The Odyssey Homer

Composition

The date of the poem is a matter of some disagreement among classicists. In the middle of the 8th century BC, the inhabitants of Greece began to adopt a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet to write down their own language.[47] The Homeric poems may have been one of the earliest products of that literacy, and if so, would have been composed some time in the late 8th century BC.[48] Inscribed on a clay cup found in Ischia, Italy, are the words "Nestor's cup, good to drink from."[49] Some scholars, such as Calvert Watkins, have tied this cup to a description of King Nestor's golden cup in the Iliad.[50] If the cup is an allusion to the Iliad, that poem's composition can be dated to at least 700–750 BC.[47]

Dating is similarly complicated by the fact that the Homeric poems, or sections of them, were performed regularly by rhapsodes for several hundred years.[47] The Odyssey as it exists today is likely not significantly different.[48] Aside from minor differences, the Homeric poems gained a canonical place in the institutions of ancient Athens by the 6th century.[51] In 566 BC, Peisistratos instituted a civic and religious festival called the Panathenaia, which featured performances of Homeric poems.[52] These are significant because a "correct" version of the poems had to be performed, indicating that a particular version of the text had become canonised.[53]

Textual tradition

The Iliad and the Odyssey were widely copied and used as school texts in lands where the Greek language was spoken throughout antiquity.[54][55] Scholars may have begun to write commentaries on the poems as early as the time of Aristotle in the 4th century BC.[54] In the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, scholars affiliated with the Library of Alexandria—particularly Zenodotus and Aristarchus of Samothrace—edited the Homeric poems, wrote commentaries on them, and helped establish the canonical texts.[56]

The Iliad and the Odyssey remained widely studied and used as school texts in the Byzantine Empire during the Middle Ages.[54][55] The Byzantine Greek scholar and archbishop Eustathios of Thessalonike (c. 1115 – c. 1195/6 AD) wrote exhaustive commentaries on both of the Homeric epics that became seen by later generations as authoritative;[54][55] his commentary on the Odyssey alone spans nearly 2,000 oversized pages in a twentieth-century edition.[54] The first printed edition of the Odyssey, known as the editio princeps, was produced in 1488 by the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles, who had been born in Athens and had studied in Constantinople.[54][55] His edition was printed in Milan by a Greek printer named Antonios Damilas.[55]

Since the late 19th century, many papyri containing fragments of the Odyssey have been found in Egypt, some with content different from later medieval versions.[57] In 2018, the Greek Cultural Ministry revealed the discovery of a clay tablet near the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, containing 13 verses from the Odyssey's 14th book. While it was initially reported to date from the 3rd century AD, the date is unconfirmed.[58][59]

English translations

George Chapman's English translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad, published together in 1616 but serialised earlier, were the first to enjoy widespread success. The texts had been published in translation before, with some translated not from the original Greek.[60][61] Chapman worked on these for a large part of his life.[62] In 1581, Arthur Hall translated the first 10 books of the Iliad from a French version.[63] Chapman's translations persisted in popularity, and are often remembered today through John Keats' sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816).[64] Years after completing his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope began to translate the Odyssey because of his financial situation. His second translation was not received as favourably as the first.[65]

Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that as late as the first decade of the 21st century, almost all of the most prominent translators of Greek and Roman literature had been men.[66] She calls her experience of translating Homer one of "intimate alienation."[66] Wilson writes that this has affected the popular conception of characters and events of the Odyssey,[67] inflecting the story with connotations not present in the original text: "For instance, in the scene where Telemachus oversees the hanging of the slaves who have been sleeping with the suitors, most translations introduce derogatory language ("sluts" or "whores") [...] The original Greek does not label these slaves with derogatory language."[67] In the original Greek, the word used is hai, the feminine article, equivalent to "those female people".[68]