Everywhere, perhaps, a god.

To love Homer, one must embrace his quirks, discovering for oneself all the charm of an exotic world, three thousand years removed.

“Everything that doesn’t resemble us,” I admit, “makes the epic irresistible; first and foremost, the gods.”

Accustomed to believing or not believing in one God, we find it hard to understand polytheism. That is why, above all else, it is the gods in Homer that astound me. Actually, that is exactly what they were counting on. Every encounter with them is not without consequence for mortals, especially women: “A union with a god,” Homer notes, “is never fruitless.”

Children from mixed marriages populate the epic in great numbers. Not always, but often, fathers—if their wives do not interfere—take care of the offspring they have fathered on the side, whatever they may turn out to be. The Cyclopes, who do not even need divine protection, are a bitter example.

“We Cyclopes,” Polyphemus blasphemes in his blindness, “have no need of Zeus or any of your other blessed gods.” (Here and below, the translation by V. Zhukovsky).

It’s understandable. The Cyclopes are the children of Zeus’s brother Poseidon. Taking advantage of this kinship, Polyphemus took revenge on his tormentor with his father’s help. In fact, it is precisely thanks to the machinations of the fearsome Poseidon that we have witnessed the terrible adventures of Odysseus. Yet Homer’s gods are not as terrifying as ours, whose appearance could only be endured because He hid behind the mask of a burning bush.

The Olympians are simpler and more human simply because they willingly and frequently take on human form. Having slipped into our midst, the gods infect everyone with doubt. In the *Odyssey*, no one is ever sure who they are dealing with: “It seems one of the Olympian gods is present here in secret,” they suspect, and not without reason:

“The gods often, having taken the form of foreign men,
enter earthly dwellings to see with their own eyes
who among men acts lawlessly, who observes their justice.”

The reverse is also true. Odysseus is easily—and just in case, often—mistaken for a god. But the bard also generously calls others, including the swineherd, “god-like.”

By narrowing the distance between us and them, Homer compelled his heroes to live in the constant, though not always obvious, presence of the gods. Sometimes intrusive, as with Calypso and Circe, and sometimes caring, as seen in Athena, who not only gives advice but also changes her favorite’s appearance, sometimes giving him more height and weight, and at other times, following the plot, aging him and dressing him in rags.

(A. Losev wrote without hesitation that the goddess bustles about Odysseus like a good old aunt.)

Every time I visit Greece, it seems to me that the landscape, familiar to both gods and humans, is to blame for this theological confinement. I felt this myself when I wandered along the rocky shores of Crete in the early mornings. The landscape, it seemed to me, possessed such vividly individual features that they were bound to be reflected in the heroes born in such surroundings. When an entrance to a cave opened up in the rocks, from which a stream flowed, I involuntarily looked around, hoping to find a nymph or a satyr.

Odysseus felt the same way in any unfamiliar place. Upon reaching the mouth of a river, he displays theological courtesy and addresses an unknown local goddess, being certain that nature cannot do without her. Now it is easier to understand Odysseus, at least for the “greens,” who have once again deified the entire Earth and call it by its Greek name: Gaia.

The problem is that we parted ways with the old gods too long ago. To truly see them—and not just pretend that we do—we must retreat to an archaic consciousness that takes everything at face value, without resorting to allegories. This is the subject of a parable-like story told through drawings created in Bali.

In 1931, two European artists settled on the island, whose inhabitants are known for their complex religion and colorful rituals. (One of them, the German Walter Spies, had lived for a long time in pre-revolutionary Russia, where he discovered Chagall and naïve folk painting. His own paintings resemble the works of Pirosmani, which Spies may have seen in the Caucasus—he was interned there during World War I.)

Enchanted by the Balinese people’s artistry, the Europeans taught them how to use ink and paper. Until then, the locals had no concept of art as we understand it; their aesthetics were inextricably linked to religious ceremonies. It is all the more surprising that the results of their very first attempts were stunning. Having mastered the technique of Western naturalistic drawing, the Balinese depicted the world as they perceived it.

Each drawing was a “photograph” of their magical universe. Alongside people and animals, their works were inhabited by deities, spirits, and demons.

Supernatural characters appeared not only in illustrations of myths but also in scenes from everyday life. The Balinese painted invisible beings because they had no doubt of their inevitable and ubiquitous presence. To understand a Balinese artist, one can imagine a Western painter who adds to a realistic landscape those images that hover around us in the ether before materializing on television screens.

Perhaps the Homeric Greeks imagined the world in the same way as the Balinese, which makes it understandable why neither group was in the least surprised by the constant presence of visible and invisible gods. They knew for certain that the gods were always nearby.

We must admit that neither resolute monotheism, nor haughty atheism, nor the cowardly compromise of agnostics has managed to completely wean us from trusting in little gods, from whom—out of necessity, circumstance, or whim—we fashion idols for ourselves that are just a tad taller than we are. So, Boris Grebenshchikov (he revealed his secret to me) is aided by a vast pantheon, where small but useful gods of parking lots and hangouts live among their own kind.
 

A World of Its Own

The epic is never in a hurry, no matter where it goes. When scholars finally reached the Balkan descendants of the aedi in the 20th century, they were able to confirm this through an example of the gusli players from the Yugoslav regions. They still sing their songs today—always for hours, often for days, sometimes through the night. At amateur concerts, the gusli players wear costumes so elaborate they border on parody, but they can also perform in plain clothes. And then they are no different from the audience until they pick up their single-string instrument, which serves as a monotonous background, unable to sing. The storyteller does the singing instead. In an unnaturally high-pitched and piercing voice, he narrates a story that is somewhat thin on plot but rich in detail. In the song, not a single word goes undefined, no action goes without repetition. For instance, every piece begins with the hero waking up in the morning. And although we already know this, the gusli player recounts this simple news first, one way, then another way, and yet another way, weaving repetitions throughout the narrative.

Prosper Mérimée, who published the minstrels’ songs before he had even heard them, eliminated unjustified excesses from his adaptation, thereby lending the verses dynamism, expressiveness, and compositional momentum with an acceleration leading to the climax. This tempted Pushkin to translate Mérimée’s adaptation into Russian. The result was the marvelous “Songs of the Southern Slavs.”

Epic, like nature, abhors a vacuum, but tolerates tautology perfectly. Repetitions hypnotize the audience and put it into a trance, like the measured dance of the Curetes, “Swan Lake,” and “Boléro.”

In the original, experts have calculated, repetitions make up a third of Homer’s texts, which never bothered anyone, for they were not read but listened to. What are pleonasms to us are refrains to them, whose monotony no one complains about. While frantically eliminating redundancies in writing, we, without even noticing it, endlessly repeat the same thing in conversation, rightly considering repetition the seed of rhetoric. The reader, but not the listener, makes use of secondary language that has passed the test of weeding and distillation. No one, not even Dovlatov, to whom this was often attributed, wrote the way he spoke. This makes Homer, whose poems knew no writing and thus did not compete with it, all the more interesting to us.

Since the epic had not yet learned to economize, it did not omit details. Each detail is illuminated by a dazzling light that allows one to make out the tiniest aspect of what is being described, even if it has no bearing on the plot’s progression. All the guns, had Homer known of them, would have been non-firing in his hands. Because of this, his world turned out to be seamless. And this makes the idle digressions delightful. They seem like harbingers of the businesslike realism in the style of Defoe and Kipling. This is how the former described the sharpening tool made by Robinson in prose, and the latter, the process of casting in verse.

Homer lingers, and not just once, on unnecessary detail. He notes “nimble slaves” washing the banquet tables with a “porous sponge.” And I immediately recall the very same sponges that quite modern Greeks shove on tourists. Sometimes the bard is detailed to the point of amusing tedium:

A shining basin, which served to wash
Her feet, was brought by Eurycleia; and, filling two-thirds
Of the basin with fresh water, she topped it off with boiling water.

In extreme cases, we get a heap of useless knowledge, like the technique Odysseus used to make earplugs:

I, however, immediately chopped the honeycomb wax into
small pieces with my sword, crushed it in my mighty palm;
and instantly it became soft; Helios, the life-giving god,
graciously warmed it with his heat-bearing ray.
Then I sealed my companions’ ears with wax.

They say that Picasso suffered from a peculiar ailment. He could not bear to look at an unpainted surface, be it an envelope, a napkin, or a pack of cigarettes. Homer has a similar affliction: for him, nothing exists that is not described. To keep the world invented by the bard alive in our imagination, he must furnish it thoroughly.

It stood on the smooth oak threshold (having hewn the beam to a line,
the builder skillfully set that threshold in place, fixed the door
jambs into it, and hung the door leaves on the jambs…

But the apotheosis of this technical procedure is the description of the marital bed that Odysseus built on the stump of an old tree:

Then he cut off a branch from an olive tree and, near the root,
chopped off the trunk with an axe, and the stump at the root, all around
he shaped it with a sharp copper chisel along a string, making it
the base of the bed…

The persistence of this long passage transforms seemingly trivial details into symbolic ones. The marital bed is the root of the family tree, which cannot be transplanted. The entire story of Penelope and her long-suffering husband is concentrated in a single image. It is clear why Homer does not spare any words for this bed.

I have a sculptor friend who cut down a tulip tree on his farm and made a double bed out of the wood. True, it stands not in Ithaca, but in the trendy New York neighborhood of SoHo.
 

Oblique Parallels

After Homer, Joyce created the most famous Odysseus, but he wasn’t particularly pleased with it, regretting that he had gotten involved with the epic. All the more so because at age 20, Joyce rejected Homer, relegating him to a place beyond the oikoumene of the Western tradition, which he had begun with “The Divine Comedy”. Later, of course, Joyce changed his mind and adopted “The Odyssey” as a template. Over time, however, he became disillusioned with this endeavor as well.

“A vain whim,” Joyce admitted as early as the 1930s.

Moreover, Joyce called all the Homeric parallels that the he had helped researchers identify and document a “terrible mistake.”

One need not necessarily agree with the author, but it is important to understand him. Apparently, “Ulysses” served as his scaffolding. After all, a prose writer always lacks the disciplining chains that prosody provides a poet. Usually, the plot handles this. But Joyce had no intention of using it. Insisting that writers, unlike journalists, write only about the ordinary. Instead of the interesting, he wanted to tell everything at once, packing it all into a single day in the life of a rather unremarkable protagonist.

To embark on such an extremely ambitious project, Joyce needed a precedent and a framework. To prevent the fabric covering the entire world he described from unraveling, he had to channel the narrative. The universal “Odyssey” seemed like a convenient crystalline grid for a novel “about everything,” for it offered new characters pseudonyms time-tested by centuries

This is how Milorad Pavić forced his novels into the grid of a crossword puzzle or the framework of a dictionary to break free from the bonds of causality. A borrowed form frees the author’s hands by taking on the compositional burden. (It’s another matter, Pavić complained to me, that his books can be read in a dozen ways, but everyone starts on the first page and ends on the last, disregarding the complex architectural design.)

Joyce drew parallels with the “Odyssey” more convincingly and hid them even more diligently within the thicket of the text. But only after “Ulysses” had already been written and begun a full-fledged life of its own did the author (rather than his critics and meticulous readers) discover that the book did not particularly need Homer and that the wardrobe from the “Odyssey” sits awkwardly on the inhabitants of his “Ulysses.” Moderately charming and peace-loving, Bloom bears little resemblance to the second-most valiant warrior in the Achaean camp. Stephen Dedalus took from Telemachus perhaps only his immaturity. And the wanton Molly Bloom has even less in common with Penelope, who is obsessed with marital fidelity.

Of course, with the help of the meticulous efforts of commentators’, we can identify all the analogies with Homer. This hunt makes reading Joyce a fascinating search for clues, a quest that challenges us and rewards us with the pleasure of solving the puzzle. But one can also imagine an approach to the text that demonstratively rejects all allusions and suggests reading the novel without looking back—with a clean slate.

If we forget the title, “Ulysses” is capable of standing on its own without Homeric parallels. And then what remains of the “Odyssey” in the book is not the heroes of the epic, but its method—the description of unadulterated reality. Joyce wanted to illuminate his rainy Ireland with the bright light of the epic, which leaves nothing in the shadows and omits no details.

According to the author’s plan, Bloom was to become the most complete hero in the history of literature: father, husband, son, lover, hero, victim, and guest in his own home.

(It turned out, as snide critics noted, to be mostly below the belt.) To achieve this, Joyce places Bloom in a unique setting—banal and exhaustive. Following Homer’s lead, Joyce lists details that have earned their place in the poem and text simply because they exist.

In the continuous world of “Ulysses,” a radical democracy of equality reigns. Here, everything is equally important and unimportant, so any fragment can be quoted. For example, the one where Bloom is driving to a funeral. This episode (“Hades”), of course, is linked to the one where Odysseus journeys to the realm of the dead. But more important than scholarly parallels is the density of the description, which revives the epic narrative strategy three thousand years later.

“Mr. Bloom spread his hands in a gesture of gentle courtesy and clasped them again. Smith O’Brien. Someone had placed a bouquet at the foot of the statue. A woman. Probably the anniversary of his death. Wishing you many more happy ones. Circling the statue of Farrell, the carriage silently pushed their unresisting knees aside.”

These very “unresisting knees” add nothing to the narrative and lead nowhere, but these relics of continuous narration link Joyce’s epic to its predecessor and trace it back to it.

It is characteristic that we meet Bloom at breakfast, when he is frying a kidney. A strange choice for a morning meal. It is justified only by the way the Achaeans divided the roasted carcass: the thighs for the gods, the “fat-filled loin” for important guests, while the host kept the favorite offal for himself.
 

Feasts

In Homer, everyone is constantly eating. In fact, they have no other choice, because in their limited repertoire of entertainment, feasts follow immediately after killing and precede love. (In “The History of Sexuality,” Michel Foucault argued that we, unlike the ancient Greeks, exaggerate the role of sex at the expense of an interest in the pleasures of the stomach.) This makes it all the more intriguing to observe what is eaten in “The Odyssey”—and what is rejected.

What is most surprising is that a power surrounded by seas and possessing a fleet completely excludes fish from its feasts. Having become a common food in the Classical era and a delicacy in the Roman era, in Homer’s time it was suitable only in critical situations:

They roamed the shifting seashore in all directions and fished
with sharp hooks—hunger gnawed at them.

In this disdain for fishing, one can discern remnants of archaic cults, echoes of which have survived to this day. On the Caribbean island of Haiti, locals do not eat fish, fearing water demons. In Greenland, a Muscovite living there told me, fishing—even for halibut, the northerners’ favorite—is a pastime for children and women; men hunt sea creatures and bears. In Serbia, which is closer to Homer’s time, the locals explained to me: it’s best not to venture into the Danube with a fishing rod because of the dangerous demons there.

“Especially,” my companion spoiled the legend, “since zander goes for 20 euros a kilo at the market.”

Having deprived themselves of marine diversity, the Greeks of that era did not eat chickens either; these appeared centuries later, arousing admiration for their colorful plumage and feisty nature, and were called the “Persian bird.”

That leaves bread, which, along with laws, was a sign of civilization. Without it, the Cyclops, for example, remained savage. Their diet consisted solely of cheese, buttermilk, and human flesh.

The other characters eat only meat, but of anything that moves: sheep, domestic pigs, boars, and oxen, including sacred ones, whose “meat, taken from the spits, let out a plaintive bellow” .

Roasted meat, sprinkled with barley flour, is mentioned in nearly every song and is never accompanied by vegetables.

The meal turns out to be meager, yet heroic. It is not the meal of a farmer, nor even of a shepherd who spares his flock, but rather that of a hunter who still sees domestic livestock as prey, fit for sacrifice to the gods and a feast for his companions.

Just as with the hunt, there is no place for cooks in Homer’s world. Men prepare the meat, just as Penelope’s suitors do day after day: “let us begin to prepare our meal with our combined strength.”

Hoping to taste what they had managed to create, I once fell for a tourist trap in Greece called “a Homeric lunch.” On the seashore, while we drank sour retsina, a whole sheep was roasting on a spit. When the meat was ready, the host—who resembled a pirate more than a cook—wildly swung a cleaver, hacking the carcass into pieces haphazardly. Grumbling and burning our mouths, we ate with our hands, spitting the bones out onto the sand. I felt full and content in Homer’s company, until quite recently, when archaeologists proved that it was all a hoax. During excavations, a clay grill with notches for skewers was found—irrefutable evidence that the Achaeans ate kebabs that were no different from ours.

Judging from Homer, the feasting never grew tiresome:

Sitting at their meal all day until evening’s gloom
They ate fine meat and drank sweet wine.

The feast became the pinnacle of the social hierarchy when heroes managed to share a meal with the gods—or rather, the goddesses:

The nymph Calypso, having offered him food and drink
Of various kinds, with which people are always satisfied.

But at the meal, despite their physical closeness, each ate their own portion: Calypso “served fragrant ambrosia with sweet nectar.”

The memory of such a feast is echoed in the Bible, when Abraham entertained the angels with “unleavened bread” and the meat of “a tender and fine calf.” In the “Odyssey”—the same menu, from which Rublev, in his “Trinity,” left only the sacrificial chalice.
 

The Living, the Dead, and the Sleeping

Since feasts in “The Odyssey” either conclude an episode or form its core, the bloodiest scene also takes place in a banquet hall—when Odysseus kills the suitors. It is explicitly stated that there are 108 of them. This figure alone is astonishing, not only because of the hero’s power in single-handedly (Telemachus not counting) defeating an army, but also because of the precision of the count. By avoiding a round number, the bard lends credibility to the slaughter.

Scholars have calculated that Homer knew more than 60 ways to say “he died in such-and-such a way,” and he used them with relish in that 22nd song, which is dedicated to the apotheosis of revenge. By that point, nearing the finale, Odysseus already suffered so much humiliation that the listener loses the ability to sympathize with the suitors. Odysseus had earned the right to be cruel, and in his hands, the famous powerful bow serves as a practical weapon of vengeance. Keeping his enemies at a distance, he prevents them from swarming him in a mob of 108 (!) men. But in Odysseus’s hands, the bow is also an instrument of justice, which he handles like a musician handles his favorite instrument (for a professional, the violin is a third hand).

Like a singer accustomed
to wielding a ringing zither, preparing to begin his song,
he tunes it and strains its elastic strings, made from sheep’s
intestines—thin and supple—with ease.

Odysseus’s vengeance is his swan song. Preparing the climax of the entire poem, Homer, as usual, brings in Athena, who further stokes the thirst for blood, driving the already insolent suitors mad:

She aroused their laughter, confusing their hearts and unsettling their minds.
They laughed wildly; and, their faces suddenly changed,
They ate raw, bloody meat.

These scenes of lawlessness are necessary so that the orgy of violence perpetrated by Odysseus does not frighten us but delight us, and here Homer spares no cruel poetry, tried and tested in the “Iliad.”

Odysseus fired, leaning forward with his chest, and the arrow pierced
his throat; the deadly tip emerged at the back of his head;
Antinous fell on his side; the bowl rolled across the floor,
having slipped from his hands; and black blood hissed like hot water
from his nostrils; kicking his legs, he pushed away
the table and overturned it; all the food (hot meat,
bread, and the rest), mixed together, fell to the floor.

And so the entire song continues until the climax of the unequal battle (Athena aiding Odysseus) ends with a mountain of corpses. Toward the end, as if a postscript to this execution, comes a truly gruesome scene of the hanging of the slave girls who slept with the enemies and “were rude” to Penelope.

A noose was drawn tight around each of their necks; and death overtook them
Soon: after twitching their legs a little, they all fell silent at once.

Having piled up so many corpses, Homer prompts us to remember what awaits them. Every great epic contains a journey into the afterlife. In Homer, it is particularly bleak. The souls of the dead, to put it in our terms, are doomed to Alzheimer’s disease: they lose their minds and their memories. And they are still lucky.

When Odysseus made them drink the blood of the sacrifices, they came to their senses and realized their plight with horror. Even Achilles, who in life so desired to become “a glorious song for posterity” after death, changed his mind in Hades:

I would rather be alive, a day laborer, working in the fields,
Earning my daily bread by serving a poor farmer,
Than reign here over soulless corpses as a dead man.

It is all the more interesting that the Greeks, unlike Christians, did not consider immortality to be their ideal. In any case, Odysseus rejected the greatest blessing from the gods’ perspective—immortality—which Calypso offered him. He is drawn to another reward—a peaceful old age, which the prophet Tiresias foretells for him:

And death will not overtake you on the misty
Sea; approaching it calmly and slowly, you will meet your end,
adorned with a serene old age, rich in both personal and public happiness.

This peaceful, if not bourgeois, passing does not fit with the heroic epic, but Odysseus himself fits into it with difficulty. He is not a hero without fear or reproach.

Homer places the sleeping among the living and the dead. For him, sleep is “like silent death.” It is clear that the bard does not trust the night; that is why he rejoices at dawn, never tiring of greeting it with enthusiastic words: “Eos, young and with purple fingers, has risen from the darkness.” One of the most frequent epithets in the poem is “bright,” which is applied to the strangest of objects, such as the “bright-toothed boar.”

On the other hand, sleep is constantly called “sweet”; it is no coincidence that it is sent by Hermes, to whom the Greeks prayed as they went to bed. (Having learned this, I do the same.)

In ancient times, dreams played an incomparably more important role than they do now. Levi-Bruhl called them “the savage’s Bible.” Borges considered dreams “the most ancient form of aesthetic activity.” In *The Birth of Tragedy*, Nietzsche suggests that in the dreams of the ancient Greeks there was “a succession of scenes, the perfection of which would certainly give us the right to call the dreaming Greek Homer.”

But in Homer himself, dreams play an even stranger role. Many of the events that prove fateful for Odysseus occur while he is asleep. He slept through those critical moments when his companions untied the bag of winds given to them by Aeolus. And the moment when they ate Helios’s sacred bulls. And Odysseus returned to Ithaca asleep: the Phaeacian sailors carried him ashore and left him there to finish his sleep.

It seems that it was convenient for Homer to put him to sleep in order to absolve him of responsibility for his biggest blunders and follies. The bard removes him from the action without taking him off the stage. This clever dramatic device is similar to Beckett’s technique in *Endgame*, where he keeps two characters in trash cans, allowing them to appear only at moments necessary to the action.

In any case, sleep is the hero’s alibi, which he needs to appear deserving of leniency.
 

The Odyssey

After Andrei Konchalovsky released the TV adaptation of *The Odyssey* in the U.S., he invited me to celebrate the premiere with the cast and crew. It wasn’t as if we were friends, but I liked his *Asya Klyachina*, and he liked what I’d written about it. The entire cast was seated at a Manhattan restaurant. On one side of me sat the actor who played the lead role; on the other, a frail old man whom I didn’t seem to have seen on screen. Not knowing what to talk about with the heroes of the myth, I could think of nothing better than to strike up a philological discussion.

“In which translation,” I asked the actor briskly, launching into a scholarly conversation, “did you read Homer?”

“Did I read it?!” Odysseus exclaimed in utter surprise, and I remembered that in the poem, he, like everyone else, was illiterate.

Having put my foot in my mouth, I turned to the old man who looked lost and asked what he liked best.

“Hockey,” he replied out of the blue, “after all, I’m the owner of the ‘Sharks’ team; Balderis himself played for us.”

That made me happy, because I used to root for him back when he was still a star for the Riga “Dynamo” club and was just as famous here as Odysseus. My conversation partner didn’t care about any of that, even though he turned out to be the film’s producer, and we were all having dinner on his tab. As I learned from his business card, his name was Guntik III, and, aside from hockey and film, his family had owned nearly the entire candy business in the country for three generations. That said, it didn’t make the film any better. Homer doesn’t translate well to the screen, because it’s difficult for cinema to weave together two planes of reality—the fantastical and the mundane—with the same mastery the bard possessed.

First and foremost, because there are two Odysseuses speaking and acting in the poem. In the first five books of the epic, the first Odysseus tells fascinating stories about his wanderings through the archipelago of Achaean imagination. That is why we love him. But that does not mean he did not make it all up. The king of the Phaeacians politely expressed doubt about the truth of his tales. After all, we know everything solely from Odysseus’s words, as he left not a single witness alive. The first Odysseus is a character of truly mythical proportions, a hyperbole of a hero who—though not immediately—comes out unscathed, thanks to the protection of Athena.

Moreover, we know that he is quite capable of lying, sometimes unnecessarily, as happened in his conversation with his father, when Odysseus pretends to be someone else, apparently to test the sincerity of his father’s grief over his missing son.

Researchers who sought traces of Homer in the Balkans reported that even in the 20th century, Greek villages retained a special respect for lying. A skilled liar was admired for his ability to deceive not only strangers but also neighbors.

The second Odysseus, about whom the bard tells in much greater detail and with even more sympathy, is strikingly unlike the first. From a fairy tale, he moves into a reality that resembles a novel more than an adventurous fable.

Having returned to Ithaca, Odysseus behaves like Hamlet and Prince Myshkin rolled into one. Like a prince, he pretends; like a prince, he is ready to endure humiliation. Having disguised himself as a beggar with the help of Athena, who indulges him in everything, the king descended the social ladder to the very bottom. Of course, in Homer’s time, the path to him was shorter than we can imagine. The upper and lower classes had not yet drifted as far apart as in our later history. Odysseus, for example, boasts of how skillfully he can till the soil, which, by our standards, is not a king’s business.

The poem needs this voluntary humiliation not only to justify the brutal execution of the suitors. Odysseus must drink the cup to the dregs to experience every path and become a truly complete hero, from top to bottom: “I am a king—I am a slave—I am a worm—I am a god!”

In Odysseus’ long return, the final trial is one of patience. It is not strength but weakness that he opposes to the suitors’ vile attacks. To endure them, Odysseus must conquer himself. By managing to restrain himself, he demonstrates feats of a different kind: he feeds on scraps, fights with another beggar, and endures insults without complaint. All of this is necessary for the narrative to build momentum. By losing his dignity, Odysseus steps back in order to burst into the battle with greater force and energy and fulfill his destiny: to take revenge on his enemies and reclaim his wife, home, kingdom, and the status quo that an unnecessary, unwanted war had deprived him of.

In essence, “The Odyssey” tells of a successful marriage earned through long sufferings—a rather unexpected outcome for an epic that took as its hero a family man who had stumbled.

Having finished the final 24th song, I emerged from Homer as if from his “wine-colored” sea. At the very moment of completing this reading project, which I had marked with a thousand index cards containing quotations, there was something solemn, reminiscent of a birth—or, more precisely, the rebirth of civilization. How fortunate we are that it began, in Brodsky’s favorite phrase, “from the top C.”
 

Beginning

In the summer, I’m all about the ancient Chinese; in the winter, the Greeks. I have no idea what triggers these seasonal shifts, but I’ve grown accustomed to trusting the impulses of my well-trained subconscious, which guides us with or without our consent.

With my mind, if not my gut, I suspect that in the winter and summer I am drawn to an alternative that allows me to glimpse another world—a neighboring one, but not quite. (In spring and fall I write on my own.)

The Chinese have gone the farthest in this direction. Their skillfully plain, profound, and caustic philosophy makes do with aphorisms instead of a system: “He who stands on tiptoe will not stand long.”

The Greeks, on the other hand, are far away, yet close by. They are a second homeland for us: for those who need one. “We are all Greeks,” said Shelley, meaning we are kin to Homer. And while we know nothing of the latter, we know more about his heroes than he himself recounted. For they have accompanied us through exactly one civilization—our own. Hellas gave us a common language, without which Western culture would be as silent and mute as the stones of Stonehenge.

The Greeks considered everyone who believed in their Olympian gods to be their own. We may no longer worship them, but we certainly know these gods better than we know ourselves. If the Jews listened to God, the Greeks saw them, ate with them, and slept with them, just like Odysseus.

We get to know them best not through retellings, not in a museum, not in a painting or on a screen, but where they were born—in Homer’s songs.

From others’ accounts, Odysseus seems either a genius of deception or a demon of lies, as the straightforward Romans believed. But to me, this time, he seemed like a “master schemer.” Odysseus, like Ostap, is always “spinning a yarn.” He lies without need, pretends to be a greater hero than he is, boasts even before the Cyclops, obscures his biography, and—with Athena’s help—constantly changes his status and appearance. Moreover, he has also lost all his companions.

It’s not so strange that no one recognizes this protean character, except for his beloved dog, whom even the intervening goddess cannot deceive. Testing his wife, son, and father, Odysseus weaves stories that are superfluous to the plot, for their own sake. Just as Homer shares unnecessary details, so Odysseus invents superfluous ones simply because he can and wants to.

Is this not why the bard admires Odysseus, recognizing in him a fellow poet? If so, it is clear to us why, at the feast that turned into a massacre, Odysseus spared only the aed who had been entertaining the suitors, counting on the fact that he would still be of use to him: all of literature was still ahead.

New York, February 2026