When I first heard we were reading The Odyssey for this class, I was excited. I’ve always been a fan of Greek myths and The Odyssey has references to a number of them. I also feel like it’s one of those books that’s a classic that you should read at some point during your life. At the same time, I was worried because other books that I have read that are older, like Paradise Lost and Doctor Faustus and various Shakespeare novels, I found very hard to read and almost impossible to get through. With that line of thinking, I expected that I would dread the nightly readings, but I was wrong. I’m glad that we are reading Emily Wilson’s translation because she did an amazing job of getting rid of all the flowery language and the excruciatingly detailed descriptions that I was not interested in. She keeps it to the basic facts and it makes it easier to concentrate more on the story and characters and get more out of them.
In the Telemachiad, we were introduced to Telemachus and we followed his story for a while. Like we discussed in class, he was a reactionary character for a lot of it. He spent twenty years moping around the castle until Athena pushed him into doing something. She led him on a mini-hero’s journey to find out information about his father. We discussed why she felt the need to do this and I believe it was a way for him to gain confidence so he could be more similar to his father and impress him when Odysseus returns. In the first four books of The Odyssey, we keep hearing about the amazing hero Odysseus and how awesome he was in battle and how he tricked the enemy with his mind and all these other details. When we meet him in book five, all these things are true, but at the same time I’m not quite sure what to think of them. He is constantly described as talking with careful calculation and tact, which is smart because he wants to be careful with what information he tells strangers, but it still makes him seem sorta sneaky and not exactly someone to trust. In books 11 and 12, he starts telling his story of what happened after he left Ogygia and how he slowly loses all his crew members. Many of them weren’t his fault and he couldn’t really do anything, but with Scylla, he knowingly sacrificed six men without telling them. I know it was his only option to get past and to finally get home, but it still rubs me the wrong way. I’m curious what will happen next so I can get more of a feel for Odysseus.
In the Telemachiad, we were introduced to Telemachus and we followed his story for a while. Like we discussed in class, he was a reactionary character for a lot of it. He spent twenty years moping around the castle until Athena pushed him into doing something. She led him on a mini-hero’s journey to find out information about his father. We discussed why she felt the need to do this and I believe it was a way for him to gain confidence so he could be more similar to his father and impress him when Odysseus returns. In the first four books of The Odyssey, we keep hearing about the amazing hero Odysseus and how awesome he was in battle and how he tricked the enemy with his mind and all these other details. When we meet him in book five, all these things are true, but at the same time I’m not quite sure what to think of them. He is constantly described as talking with careful calculation and tact, which is smart because he wants to be careful with what information he tells strangers, but it still makes him seem sorta sneaky and not exactly someone to trust. In books 11 and 12, he starts telling his story of what happened after he left Ogygia and how he slowly loses all his crew members. Many of them weren’t his fault and he couldn’t really do anything, but with Scylla, he knowingly sacrificed six men without telling them. I know it was his only option to get past and to finally get home, but it still rubs me the wrong way. I’m curious what will happen next so I can get more of a feel for Odysseus.
Good post! I personally am not a huge fan of Odysseus. In regards to your discussion of the Telemachiad, I feel like Athena already had the entire story of Odysseus planned and realized that to build the father-son relationship, she needed to prep him to slaughter the suitors. Thus, she guided him on this small journey.
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