to defend the inhabitants.
Telemachus, Odysseus’ almost-adult son, is in a particularly precarious
situation. Left as a “little newborn baby” when Odysseus sailed for Troy, he
must be twenty or twenty-one years old at the time of the poem’s action, but
he seems in many ways younger. To fight off the suitors and take control of
the household himself, he would need great physical and emotional
strength, a strong group of supporters, and the capacity to plan a difficult
military and political operation—none of which he possesses. Telemachus
must complete several difficult quests in the course of the poem: to survive
the mortal danger posed by the suitors; to mature and grow up to manhood;
to find his lost father, and help him regain control of the house. The journey
with which the story begins is not that of Odysseus himself but of
Telemachus, who sets out to find news of his absent father. The son’s
odyssey away from home parallels the father’s quest in the opposite
direction. The poem intertwines the story of these three central characters—
the father, the mother, the son—and shows us how something different is at
stake for each of them, in the gradual and difficult struggle to rebuild their
lost nuclear family.
The Odyssey puts us into a world that is a peculiar mixture of the
strange and the familiar. The tension between strangeness and familiarity is
in fact the poem’s central subject. Its setting, in the islands of the
Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, would have been vaguely familiar to any
Greek-speaking reader; but this version of the region includes sea-monsters
and giants who eat humans, as well as gods who walk the earth and talk
with select favorites among the mortals. We encounter a surprisingly varied
range of different characters and types of incident: giants and beggars,
arrogant young men and vulnerable old slaves, a princess who does laundry
and a dead warrior who misses the sunshine, gods, goddesses, and ghosts,
brave deeds, love affairs, spells, dreams, songs, and stories. Odysseus
himself seems to contain multitudes: he is a migrant, a pirate, a carpenter, a
king, an athlete, a beggar, a husband, a lover, a father, a son, a fighter, a liar,
a leader, and a thief. He is a man who cries, takes naps, and feels homesick,
but he is also a man who has a special relationship with the goddess who
transforms his appearance at will and ensures that his schemes succeed. The
poem promotes but also questions its own fantasies and ideals, such as the
idea that time and change can be undone, and the notion that there is such a
thing as home, where people and relationships can stay forever the same.
Who Was Homer?
The authorship of the Homeric poems is a complex and difficult topic,
because these written texts emerge from a long oral tradition. Marks of this
distinctive legacy are visible in The Odyssey on the level of style. Dawn
appears some twenty times in The Odyssey, and the poem repeats the same
line, word for word, each time: emos d’erigeneia phane rhododaktulos eos:
“But when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared . . .” There is a vast
array of such formulaic expressions in Homeric verse, which suggest that
things have an eternal, infinitely repeatable presence. Different things will
happen every day, but Dawn always appears, always with rosy fingers,
always early. Characters and objects all have their own descriptive terms in
Homer; these are known as epithets, rather than adjectives, because they
express an essential quality or characteristic, rather than a trait that the
object or person possesses only in a particular moment. Ships are “black,”
“hollow,” “swift,” or “curved,” never “brown,” “slow,” or “wobbly.” Chairs
are “well-carved” or “polished,” never “uncomfortable” or “expensive.”
Penelope is “prudent Penelope,” never “swift-footed Penelope” even if she
is moving quickly. Telemachus is “thoughtful,” even when he seems
particularly immature. Moreover, many types of scene follow a certain
predictable pattern. There is a fixed sequence of events described, with
variations, whenever someone gets dressed or puts on armor, whenever a
meal is prepared, or whenever a person is killed. Through its formulaic
mode, The Odyssey assures us that, once we know the patterns, the world
will follow a predictable rhythm. This feature of the Homeric poems is a
mark of their debt to a Greek oral tradition of poetic song that extends back
hundreds of years before the poems in their current forms came into
existence.
In The Odyssey itself we meet two singers who play the lyre while they
give their performances of traditional tales at the banquets of the rich. The
first is Demodocus at the court of King Alcinous of Phaeacia, who tells
stories about Odysseus himself and the Trojan Horse, as well as about the
affair between the god Ares and the goddess Aphrodite. The second is
Phemius, who performs under compulsion for the suitors of Penelope.
These characters give us some important insights into the composition of
the poem, and the person (or people) who composed it. In an obviously self-
interested spirit, The Odyssey suggests that poets have a particularly
honorable place in society. But the singer is also presented as a servant,
perhaps a slave, who earns food and a place to rest by giving performances
that are enjoyed by wealthy banqueters. Demodocus does not read out his
poetry from a script; his inability to do so is underlined by the fact that he is
blind (not incidentally, no one in the entire Odyssey reads or writes
anything). Moreover, Demodocus does not invent an original story of his
own composition. Instead, Demodocus is inspired by the Muse to sing the
“deeds of heroes”—which are, at least in outline, already well-known to his
audience. The skill and inspiration of these illiterate singers is shown not in
the invention of entirely new stories, but in their ability to retell ancient
stories, and to transport their audience to the scenes they describe.
But Homer himself—if there was such a person—was not exactly a
Demodocus. A blind, illiterate bard could not, by himself, have written the
monumental Iliad and Odyssey. Homer is usually described in Greek
sources not as a singer (aoidos) or rhapsode (“song-stitcher”), but as a poet,
poetes—a word that means “maker.” Indeed, a normal way to refer to
Homer in Greek is as “the Poet”—the name Homer can be omitted, since
there is only one primary poet in the canon.
The Odyssey as we know it is based, like almost all the Graeco-Roman
literature we have, on medieval manuscripts. But there is an important
difference with this text. The medieval manuscripts of an author like Virgil
or Horace are based on earlier manuscripts, based in turn on earlier
manuscripts, and so on, each scribe copying the work of a predecessor, and
moving back from the medieval codex (a leaved book written on animal
skin parchment) to the Byzantine and then ancient papyrus (a scroll written
on a kind of thick paper made from papyrus leaves).
The Odyssey and The Iliad are different, not only because they are
older than other ancient texts, but because of the specific difficulties of
understanding how these poems were created—not, or not simply, from the
mind of an individual creator, but also from a long oral tradition, which has
been transformed into two monumental written texts. How exactly did this
process happen? Did a single, particularly talented folk-poet learn to write?
Or did an illiterate singer collaborate with scribes? Was there one creator, or
many? At what time in the process of composition did writing enter the
picture?
This takes us to what is known as the Homeric Question, which is
really a whole cluster of questions about the composition of The Iliad and
The Odyssey. The Question is given a capital Q, because scholars still
disagree on some crucial issues even after a couple of centuries of
discussion. How exactly did the Homeric poems as we have them emerge
from the oral tradition that preceded them? Who was Homer? Was there a
single author of The Odyssey, or several? Did the same person produce The
Iliad and The Odyssey? When exactly did the poems get written down, and
how? Can we trace earlier and later parts of the poems, or tie particular
passages to different geographical locations? And to what extent do the
poems reflect real historical events, cultures, and peoples—a real Trojan
War, or the real Mycenean civilization of late Bronze Age Greece (which
existed from the sixteenth to the twelfth centuries BCE)? Most generally,
how exactly did multiple people over hundreds of years across the Greek-
speaking world work together to create this magnificent, challenging, and
coherent work of poetic storytelling? Design “by committee” has a very bad
name, and yet The Odyssey seems like an unexpected success. How was it
done?
During the Renaissance, when the Homeric poems were rediscovered
in Europe, Homer was assumed to have been a writer, in the same way that
Virgil or Dante were writers—albeit a writer from an ancient time. But in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dissenting voices began to
emerge. In 1664, the Abbé d’Aubignac attacked Homer, arguing that The
Iliad and Odyssey were incoherent, immoral, and tasteless poems, cobbled
together out of an oral folk tradition. A generation later, the British scholar
Richard Bentley studied Homer’s language, and proved that it was much
earlier than classical (fifth- and fourth-century) Greek, because it still
showed traces of a letter of the alphabet that dropped out of the language:
the digamma. Bentley argued that “Homer” was a prehistoric oral poet of
about 10,000 BCE, whose disparate and rambling songs were not gathered
into the epics we have until the late sixth century. Scholars began to apply
new methods of historical and linguistic analysis, and to ask new questions
about how and when these texts were produced. In his Prolegomena to
Homer of 1795, a pioneering work in this “new philology,” Friedrich
August Wolf argued that the Homeric poems were transmitted orally, and
that they had undergone a long period of change and adaptation, through
multiple oral reperformances and multiple reformulations by literate editors
to suit changing contemporary tastes. He suggested that the poems, which
he saw as the product of “the whole Greek people,” were forged into their
state of apparent unity only at the stage of transcription. Wolf’s new vision
initiated a fresh discussion of how the original Homer, or the original
building blocks of the poem, might be uncovered out of the text as we have
it.
During the nineteenth century, Homeric scholarship was divided
between the Analytic and Unitarian schools. The Unitarians opposed Wolf’s
ideas, largely on literary grounds, and argued that the poems as we have
them are not an aggregate of earlier, shorter compositions, but were
composed by a lone author with a single overarching structure in mind. The
Analysts, by contrast, argued that the epics were produced by many
different hands. There were multiple theories about how exactly the
compilation took place, and what the original kernel might have been. Some
argued that there was an original core narrative, an ur-Odyssey, which had
been encrusted with many later and clumsier accretions; their scholarly task
was to strip away the layers of later sub-Homeric narrative and restore the
original purity of the poems. Others believed that the poems as we have
them are a compilation of originally separate folk stories welded together.
The Analysts shared the view that the earlier, more original layers of the
poems were superior to the later additions and edits, although they
disagreed about where exactly the original Homer could be located in the
poems as we have them. Even in more recent times, Homerists have been
slow to shake off the notion that earlier means better, as well as to rid
themselves of the hope that one might chisel a more perfect poem out of the
rough marble of the text we have.
Up until the start of the twentieth century, scholars took the oral roots
of Homeric poetry more or less for granted, not fully understanding the
degree to which they can help us explain important features of Homeric
style and narrative technique. The emergence of Homeric poetry from folk
traditions explained its “primitive” style, but the generic and stylistic
structures of oral poetry and folk traditions were not examined in a
systematic way. The state of Homeric scholarship changed radically and
permanently in the early 1930s, when a young American classicist named
Milman Parry traveled to the then-Yugoslavia with recording equipment
and began to study the living oral tradition of illiterate and semiliterate
Serbo-Croat bards, who told poetic folk tales about the mythical and
semihistorical events of the Serbian past. Parry died at the age of thirty-
three from an accidental gunshot, and research was further interrupted by
the Second World War. But Parry’s student Albert Lord continued his work
on Homer, and published his findings in 1960, under the title The Singer of
Tales. Lord and Parry proved definitively that the Homeric poems show the
mark of oral composition.
The “Parry-Lord hypothesis” was that oral poetry, from every culture
where it exists, has certain distinctive features, and that we can see these
features in the Homeric poems—specifically, in the use of formulae, which
enable the oral poet to compose at the speed of speech. A writer can pause
for as long as she or he wants, to ponder the most fitting adjective for a
particular scene; she can also go back and change it afterwards, on further
reflection—as in the famous anecdote about Oscar Wilde, who labored all
morning to add a comma, and worked all afternoon taking it out. Oral
performers do not use commas, and do not have the luxury of time to
ponder their choice of words. They need to be able to maintain fluency, and
formulaic features make this possible.
Subsequent studies, building on the work of Parry and Lord, have
shown that there are marked differences in the ways that oral and literate
cultures think about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literate
cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as
cliché; we think of it as boring or lazy writing. In primarily oral cultures,
repetition tends to be much more highly valued. Repeated phrases, stories,
or tropes can be preserved to some extent over many generations without
the use of writing, allowing people in an oral culture to remember their own
past. In Greek mythology, Memory (Mnemosyne) is said to be the mother of
the Muses, because poetry, music, and storytelling are all imagined as
modes by which people remember the times before they were born.
It is now generally agreed that, in broad terms, Parry and Lord were
right. Many features of the Homeric poems are indeed formulaic (such as
those standard “epithets” and those formulaic “type-scenes” of arming or
eating), and must have originated from an oral tradition. But there is still a
very wide range of opinion about how, exactly, the words of many
generations of illiterate and semiliterate bards turned into the written texts
of Homer that we have. Several essential factors need to be accounted for
by any viable theory. Most obviously, the Homeric poems are written texts,
not oral performances. Writing must have played a central part in the
process of composition, so it is very misleading to describe The Odyssey
simply as an “oral” poem, as is far too often done. It is a written text based
on an oral tradition, which is not at all the same as being an actual oral
composition. Moreover, these texts are far too long for any singer to
perform them on a single occasion, and far too long for any individual to
hold in memory without the use of writing. Songs that had an influence on
the Homeric poems were sung for hundreds of years in preliterate Greece;
but none of them was The Odyssey.
These are written texts that display the legacy of a long oral tradition.
In important ways the poems are a patchwork. The language is a mishmash
of several different dialects, which marks the fact that the Greek singers and
storytellers lived and developed their legends in multiple different locations
across the Greek-speaking world. Moreover, there are small inconsistencies
in the narrative itself, which usually pass unnoticed by the casual reader
(such as a slight confusion about how many cloaks Eumaeus possesses, and
an apparent switch in who sets up the axes for the contest in which the
suitors and Odysseus compete for Penelope’s hand). The inconsistencies
could mark the text’s emergence from multiple different earlier versions of
the story of Odysseus, or they might suggest multiple stages of composition
and revision, by one poet or by many. Yet despite their mixed language, and
despite the few inconsistencies, both The Iliad and The Odyssey display
striking structural coherence. There is a grand architecture to the
storytelling, which might seem to imply the careful planning of a single
architect, or architects.
It is possible, as Albert Lord argued, that an oral poet worked closely
with a literate scribe or scribes over the course of many days, weeks, or
months. On this model, the composition of The Odyssey may have been not
so different from that of Paradise Lost, composed by a blind poet who
dictated his work over a long period to a number of amanuenses. Lord and
Parry thought that the composer of the poem could not have been literate,
because in the Yugoslavian context, singers who acquired literacy tended to
lose their ability to compose oral poetry. But it has now been shown that
oral traditions, or “orature,” can interact with literacy in a number of
different ways, and they are not necessarily driven out as soon as literacy
arrives; in Somalia, for example, oral poets have been able to continue their
oral compositions even after acquiring literacy. Oral literature is more
diverse than Parry, with a single point of cultural comparison, could
discern.
Some scholars argue that The Odyssey was composed by a single
person who was well acquainted with the oral tradition but had become
literate. This is certainly possible, but there is really no evidence one way or
the other. Alternatively, perhaps the poem was composed when one
particularly talented illiterate or semiliterate poet (or several) teamed up
with a scribe or a group of scribes. Perhaps the scribe or scribes were
entirely passive in the process of writing down what the poet composed; or
perhaps there was an ongoing collaboration between two or more members
of a group. Again, it is difficult to adjudicate between these various
possibilities, in the absence of any solid evidence, or a time machine.
The same person could, in theory, have composed The Iliad and The
Odyssey, though many scholars believe that different individuals wrote the
two poems, because they are notably different in terms of language as well
as narrative content. It certainly seems likely that the person or people who
composed The Odyssey were aware of The Iliad, since The Odyssey
supplements but does not repeat any incidents from The Iliad—which is
unlikely to have happened by chance.
Scholars who claim that The Odyssey was composed by a single
person acknowledge that this poet drew on a long and complex set of earlier
poetic and folkloric traditions, and that the initial composition underwent
considerable alteration in subsequent years, decades, and centuries. Homer
—whoever he, she, or they may have been—composed this definitive
version of the homecoming of Odysseus with a deep awareness of multiple
different versions of the story, as well as a deep knowledge of multiple
other parallel folk traditions and myths. For instance, there were probably
versions of the story in which Penelope was aware of Odysseus’ plans to
slaughter the suitors at a much earlier stage, and thus proposed the Contest
of the Bow in full knowledge that it would help further her husband’s plot.
The Odyssey is also influenced by other related archaic legends, originating
both around the Mediterranean and the Near East; for instance, the ancient
myth of Jason and the Argonauts seems to hover behind the story of
Odysseus and his wanderings.
Maybe an individual genius, a “Homer,” had a particularly important
role in the creation of The Odyssey. But we should question the notion that a
unified structure and coherent creative product must necessarily be seen as
the result of an individual’s work. Scholars have tended to assume so,
because many long-form narrative genres that we are familiar with, like
novels, are produced that way. However, we are also familiar with long
narratives that do not have single authors. Many movies, for example, are
the product of a team. Most contemporary long-form television drama
series are put together by multiple people, even if there is a single creator
who came up with the show’s initial premise. It may be helpful to think in
these terms when considering the authorship of The Odyssey. Perhaps we
are more prepared than readers of the past to approach The Odyssey as a
poem that exists as a mostly unified whole, but which was created by
multiple different people, over a long period of time.
When Was The Odyssey Composed?
The date of the poem, no less than its authorship, is a matter of serious
disagreement. In the middle of the eighth century BCE, the inhabitants of
Greece began to adopt a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet to
write down their language. The Homeric poems may have been one of the
earliest products of this new literacy. If so, they would have been composed
some time in the late eighth century. But some scholars have suggested a
significantly later date, in the early, middle, or late seventh century BCE;
others, less plausibly, have suggested even later dates of composition. The
near consensus is that, at some point between the late eighth and late
seventh century, a hundred-year-long window, The Odyssey was composed.
It is frustratingly difficult to be any more precise. Arguments about
dating the Homeric poems usually involve an appeal to material evidence.
Objects can often be dated with some precision, especially since the advent
of carbon dating and other technological advances in archaeology. People
use different artifacts as time goes by, or behave differently in ways that
leave a material record: for instance, we know that people in the
Mediterranean world switched from using bronze weapons to using,