One of the earliest works of Greek literature sets off during the end of the Mycenaean period and launch of the “Dark Age.” This was a time where heroes, intermediate between mortal man or a god, were first being demonstrated in the poetries of Hesoid and Homer. While Hesoid begins with the origin of the universe, biological procreation, and generation of gods, Homer, in connection to the Trojan War, recalls history through the story telling of his characters portrayed in his epic.
A similarity as seen in both poets’ writings relates to the depiction of warriors and gods. According to Homer, a great warrior was one who usually belongs to Troy, or Mycenaean World, and a god was everlastingly to which there is evidence seen today in Linear B tablets. Approximately 70 to 80 percent of literature was influenced by this man; most of which was composed orally before dying out when writing became well-known and literacy began to spread this tradition out.
Comparable to that of a singer, which Homer references as a character in his epic poem, “The Odyssey,” there are set phrases, or tales, that the lyricist uses to project a series of themes throughout the work. One of these subjects is the several strands of people returning home after the Trojan War – the homecomings – representing inhabitants coming back from their travels to changed circumstances. With 24 books constructing its narrative, five homecomings (Telemachus, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Nestor) are distinguished as predominant.
The initial action that fumed and permitted the homecomings of most Achaeans began in the Trojan War. Women were raped in temples, incidents of burning temples, and this caused gray-eyed goddess Athena a great deal of anger resulting in the disbursement of Greeks left to scatter. In Book 1 the audience meets the son of Odysseus, sacker of cities, Telemachus (Telemacheia) in Ithaka who was only an infant at the time of his father’s departure for Troy. Innocent and still maturing in age, here he meets Athena, disguised as Mentes, son of Anchialos the wise, who claims to be “guest-friends by heredity” with Odysseus and whom changes Telemachus’s perspective (32).
In the midst of altering the young prince’s physique, Athena then pushes him to amend his role in the palace, and accept his responsibilities in maintaining his father’s estate, caring for his cheerless mother, Penelope, and protecting all from the suitors fighting for his mother’s hand in marriage. Athena advises Telemachus to summon Achaian warriors, tell off the suitors with assertiveness, fit out the best ship with twenty oars he can find, and go out to ask news of his father’s long absence. Listening to her, Telemachus gains confidence and strength, recognizing Pallas Athene’s words in no longer being of an age to cling to childhood.
The first destination, as directed by Athene, was to Pylos to question the great Nestor. Here he stayed for quite some time, until towards the last remaining books of “The Odyssey” where Athene, with her endless disguises and trickery mind, stood close to Telemachus during his wakeful sleep through the night speaking to him to no longer stay with Nestor on Lakedaimon, but rather remind him of his journey home. She whispered how “it no longer becomes [him] to stray off so far from home, leaving [his] possessions behind and men in [his palace] who are so overbearing” (225).
Recommending urging Menelaos of the great war cry to grant him permission to leave, Athena spoke and told Telemachus, once making land, to go to the swineherd to speak with the man in charge of the pigs, unsuspecting to find his twenty-year gone father there. Telemachus, although never fully matching his father’s strength nor wisdom, returns into his country of Ithaka a transformed man. Taking on the suitors amongst side of his father and two other men, this fiction is one of a coming of age where a man breaks out of uncertainty and finds his potential power as well as belief in the supports of the gods. He does not know the true nature of a divinity, nor does anyone, but his reference becomes clearer.
Odysseus, on the other hand, did not have as positive or straight homecoming as his son, but was engineered return through the authority of Athena. The reader originally understands Odysseus in Books 5 through 8, in the present tense through his wanderings- the stories from how he got from one place to another. The focus of the poem, Books 13-24, recollects the past of Odysseus’s adventures as well as his final journey homeward.
Once Odysseus makes his way to Ithaka he pretends to be someone else, a beggar, telling those around him he is a man of Crete- putting himself into a role of a merchant from a Cretan sailor- who has “met Odysseus.” In a sense the recreation of Odysseus’s identity as a sailor was a symbol used by Homer for sailors, finding ways to pass the time or make something of themselves, would invent stories such as monsters or evil creatures. It was not a random thought for the sailors were also those of Cretans and Phoenicians who prayed to their gods for a safe homecoming, although Odysseus’s men always angered the gods, either through the eating of their meats or rejecting their laws, which resulted in this prolonged expedition.
Revealing himself to his son, Odysseus hides his individuality since Book 14, in evading any future dangers in his own country, let alone palace. Slight reminisces of Odysseus appear such as the recognition of Odysseus through his dog, Argos. For twenty years he waited for his master’s return, and once Odysseus had come close to him, Argos wagged his tail and lost his strength in battle against death. Eurykleia, the housekeeper to Penelope, even saw clear signs of Odysseus’s arrival for a piercing scar left on his foot was noticeable when washing his feet. Unaware of her husband’s coming (or state of living for that matter), nor made recognition that the beggar was Odysseus himself, Penelope chose to have the suitors string her husband’s bow, a competition she knew in her heart many would fail, in choosing the next companion.
As expected, the suitors could not complete the task at hand. When given the bow, granted agreement through Telemachus unlike the suitors, Odysseus was able to finish the contest and gain ownership within the palace. It was then where Odysseus fully revealed himself, warrior and king, and the suitors were placed into war. It was interesting to see how even after the battle ended, all the suitors killed, how Penelope did not make a distinction of her beloved husband until he proved his accuracy in the making of their bed, a bed that was built by Odysseus himself, and only seen by one serving woman, Aktor’s daughter, who had guarded the doors to the chamber.
Odysseus’s homecoming can be described as a restoration, finding his wife twenty years later, ten years in war, and ten traveling back to his homeland. Having to repeatedly confront the question of what is real and what is merely the semblance of reality, Odysseus in the end of the poem recreates the world according to his liking and eliminates all negativity.
Odysseus’s return runs parallel with disastrous pitfalls of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae and leader in expedition to Troy. Although the listener does not receive much detail about him until Book 11 in the underworld, he takes the position of a counter-narrative of Odysseus, for it is also his brother, Menelaos, also assists Telemachus in Pylos. During the time of the Trojan War, disagreement between Agamemnon and his brother rose. Menelaus set sail immediately, while Agamemnon insisted that a sacrifice be held first to pacify the godness Athene.
Unfortunately for Agamemnon, his death came to him by invitation from Aigisthos and his own wife in their home. The destruction of his soul and companions were left “without mercy, like pigs with shining tusks, in the house of a man rich and very powerful, for a wedding, or a festival, or a communal dinner” (178-9). Then seven years later he was avenged by his son, Orestes. King Agamemnon’s story can be interpreted through the listening of the Sirens when Odysseus crosses through this path for it is only he who can hear the songs from the point of Klytaimestra, the “monster” who murdered her husband, although the Sirens have the potential to alter their story telling and thus make Agamemnon the villain- the source for his own death.
In the quest to discover news of his father, when Telemachus visited Nestor and Menelaus in Book 4, he also learns of their homecomings. Nestor, King of Pylos and former warrior in the Trojan War, remembers Troy, and how Zeus, hard-hearted, was not giving allowance to his ship’s homecoming, but rather inspired another clash. Instead of following the crowd, Nestor, “with all the ships that followed pulled together, fled away, for [he] saw how the god was devising evils, and the warlike son of Tydeus fled and urged his companions on, and late, fair-haired Menelaos came to join [them]” (55).
Menelaos, brother of Agamemnon, and husband of Helen, helped lead the Greeks in the Trojan War, and eventually met up with Nestor, reaching the land of Pylos. They returned but knew nothing of the other Achaians- which had survived, which had perished. Although the pair came home together, there was a storm that blew Menalaos to Egypt where he made a lot of money, and furthermore returned from Egypt with ships full of gold. Their homecomings were unlike the others, and both narrate their wanderings from Troy to Telemachus.
The homecomings of Odysseus reflect the homecomings of the periods during this era. These stories do not stop here. They reach out to other Greek mythological traditions, and without Odysseus’s wanderings after Troy, the theme of homecomings or “heroes” would have no significance. Although chronology was not made sense in Homer, the first writings of him were in Athens, and it was from then on that he developed a world of values that Greeks later pertained to.
