W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.Independent Publishers Since 1923New York * LondonOceanofPDF.com HOMERTHEODYSSEYTRANSLATED BY EMILY WILSONOceanofPDF.com Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help topreserve line breaks.OceanofPDF.com To my daughters,Imogen, Psyche, and FreyaOceanofPDF.com CONTENTSINTRODUCTIONTRANSLATOR’S NOTEMAPS1. The World of The Odyssey2. The Aegean and Asia Minor3. Mainland Greece4. The PeloponneseTHE ODYSSEYBOOK 1The Boy and the GoddessBOOK 2A Dangerous JourneyBOOK 3An Old King RemembersBOOK 4What the Sea God SaidBOOK 5From the Goddess to the StormBOOK 6A Princess and Her LaundryBOOK 7A Magical KingdomBOOK 8The Songs of a PoetBOOK 9A Pirate in a Shepherd’s Cave BOOK 10The Winds and the WitchBOOK 11The DeadBOOK 12Difficult ChoicesBOOK 13Two TrickstersBOOK 14A Loyal SlaveBOOK 15The Prince ReturnsBOOK 16Father and SonBOOK 17Insults and AbuseBOOK 18Two BeggarsBOOK 19The Queen and the BeggarBOOK 20The Last BanquetBOOK 21An Archery ContestBOOK 22BloodshedBOOK 23The Olive Tree BedBOOK 24Restless SpiritsNOTESGLOSSARYACKNOWLEDGMENTSAdjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help topreserve line breaks.OceanofPDF.com INTRODUCTIONThe Odyssey is, along with The Iliad, one of the two oldest works ofliterature in the Western tradition. It is an epic poem: “epic” both in thesense that it is long, and in the sense that it presents itself as telling animportant story, in the traditional, formulaic language used by archaic poetsfor singing the tales of gods, wars, journeys, and the collective memoriesand experience of the Greek-speaking world.Modern connotations of the word “epic” are in some ways misleadingwhen we turn to the Homeric poems, the texts that began the Western epictradition. 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 formwith a prefix) in the first line of the poem. The narrator commands theMuse, “Tell me”: enn-epe. An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that istold.The Odyssey is grand or (in modern terms) “epic” in scope: it is overtwelve thousand lines long. The poem is elevated in style, composedentirely in a regular poetic rhythm, a six-beat line (dactylic hexameter), andits vocabulary was not that used by ordinary Greeks in everyday speech, inany time or place. The language contains a strange mixture of words fromdifferent periods of time, and from Greek dialects associated with differentregions. A handful of words in Homer were incomprehensible to Greeks ofthe classical period. The syntax is relatively simple, but the words andphrases, in these combinations, are unlike the way that anybody everactually spoke. The style is, from a modern perspective, strange: it is full ofrepetitions, redundancies, and formulaic expressions. These mark the poem’s debt to a long tradition of storytelling and suggest that we are in aworld 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 andordinary. 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 manof extraordinary cognitive, psychological, and military power, one who canwin any competition, outwit any opponent, and manage, against all odds, tosurvive. The poem tells us how he makes his circuitous way back homeacross stormy seas after many years at war. We may expect the hero of an“epic” narrative to confront evil forces, perform a superhuman task, andrescue vast numbers of people from an extraordinary kind of threat. Failingthat, we might hope at least for a great quest unexpectedly achieved, despiteperils all around; an action that saves the world, or at least changes it insome momentous way—like Jason claiming the Golden Fleece, Launcelotglimpsing the Holy Grail, or Aeneas beginning the foundation of Rome. InThe Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure issimply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything backto the way it was before he went away. For this hero, mere survival is themost amazing feat of all.Only a portion of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey describes themagical wanderings of Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca. Theseadventures are presented as a backstory partly told by the hero himself (inBooks 5 through 12). The poem cuts between far-distant and diverselocations, from Olympus to earth, from Calypso’s island to the palace atIthaca, from the underworld to the cottage of the swineherd. Sometimes thesetting feels entirely realistic, even mundane—a world where a motherpacks a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where thereis a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and playcheckers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together. Atother moments, we are in the realm of pure fantasy, inhabited by cannibals,witches, and goddesses with six barking heads, where it is possible to crossthe streams of Ocean (the mythical river that encircles the known world),and come to the land of asphodel, where the spirits of dead heroes liveforever. Different characters tell their own inset stories—some true, somefalse, of past lives, adventures, dreams, memories, and troubles. The poemweaves and unweaves a multilayered narrative that is both simple and artfulin its patterning and composition. The story begins in an unexpected place, in medias res (“in the middleof things”—the proper starting point for an epic, according to Horace). It isnot the start of the Trojan War, which began with the Judgment of Paris andthe Abduction of Helen and was fought for ten years. Nor does the poemstart at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey home, which has been inprogress for almost as many years as the war. Instead, it begins whennothing much seems to be happening at all; Odysseus, his son, and his wifeare all stuck in a state of frustration and paralysis that has been continuingfor 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 couldchoose 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 avictim of shipwreck or a coddled plaything of a powerful goddess, but as amaster of his home and household, as a father and as a husband. He sitssobbing 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 byyoung men who have forced their way into her home and are making merrywith daily feasts, wasting the provisions of the household, waiting for her toagree to give up on Odysseus and marry one of them. Penelope has a deeployalty both to her lost husband, for whom she weeps every night andwhom she misses “all the time,” and also to the “beautiful rich house” inwhich she lives, which she risks losing forever if she remarries. She hasdevised clever ways to put off the suitors, but it is clear that she cannot doso forever; eventually, she will have to choose one of them as her husbandand perhaps leave the household of Odysseus for a new home. When thathappens, either the suitors will divide the wealth of Odysseus between them—as they sometimes threaten—or the dominant suitor may gain the throneof Ithaca for himself. The ambiguity about what the suitors are seekingmatches an even more central ambiguity, about what Penelope herselfwants. Indefinitely, tearfully, Penelope waits, keeping everyone guessingabout her innermost feelings and intentions. As the chief suitor complains,“She offers hope to all, sends notes to each, / but all the while her mindmoves somewhere else.” This premise allows for artful resonances withearlier 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 ofTroy, later stole away. Like Paris, Penelope’s suitors threaten to steal away amarried woman as if she were a bride. Penelope’s house also echoes thebesieged town of Troy, when the Greeks were fighting to take Helen backhome—but there is here no strong Hector to defend the inhabitants.Telemachus, Odysseus’ almost-adult son, is in a particularly precarioussituation. Left as a “little newborn baby” when Odysseus sailed for Troy, hemust be twenty or twenty-one years old at the time of the poem’s action, buthe seems in many ways younger. To fight off the suitors and take control ofthe household himself, he would need great physical and emotionalstrength, a strong group of supporters, and the capacity to plan a difficultmilitary and political operation—none of which he possesses. Telemachusmust complete several difficult quests in the course of the poem: to survivethe 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 journeywith which the story begins is not that of Odysseus himself but ofTelemachus, who sets out to find news of his absent father. The son’sodyssey away from home parallels the father’s quest in the oppositedirection. The poem intertwines the story of these three central characters—the father, the mother, the son—and shows us how something different is atstake for each of them, in the gradual and difficult struggle to rebuild theirlost nuclear family.The Odyssey puts us into a world that is a peculiar mixture of thestrange and the familiar. The tension between strangeness and familiarity isin fact the poem’s central subject. Its setting, in the islands of theMediterranean and Aegean Seas, would have been vaguely familiar to anyGreek-speaking reader; but this version of the region includes sea-monstersand giants who eat humans, as well as gods who walk the earth and talkwith select favorites among the mortals. We encounter a surprisingly variedrange of different characters and types of incident: giants and beggars,arrogant young men and vulnerable old slaves, a princess who does laundryand a dead warrior who misses the sunshine, gods, goddesses, and ghosts,brave deeds, love affairs, spells, dreams, songs, and stories. Odysseushimself seems to contain multitudes: he is a migrant, a pirate, a carpenter, aking, 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 whotransforms his appearance at will and ensures that his schemes succeed. Thepoem promotes but also questions its own fantasies and ideals, such as theidea that time and change can be undone, and the notion that there is such athing 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 thisdistinctive legacy are visible in The Odyssey on the level of style. Dawnappears some twenty times in The Odyssey, and the poem repeats the sameline, word for word, each time: emos d’erigeneia phane rhododaktulos eos:“But when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared . . .” There is a vastarray of such formulaic expressions in Homeric verse, which suggest thatthings have an eternal, infinitely repeatable presence. Different things willhappen every day, but Dawn always appears, always with rosy fingers,always early. Characters and objects all have their own descriptive terms inHomer; these are known as epithets, rather than adjectives, because theyexpress an essential quality or characteristic, rather than a trait that theobject or person possesses only in a particular moment. Ships are “black,”“hollow,” “swift,” or “curved,” never “brown,” “slow,” or “wobbly.” Chairsare “well-carved” or “polished,” never “uncomfortable” or “expensive.”Penelope is “prudent Penelope,” never “swift-footed Penelope” even if sheis moving quickly. Telemachus is “thoughtful,” even when he seemsparticularly immature. Moreover, many types of scene follow a certainpredictable pattern. There is a fixed sequence of events described, withvariations, whenever someone gets dressed or puts on armor, whenever ameal is prepared, or whenever a person is killed. Through its formulaicmode, The Odyssey assures us that, once we know the patterns, the worldwill follow a predictable rhythm. This feature of the Homeric poems is amark of their debt to a Greek oral tradition of poetic song that extends backhundreds of years before the poems in their current forms came intoexistence.In The Odyssey itself we meet two singers who play the lyre while theygive their performances of traditional tales at the banquets of the rich. The first is Demodocus at the court of King Alcinous of Phaeacia, who tellsstories about Odysseus himself and the Trojan Horse, as well as about theaffair between the god Ares and the goddess Aphrodite. The second isPhemius, who performs under compulsion for the suitors of Penelope.These characters give us some important insights into the composition ofthe poem, and the person (or people) who composed it. In an obviously self-interested spirit, The Odyssey suggests that poets have a particularlyhonorable 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 performancesthat are enjoyed by wealthy banqueters. Demodocus does not read out hispoetry from a script; his inability to do so is underlined by the fact that he isblind (not incidentally, no one in the entire Odyssey reads or writesanything). Moreover, Demodocus does not invent an original story of hisown composition. Instead, Demodocus is inspired by the Muse to sing the“deeds of heroes”—which are, at least in outline, already well-known to hisaudience. The skill and inspiration of these illiterate singers is shown not inthe invention of entirely new stories, but in their ability to retell ancientstories, and to transport their audience to the scenes they describe.But Homer himself—if there was such a person—was not exactly aDemodocus. A blind, illiterate bard could not, by himself, have written themonumental Iliad and Odyssey. Homer is usually described in Greeksources 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 toHomer in Greek is as “the Poet”—the name Homer can be omitted, sincethere is only one primary poet in the canon.The Odyssey as we know it is based, like almost all the Graeco-Romanliterature we have, on medieval manuscripts. But there is an importantdifference with this text. The medieval manuscripts of an author like Virgilor Horace are based on earlier manuscripts, based in turn on earliermanuscripts, and so on, each scribe copying the work of a predecessor, andmoving back from the medieval codex (a leaved book written on animalskin parchment) to the Byzantine and then ancient papyrus (a scroll writtenon a kind of thick paper made from papyrus leaves).The Odyssey and The Iliad are different, not only because they areolder than other ancient texts, but because of the specific difficulties ofunderstanding how these poems were created—not, or not simply, from themind of an individual creator, but also from a long oral tradition, which has been transformed into two monumental written texts. How exactly did thisprocess happen? Did a single, particularly talented folk-poet learn to write?Or did an illiterate singer collaborate with scribes? Was there one creator, ormany? At what time in the process of composition did writing enter thepicture?This takes us to what is known as the Homeric Question, which isreally a whole cluster of questions about the composition of The Iliad andThe Odyssey. The Question is given a capital Q, because scholars stilldisagree on some crucial issues even after a couple of centuries ofdiscussion. How exactly did the Homeric poems as we have them emergefrom the oral tradition that preceded them? Who was Homer? Was there asingle author of The Odyssey, or several? Did the same person produce TheIliad and The Odyssey? When exactly did the poems get written down, andhow? Can we trace earlier and later parts of the poems, or tie particularpassages to different geographical locations? And to what extent do thepoems reflect real historical events, cultures, and peoples—a real TrojanWar, or the real Mycenean civilization of late Bronze Age Greece (whichexisted 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, andcoherent work of poetic storytelling? Design “by committee” has a very badname, and yet The Odyssey seems like an unexpected success. How was itdone?During the Renaissance, when the Homeric poems were rediscoveredin Europe, Homer was assumed to have been a writer, in the same way thatVirgil or Dante were writers—albeit a writer from an ancient time. But inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dissenting voices began toemerge. In 1664, the Abbé d’Aubignac attacked Homer, arguing that TheIliad and Odyssey were incoherent, immoral, and tasteless poems, cobbledtogether out of an oral folk tradition. A generation later, the British scholarRichard Bentley studied Homer’s language, and proved that it was muchearlier than classical (fifth- and fourth-century) Greek, because it stillshowed traces of a letter of the alphabet that dropped out of the language:the digamma. Bentley argued that “Homer” was a prehistoric oral poet ofabout 10,000 BCE, whose disparate and rambling songs were not gatheredinto the epics we have until the late sixth century. Scholars began to applynew methods of historical and linguistic analysis, and to ask new questions about how and when these texts were produced. In his Prolegomena toHomer of 1795, a pioneering work in this “new philology,” FriedrichAugust Wolf argued that the Homeric poems were transmitted orally, andthat they had undergone a long period of change and adaptation, throughmultiple oral reperformances and multiple reformulations by literate editorsto suit changing contemporary tastes. He suggested that the poems, whichhe saw as the product of “the whole Greek people,” were forged into theirstate of apparent unity only at the stage of transcription. Wolf’s new visioninitiated a fresh discussion of how the original Homer, or the originalbuilding blocks of the poem, might be uncovered out of the text as we haveit.During the nineteenth century, Homeric scholarship was dividedbetween the Analytic and Unitarian schools. The Unitarians opposed Wolf’sideas, largely on literary grounds, and argued that the poems as we havethem are not an aggregate of earlier, shorter compositions, but werecomposed by a lone author with a single overarching structure in mind. TheAnalysts, by contrast, argued that the epics were produced by manydifferent hands. There were multiple theories about how exactly thecompilation took place, and what the original kernel might have been. Someargued that there was an original core narrative, an ur-Odyssey, which hadbeen encrusted with many later and clumsier accretions; their scholarly taskwas to strip away the layers of later sub-Homeric narrative and restore theoriginal purity of the poems. Others believed that the poems as we havethem are a compilation of originally separate folk stories welded together.The Analysts shared the view that the earlier, more original layers of thepoems were superior to the later additions and edits, although theydisagreed about where exactly the original Homer could be located in thepoems as we have them. Even in more recent times, Homerists have beenslow to shake off the notion that earlier means better, as well as to ridthemselves of the hope that one might chisel a more perfect poem out of therough marble of the text we have.Up until the start of the twentieth century, scholars took the oral rootsof Homeric poetry more or less for granted, not fully understanding thedegree to which they can help us explain important features of Homericstyle and narrative technique. The emergence of Homeric poetry from folktraditions explained its “primitive” style, but the generic and stylisticstructures of oral poetry and folk traditions were not examined in a systematic way. The state of Homeric scholarship changed radically andpermanently in the early 1930s, when a young American classicist namedMilman Parry traveled to the then-Yugoslavia with recording equipmentand began to study the living oral tradition of illiterate and semiliterateSerbo-Croat bards, who told poetic folk tales about the mythical andsemihistorical events of the Serbian past. Parry died at the age of thirty-three from an accidental gunshot, and research was further interrupted bythe Second World War. But Parry’s student Albert Lord continued his workon Homer, and published his findings in 1960, under the title The Singer ofTales. Lord and Parry proved definitively that the Homeric poems show themark of oral composition.The “Parry-Lord hypothesis” was that oral poetry, from every culturewhere it exists, has certain distinctive features, and that we can see thesefeatures in the Homeric poems—specifically, in the use of formulae, whichenable the oral poet to compose at the speed of speech. A writer can pausefor as long as she or he wants, to ponder the most fitting adjective for aparticular scene; she can also go back and change it afterwards, on furtherreflection—as in the famous anecdote about Oscar Wilde, who labored allmorning to add a comma, and worked all afternoon taking it out. Oralperformers do not use commas, and do not have the luxury of time toponder their choice of words. They need to be able to maintain fluency, andformulaic features make this possible.Subsequent studies, building on the work of Parry and Lord, haveshown that there are marked differences in the ways that oral and literatecultures think about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literatecultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse ascliché; 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 withoutthe use of writing, allowing people in an oral culture to remember their ownpast. In Greek mythology, Memory (Mnemosyne) is said to be the mother ofthe Muses, because poetry, music, and storytelling are all imagined asmodes by which people remember the times before they were born.It is now generally agreed that, in broad terms, Parry and Lord wereright. Many features of the Homeric poems are indeed formulaic (such asthose standard “epithets” and those formulaic “type-scenes” of arming oreating), and must have originated from an oral tradition. But there is still a very wide range of opinion about how, exactly, the words of manygenerations of illiterate and semiliterate bards turned into the written textsof Homer that we have. Several essential factors need to be accounted forby any viable theory. Most obviously, the Homeric poems are written texts,not oral performances. Writing must have played a central part in theprocess of composition, so it is very misleading to describe The Odysseysimply as an “oral” poem, as is far too often done. It is a written text basedon an oral tradition, which is not at all the same as being an actual oralcomposition. Moreover, these texts are far too long for any singer toperform them on a single occasion, and far too long for any individual tohold in memory without the use of writing. Songs that had an influence onthe 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 mishmashof several different dialects, which marks the fact that the Greek singers andstorytellers lived and developed their legends in multiple different locationsacross the Greek-speaking world. Moreover, there are small inconsistenciesin the narrative itself, which usually pass unnoticed by the casual reader(such as a slight confusion about how many cloaks Eumaeus possesses, andan apparent switch in who sets up the axes for the contest in which thesuitors and Odysseus compete for Penelope’s hand). The inconsistenciescould mark the text’s emergence from multiple different earlier versions ofthe story of Odysseus, or they might suggest multiple stages of compositionand revision, by one poet or by many. Yet despite their mixed language, anddespite the few inconsistencies, both The Iliad and The Odyssey displaystriking structural coherence. There is a grand architecture to thestorytelling, which might seem to imply the careful planning of a singlearchitect, or architects.It is possible, as Albert Lord argued, that an oral poet worked closelywith a literate scribe or scribes over the course of many days, weeks, ormonths. On this model, the composition of The Odyssey may have been notso different from that of Paradise Lost, composed by a blind poet whodictated his work over a long period to a number of amanuenses. Lord andParry thought that the composer of the poem could not have been literate,because in the Yugoslavian context, singers who acquired literacy tended tolose their ability to compose oral poetry. But it has now been shown that oral traditions, or “orature,” can interact with literacy in a number ofdifferent ways, and they are not necessarily driven out as soon as literacyarrives; in Somalia, for example, oral poets have been able to continue theiroral compositions even after acquiring literacy. Oral literature is morediverse than Parry, with a single point of cultural comparison, coulddiscern.Some scholars argue that The Odyssey was composed by a singleperson who was well acquainted with the oral tradition but had becomeliterate. This is certainly possible, but there is really no evidence one way orthe other. Alternatively, perhaps the poem was composed when oneparticularly talented illiterate or semiliterate poet (or several) teamed upwith a scribe or a group of scribes. Perhaps the scribe or scribes wereentirely passive in the process of writing down what the poet composed; orperhaps there was an ongoing collaboration between two or more membersof a group. Again, it is difficult to adjudicate between these variouspossibilities, in the absence of any solid evidence, or a time machine.The same person could, in theory, have composed The Iliad and TheOdyssey, though many scholars believe that different individuals wrote thetwo poems, because they are notably different in terms of language as wellas narrative content. It certainly seems likely that the person or people whocomposed The Odyssey were aware of The Iliad, since The Odysseysupplements but does not repeat any incidents from The Iliad—which isunlikely to have happened by chance.Scholars who claim that The Odyssey was composed by a singleperson acknowledge that this poet drew on a long and complex set of earlierpoetic and folkloric traditions, and that the initial composition underwentconsiderable alteration in subsequent years, decades, and centuries. Homer—whoever he, she, or they may have been—composed this definitiveversion of the homecoming of Odysseus with a deep awareness of multipledifferent versions of the story, as well as a deep knowledge of multipleother parallel folk traditions and myths. For instance, there were probablyversions of the story in which Penelope was aware of Odysseus’ plans toslaughter the suitors at a much earlier stage, and thus proposed the Contestof the Bow in full knowledge that it would help further her husband’s plot.The Odyssey is also influenced by other related archaic legends, originatingboth around the Mediterranean and the Near East; for instance, the ancient myth of Jason and the Argonauts seems to hover behind the story ofOdysseus and his wanderings.Maybe an individual genius, a “Homer,” had a particularly importantrole in the creation of The Odyssey. But we should question the notion that aunified structure and coherent creative product must necessarily be seen asthe result of an individual’s work. Scholars have tended to assume so,because many long-form narrative genres that we are familiar with, likenovels, are produced that way. However, we are also familiar with longnarratives that do not have single authors. Many movies, for example, arethe product of a team. Most contemporary long-form television dramaseries are put together by multiple people, even if there is a single creatorwho came up with the show’s initial premise. It may be helpful to think inthese terms when considering the authorship of The Odyssey. Perhaps weare more prepared than readers of the past to approach The Odyssey as apoem that exists as a mostly unified whole, but which was created bymultiple 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 seriousdisagreement. In the middle of the eighth century BCE, the inhabitants ofGreece began to adopt a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet towrite down their language. The Homeric poems may have been one of theearliest products of this new literacy. If so, they would have been composedsome time in the late eighth century. But some scholars have suggested asignificantly later date, in the early, middle, or late seventh century BCE;others, less plausibly, have suggested even later dates of composition. Thenear consensus is that, at some point between the late eighth and lateseventh century, a hundred-year-long window, The Odyssey was composed.It is frustratingly difficult to be any more precise. Arguments aboutdating the Homeric poems usually involve an appeal to material evidence.Objects can often be dated with some precision, especially since the adventof carbon dating and other technological advances in archaeology. Peopleuse different artifacts as time goes by, or behave differently in ways thatleave a material record: for instance, we know that people in theMediterranean world switched from using bronze weapons to using,