‘Odyssey’ reading for you to dine out on
TODAY’S subject is Homer’s Odyssey, first published to rave reviews around 800BC, the purpose of the column being to save you the trouble of reading it and to give you something incisive to say about it at dinner parties. No no, the pleasure’s mine.
One of the few regrets about my education is that I didn’t get to tangle with Ancient Greek, not because it would have opened up the world of classical literature but because of its supreme potential for showing off. Whenever I see a quotation in that exotic alphabet I yearn to impress people by reading it out loud. But such things were not to be. Ah well.
Anyhow, at a secondhand book sale at my local school last year I picked up a copy of Cowper’s 1791 translation of the Odyssey. You probably know it. I paid two bucks for it, partly in the hope that I might one day catch up on the seminal text of Western literature, but mainly for purposes of ostentation, to which end I placed the book prominently in the lavatory. (I wonder en passant what is the Ancient Greek for lavatory. There are simply no good words in English, all the available ones being either barrackroom bawdy or prissy euphemism — lavatory included. But I digress.)
There Cowper (pronounced Cooper, as I’m sure you know, but still a useful nugget for oneupmanship) sat for months, and whether any visitors to the lavatory came away impressed by my classical scholarship I don’t know because they didn’t tell me. But there came a day when I found myself enthroned with nothing to read, and my eye fell, as eyes so famously do, on dear old CowperCooper.
Interesting chap Cowper. He tried but failed to marry his cousin, wrote lots of hymns, was several times incarcerated as a lunatic, wrote the notorious line ‘‘God moves in a mysterious way’’, kept hares as pets, wrote a touching little epitaph for one of them that died at the age of 8 and ahalf, and died himself of dropsy aged 68 in the spring of 1800, by which time he had established himself as one of the most popular poets of his day and had translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey into blank verse.
(My copy was previously owned by B.J. McMurtry, who signed the flyleaf with a fountain pen, and if he’s reading this and wants his book back he’ll need a good sob story and a lot more than two bucks.)
The Odyssey runs to 24 books. Keen to avoid the sort of tedious introduction that slowpaced ancient authors favoured, there being no television in those days to beguile the masses, I dived in at Book 17. It proved a wise choice, the first 16 books being effectively a travelogue during which Ulysses (which is the Roman name for Odysseus as well as being the title of a novel by James Joyce that I intend to continue not having read) wanders round the Aegean trying to get home to his wife Penelope but being thwarted by assorted gods.
Finally back on his native shore, however, Ulysses dresses up as a beggar and limps up to his palace to be recognised only by his old dog, who wags his tail and dies on the spot. The palace meanwhile is crawling with drunken suitors all competing for Penelope’s hand in marriage, the general assumption being that he, Ulysses, has perished in some distant land. Penelope, however, has kept the suitors at bay in the remote hope that her hubby will one day return to her — unlike, it has to be said, several of her handmaidens, who have been carrying on something terrible with the drunken suitors.
It doesn’t take long for
Ulysses to work out what’s what. He astonishes the suitors by stringing a mighty bow that none of them could so much as bend, astonishes them further by firing an arrow unerringly through a line of little metal hoops and astonishes them furthest of all by slaughtering the lot of them by means of his bow, a few spears, his son Telemachus and a single loyal servant. He then hangs all the randy handmaidens (which seems a bit stiff), orders the palace fumigated and retires with Penelope to the giant immovable bed that he hewed himself from a living olive tree.
And that’s pretty well that. In other words it’s a Marvel comic that’s gained cultural clout from being 3000 years old.