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Odysseus - Part 1 Friends I have spent some very delightful hours reading about Odyssey in the last couple of days. As I read it my childhood came back to me. Whenever I did not finish some work I was doing, my grand father would say, "Aha, you are busy with the Penelope's web!" I read in two mythological books I have at home, and as I was reading it I was wondering what would Ulysses have to do with all this. Those of you who know Ulysses might laugh at that question. But... Then I thought what can I after all write about this theme being such a novice. So here is the decision. First a summary of the story as taken from(!!) the Oxford reference dictionary and then a summary of the chapter I read in the German book - "Die griechisch-römische Antike". The latter book is very interesting to read, because it deals with the meaning of the story , and I will translate and summarise what I have read below. But first, the summary: Odyssey is a Greek hexameter epic poem in 24 books traditionally ascribed to Homer. It tells of the travels of the ever-resourceful Odysseus during his years of wandering after the sack of Troy, and of his eventual return home to Ithaca and his slaying of the evil suitors of his faithful wife Penelope. His adventures include amorous liaisons with Calypso and the witch Circe, hospitality at the court of the pleasure-loving Phaeacians, the evocation of thefamous dead from the underworld, and encounters with a number of fabulous monsters, including the Cyclops Polyphemus and Scylla and Charybdis. Now the summary of what I read in "The Green and Roman Antiquity" book, by W. Dahlheim, UTB 1646. I may not know all the English equivalents of the German nouns here, and might be using the German version in some places! Aristoteles looked at the story of Odysseus thus: "A man wanders many a year all over the place because he is pursued by Poseidon. He is alone. At home suitors are feasting on his wealth, and the life of his son is at risk. After an adventurous journey he reaches his homeland, and decides to fight with the suitors. He destroys his enemies and is victorious. This is the core of the story. Everything else is just episodes." Aristoteles says not one word about Odysseus' wife, and mentions nothing about their reunion. The killing of the suitors and recapturing the power over his kingdom of Ithaka is for Aristoteles the aim of the epic. Modern interpretors consider the passages describing the return of the hero to be too afffected. Odysseus when, after 23 years, he is lying next to his wife, talks of the sufferings (!) to which he subjected others and which he himself had to suffer. .... The story of the warrior and adventurer, who could withstand all kinds of disasters and could overcome various problems by the sheer dint of his ability, has many faces. At the very first instance it is the story of a tricky hero, who had gone away to punish the thieves - Paris and Troja -, who could not return home, as the fate was against him and as he longed after new experiences. Many different stories have been knitted into the epic.(See the short summary at the top of htis message.) These were the stories which fed the human love for fantasy and adventure. But this also the story of a sailor and one who returns home after a long, long absence. And thirdly, the hero moves between the poles of the world which were opened by the initial efforts of colonialism. Interesting is also how Christianity treated Odyssey, and what Dante wrote about it. And let me sumarise all that another time, the message is too long as it is. I hope that somebody would say now what Joyce's Ulysses has to do with Odysseus. Chandra |