World Literature from a Christian Perspective By Edwin McAllister 2 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Introduction to the Old Testament 8 Introduction to The Iliad 17 Introduction to The Odyssey 29 Introduction to Agamemnon 39 Introduction to Oedipus 50 Introduction to The Aeneid 59 Introduction to the New Testament 73 Introduction to The Confessions 79 Introduction to Beowulf 84 Introduction to The Inferno 90 Introduction to The Canterbury Tales 96 Introduction to Luther’s Commentary on Galatians 104 Introduction to The Prince 110 Introduction to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” 115 Introduction to Hamlet 121 Introduction to Paradise Lost 130 3 World Literature From A Christian Perspective Introduction When I was in grade school, I had an argument with a friend over the ethics of telling lies. We were having a schoolyard fight over a lie I’d been telling recently. I claimed to have broken my leg in order to avoid playing tackle football at recess, and my friend told me that I could not lie because “the Bible says lying is wrong.” I challenged him to “find the place” where the Bible says lying is wrong. Finding “the place” turned out to be more difficult than my friend thought it would be. It took us half an hour to find the Ten Commandments in the dusty old King James we dug up, but when we did locate them, “Thou shalt not tell lies” was not among them. Instead, what we found was “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). That didn’t help much, since it didn’t really cover what I was doing. At worst, I was bearing false witness against myself. In our further attempt to find “the rule,” what we discovered was a lot of stories and poems and precious few straightforward “thou shalt not kill”-type rules. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, my friend and I were learning a valuable lesson about the Bible: often, rather than directly stating truth or ethical ideals, the Bible uses literary techniques to embody or incarnate ideas. In other words, rather than saying “do not lie,” the Bible shows God’s hatred for lying in stories like that of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 or in figurative language like that Jesus uses in John 8 when he identifies Satan as “the father of lies.” Acts 5 never literally says “Do not lie,” but when Ananias and Sapphira are struck dead by God after lying to the Holy Spirit, the story shows that God hates lying. When Jesus identifies Satan as the father of lies he does not literally mean that Satan is a father who has lies as his children; instead, by identifying Satan as “the father” of lies, he implies that Satan is the ultimate source of all falsehood. Stories and figures like these embody God’s love of the truth and his hatred for falsehood. Literature not only embod ...

1. World Literature from a
Christian Perspective
By Edwin McAllister
2
Table of Contents

2. Introduction 1
Introduction to the Old Testament 8
Introduction to The Iliad 17
Introduction to The Odyssey 29
Introduction to Agamemnon 39
Introduction to Oedipus 50
Introduction to The Aeneid 59
Introduction to the New Testament 73
Introduction to The Confessions 79
Introduction to Beowulf 84
Introduction to The Inferno 90
Introduction to The Canterbury Tales 96
Introduction to Luther’s Commentary on Galatians 104
Introduction to The Prince 110
Introduction to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” 115
Introduction to Hamlet 121
Introduction to Paradise Lost 130

3. 3
World Literature From A Christian Perspective Introduction
When I was in grade school, I had an argument with a friend
over the
ethics of telling lies. We were having a schoolyard fight over a
lie I’d been telling
recently. I claimed to have broken my leg in order to avoid
playing tackle
football at recess, and my friend told me that I could not lie
because “the Bible
says lying is wrong.” I challenged him to “find the place”
where the Bible says
lying is wrong.
Finding “the place” turned out to be more difficult than my
friend
thought it would be. It took us half an hour to find the Ten
Commandments in
the dusty old King James we dug up, but when we did locate
them, “Thou shalt
not tell lies” was not among them. Instead, what we found was
“Thou shalt not
bear false witness against thy neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16). That
didn’t help
much, since it didn’t really cover what I was doing. At worst, I
was bearing
false witness against myself. In our further attempt to find “the
rule,” what we
discovered was a lot of stories and poems and precious few
straightforward
“thou shalt not kill”-type rules.

4. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, my friend and I were
learning a
valuable lesson about the Bible: often, rather than directly
stating truth or
ethical ideals, the Bible uses literary techniques to embody or
incarnate ideas.
In other words, rather than saying “do not lie,” the Bible shows
God’s hatred for
lying in stories like that of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 or in
figurative
language like that Jesus uses in John 8 when he identifies Satan
as “the father
of lies.” Acts 5 never literally says “Do not lie,” but when
Ananias and Sapphira
are struck dead by God after lying to the Holy Spirit, the story
shows that God
hates lying. When Jesus identifies Satan as the father of lies he
does not
literally mean that Satan is a father who has lies as his children;
instead, by
identifying Satan as “the father” of lies, he implies that Satan is
the ultimate
source of all falsehood. Stories and figures like these embody
God’s love of the
truth and his hatred for falsehood.
Literature not only embodies propositional truths like “God
hates lies,” it
also conveys experiential truth, or what it feels like to live
through a particular
experience. At times, such experiential truth can gratify our
curiosity about
other lives, other cultures, and other times. None of us is likely
to experience
the brutal hand-to-hand combat described so precisely in the

5. Iliad, but reading
the Iliad can help us to understand something of the terror and
exhilaration
these warriors felt.
But the experiential dimension of literature does more than
simply
gratify our curiosity about the experiences of other people and
places. The best
literature teaches us something about how it feels to be a
limited human being
living in a fallen world. The Iliad not only asks us to
experience combat, but to
experience the grief of losing someone close to us. Achilles’
grief for Patroclus
can help us to understand our own grief and how to avoid the
worst excesses to
which grief can drive us. Achilles’ grief can cause us to reflect
on our own
human limitations and the temptation to live as if those
limitations did not
exist. When we respond to good works of literature by saying
to ourselves: “Yes,
that is what life is like; that is how it feels to be human,” we are
responding to
the experiential truth that literature conveys.
4
Finally, literature is frequently a better learning tool than
propositional
language. Memorizing the ten commandments is a chore.
Remembering the

6. basic outline of the story of Joseph is simple, yet that same
story has as much
to teach us about the character of God as the Ten
Commandments, and
perhaps more, as we shall see.
In addition to being pleasurable for its own sake (everyone
loves stories),
literature can intensify the impact of what we read by speaking
to our hearts
rather than to our heads only, implanting its lessons far more
deeply than
“head knowledge.” Literature is also easier to remember, a way
of saying a
great deal in a small space. When David writes “The Lord is
my shepherd,” he’s
using a metaphor that contains volumes of information about
God—information
that need not be memorized because it is packed into the
metaphor itself.
Psalm 73, which we will explore at some length, is a great
example of
how Biblical literature can embody both propositional and
experiential truth.
Psalm 73
1 Truly God is good to the upright,
to those who are pure in heart.
2 But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
I had nearly lost my foothold.
3 For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
4 They have no struggles;

7. their bodies are healthy and strong.
5 They are free from the burdens common to man;
they are not plagued by human ills.
6 Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
7 Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
8 They scoff, and speak with malice;
in their arrogance they threaten oppression.
9 They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.
10 Therefore their people turn to them and praise them; and
find no fault in them.
11 They say, “How can God know?
Does the Most High have knowledge?”
12 This is what the wicked are like-
always carefree, they increase in wealth.
13 Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure;
in vain have I washed my hands in innocence.
14 All day long I have been plagued;
I have been punished every morning.
5
15 If I had said, “I will speak thus,”
I would have betrayed your children.
16 When I tried to understand all this,

8. it was oppressive to me
17 till I entered the sanctuary of God;
then I understood their final destiny.
18 Surely you place them on slippery ground;
you make them fall down to ruin.
19 How suddenly are they destroyed,
completely swept away by terrors!
20 As a dream when one awakes,
so when you arise, O Lord,
you will despise them as fantasies.
21 When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
22 I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you.
23 Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever.
27 Those who are far from you will perish;
you destroy all who are unfaithful to you.
28 But as for me, it is good to be near God.
I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;
I will tell of all your deeds.
*This is the “New Revised Standard McAllister Version”
(NRSMV) of this
Psalm, cobbled together from several other translations.

9. The psalm begins with a statement of propositional truth: “Truly
God is
good to the upright.” We might notice, though, that the speaker
begins this
statement with the word “Truly,” as though the statement
needed some
intensification, indicating the speaker’s recognition that the
propositional
statement of the first verse (“God is good to the upright”) is not
self-evident.
From its beginning line, then, the poem embodies the truths of
human
experience, where short-term observations do not always
support the abstract
claims made elsewhere in the Bible. Is God really “good to the
upright”? A
cursory glance at the world would certainly suggest otherwise,
for it is
6
frequently the case that those who despise God and trample his
truth seem to
be the most “blessed.”
The dissonance between the Biblical truth that “God is good to
the
upright” and the experiential evidence of human observation is
the puzzle that
the speaker mulls over in this poem. The psalm itself embodies
this dissonance
because the claim that is ultimately upheld in the psalm (God IS
good to the

10. upright) is at first stated only as an abstract proposition,
whereas the evidence
against the claim (the wicked are prospering) is presented in a
series of concrete
images, which we will explore in some detail below.
The speaker begins with a series of relatively straightforward
observations about the prosperity of the wicked: “they have no
struggles” and
“their bodies are healthy and strong.” The language becomes
more recognizably
literary when the speaker claims that “pride is their necklace.”
“Pride” cannot
literally be worn around the neck; this is figurative language.
In this case, the
figure is called a metaphor, a comparison that does not use the
words “like” or
“as.” Instead of saying “A is like B” (a figure called a simile),
metaphor instead
makes the much stronger and more striking claim that “A is B.”
Metaphor
helps us to grasp something abstract or unfamiliar (the pride of
the wicked) by
comparing it with something concrete and familiar (a person
wearing a
necklace). A necklace is something worn openly, often as a
way of displaying
prosperity (especially thick gold chains or jewels). So the
suggestion here is
that the wicked are not even ashamed of their pride, but rather
display it
openly.
The speaker goes on to tell us that the eyes of the wicked “swell
out with
fatness.” Again, the speaker simply presents us with a word-

11. picture, but the
picture speaks clearly enough that no further explanation is
necessary. In this
culture, fatness is not shameful, but is instead a sign of
prosperity, indicating
that one does not have to do manual labor and can afford to eat
a great deal of
rich food. So the image of the eyes of the wicked swelling out
with fatness
embodies or incarnates the abstract idea that the wicked are
prospering.
An even more interesting figure appears in verse 9, where we
are told
that the tongue of the wicked “struts through the earth.” (NASB
translates
“struts” here as “parades.”) The figure here is called
personification, which
happens when a writer invests an object with human properties.
In this case, a
tongue is made to walk grandly around the earth as if it had legs
and a brain to
guide it. The psalmist asks us to see the picture as a way of
understanding the
real object he is describing: the words of the wicked, which are
obviously as full
of false pride as a lone man strutting through the earth laying
claim to all that
he sees.
Verses 10 and 11 show us the effect of the apparent prosperity
of the
wicked: other people admire the wicked and turn away from
God. Seeing the
wicked go unpunished, they are encouraged to engage in wicked
behavior

12. themselves. After all, if God does not punish the wicked but
gives them
prosperity, maybe he does not watch over human behavior at all.
Of course,
the psalm doesn’t literally say any of this. Instead, it simply
reports the actions
and speech of “the people” and leaves us to infer what these
speeches and
actions mean. The speaker even begins to report his own
frustration with God’s
7
lack of oversight in allowing the wicked to prosper by directly
reporting his own
thoughts: “Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure.” In other
words, “What a
waste of time to be obedient to God if wicked people have all
the wealth, health,
and happiness.”
But the psalm does not leave us to sort unaided through the
implications
of the disheartening experience of seeing the wicked prosper.
Instead, just after
verse 14, at the exact midpoint of the psalm, the tone changes
based on the
speaker’s having “entered the sanctuary of God.” This last
phrase is more
figurative language serving to indicate not necessarily a change
in physical
location, but a figurative change in thinking, since “entering”
this sanctuary

13. involves an entire change of heart on the part of the thinker, a
change that will
be embodied in the rest of the psalm.
This change of heart might be described as a shift from short-
term to
long-term thinking; the shift is incarnated for us in figurative
language. The
speaker remembers here that God places the wicked “on
slippery ground.” Of
course, the speaker does not literally mean that God puts down
wicked people
in the mud, but that figuratively speaking, the wicked are in
“slippery places,”
places where one cannot stand long before falling. “Slippery
place” is a physical
metaphor describing the spiritual position of the wicked before
God. The
implication, here and elsewhere, is that destruction is coming on
the wicked
eventually. The ultimate destruction of the wicked is one of the
most
fundamental of all Biblical themes, embodied in stories all over
the Bible.
When we begin to allow ourselves to think in Biblical terms,
when our
hearts are soaked in the truth of the Bible, we understand that
the prosperity of
the wicked is only temporary. God has never allowed the
wicked to prosper
unpunished, though retribution comes on God’s timetable and
not on man’s.
God’s character as the punisher of evil deeds has not changed.
The history of
God’s interaction with humans is full of stories of the

14. temporary prosperity of
the wicked being ultimately placed under God’s judgment.
In Psalm 73, the speaker's ultimate embrace of God’s way of
thinking,
comes through, rather than apart from, a wrestling with the
fallen world and its
apparent contradiction of Biblical truth. The speaker in the
psalm reaches
solid ground theologically only after looking carefully and
actively at his world,
even in those places where the facts seem to contradict
scripture, even at those
actions and behaviors that are displeasing to God, not hiding
from them, but
encountering them and thinking about what they mean. To
extend the
psalmist’s metaphor, we enter the sanctuary of God by passing
through the
courtyard of critical thinking.
My prayer is that, even as the psalmist’s view of the world is
deepened by
approaching the evidence of experience from a Biblical
perspective, your
encounter with literature will help you undergo the same
process of
transformation this psalm embodies. This process is described
by Paul in
Romans 12:2, when he warns against being “conformed to this
world,” as the
speaker of the psalm appears to be in the first fourteen verses,
relying solely on
his short-term observations of the prosperity of the wicked. Paul
commands
instead that we allow ourselves to be “transformed by the

15. renewing of [our]
mind[s], that [we] may prove what is that good, and acceptable,
and perfect, will
8
of God.” Knowing the will, and thus the character, of God, is
the end or
purpose of all human knowledge. The study of the best
literature can be an
invaluable aid in that process.
Worldview
The Bible teaches us that humans are limited beings who exist
in a fallen
world, a world that is very different from the world that God
originally created
for us to occupy. God created us with a consciousness that was
designed for a
perfect world, but, like fish out of water, we no longer occupy
that world. As a
result, our minds constantly scream that something is wrong.
The hard facts of
existence—death, disease, aging, human evil, our own
loneliness and sense of
isolation—strike us as desperately wrong, so we naturally
search for answers.
This search is as human and normal as breathing.
The mere fact of human consciousness, of existing in a fallen
world,
forces on each of us certain questions. Who am I? Why am I

16. here? What
should I be doing? What went wrong? Where am I? Who (or
what) is in control
of events? No culture has ever existed that did not feel the need
to answer
these questions, for they are built into the very nature of man.
Your answers to these questions define your worldview, your
way of
thinking about yourself and your relationship to the world and
to God. Every
human being has a worldview; some are more explicit and
carefully constructed
than others, but we all have one. One of the goals of this
anthology is to
encourage you to think more carefully about your own
worldview and to begin
“taking every thought captive” so that your thinking will
become more clearly in
line with a Biblical worldview. For organizational purposes, I
am dividing these
worldview questions up into three areas: view of man (who am
I?), view of the
world (where am I?), and view of the divine (what, or who, is in
charge?). In
practice, we’ll see that all of these questions are inter-related,
that answering
any of these questions in a particular way affects the way we
answer the others.
View of Man
Who am I? Every worldview attempts to provide a meaningful
answer to
this question, an answer that helps an individual to understand
his

17. relationship with the world and with the divine. Am I created
or did I “just
happen”? Do I have free will, or are my actions predetermined
by some external
force? Can I take significant action? How can I live a
meaningful life? How
useful is my reason? How do I balance my responsibilities to
the community
with my own desires? Are my abilities and gifts in life the
result of who my
parents are? How important are “every day” events like
cooking, eating, and
caring for children? Are they less important than extraordinary
events like
wars, counsels, and business meetings? How important is
romantic love? Is
love merely a distraction from more important matters?
View of World
Where am I? The nature of the world we inhabit has been a
subject of
reflection for philosophers and scientists since the beginnings
of recorded
history. The primary questions that humans have asked about
the world
involve orderliness. Does the world display an order, a
predictable pattern of
behavior, or is the world simply random? Psalm 73 seems to be
asking
9

18. precisely this question; after all, if evildoers flourish, there
must be no order.
Answers to this question are generally based on how one
answers other related
questions: was the world created, or did it just happen? Is the
physical world
all that exists, or is there a spiritual world as well? Does the
physical world
really exist? Some non-Christian worldviews like Hinduism and
Christian
Science hold that the material world is merely an illusion and
that the only
“real” world is the spiritual. Other worldviews like Platonism
hold that the
material world exists but is only a shabby and imperfect
reflection of the truly
significant spiritual world. Finally, some worldviews like
scientific determinism
insist that the spiritual world does not exist at all, or if it does it
is unnecessary
for explaining the physical world. View of the world also
includes views about
man’s ultimate destination: where (if anywhere) do we go after
death?
View of the Divine
What (or who) is in control? The Bible tells us that God created
humans
to be in a close and loving relationship with Him; when man
sinned, he cut
himself off from his relationship with God. Ever since, man
apart from God has
felt deeply that something or someone must be in control of the
observable
world, working behind the scenes. But different cultures and

19. groups without
the Biblical revelation of God have disagreed about the nature
of that divine
someone or something. Is there a force that transcends the
physical world that
controls it? Does that force have personal features like
emotions, memory, or
planning? If the force is personal, is there one God, as the
Hebrew tradition
insists, or are there many, as the Greeks, Hindus, and Mormons
claim? How
complete is the control of the divine over physical affairs? Did
the force that
controls the universe actually create the universe?
Organization of Chapters
Each chapter of the textbook consists of an introduction to a
single piece
of literature or selections from a single work or author. Each
chapter will be
divided into five, and sometimes six, sections. The first section
of each chapter
will be entitled “Introduction” and will include general notes
about the author,
the immediate historical context for the work, changes in
critical opinions or
receptions of the work, and other matters not directly related to
worldview
issues. The next three sections of each chapter (“View of Man,”
“View of the
Divine,” “View of the World”) will discuss how the work or
group of works
reflects a particular worldview. Where necessary, chapters will
also include
“Individual Analysis of Major Characters.” Finally, each

20. chapter will include
a section on the “Artistic / Aesthetic” qualities of each of the
works. Here,
we’ll explore the specifically literary qualities of each work:
design and
patterning, relationship to art of the past, how form reflects
meaning, and
finally how the work treats the importance of art itself to human
existence.
10
Introduction to the Old Testament
2 Chronicles 18-20 Introduction
General
Even students who know the Bible well may not recognize this
obscure narrative from the Old Testament, but this brief passage
can
teach us a great deal about the Hebrew worldview, particularly
when we
compare some of the features of this passage with similar
features we
will encounter later in our study of classical literature. The
narrative is
drawn from the “divided kingdom” period, when the Israelites
split into
two political entities: Israel, which generally had apostate
kings, and
Judah, which generally remained faithful to God.

21. View of Man
2 Chronicles 18-20 provides us with a great example of a
literary
feature that sets the Bible apart from literature being produced
out of the
classical tradition at the same time: the Bible's focus on the
moral
development of individuals. Jehoshaphat grows and changes
over time
and is a dynamic, multifaceted individual. Nevertheless, he
retains
certain features of his personality over time. Consider
Jehoshaphat's
early experience with Ahab; his alliance with this wicked King
of Israel
brings disaster, particularly because of ignoring the words of
the prophet
Micaiah. Jehoshaphat does not make the same mistake in his
second
great crisis. He learns and grows so that his behavior in the
second
crisis is in part determined by what he learned in the first crisis.
Classical heroes, on the other hand, do not develop but remain
static.
Unfortunately, Jehoshaphat's transformation is not complete;
some of
his weakness of character evidently remains with him
throughout life.
Just as he was willing at the beginning of his reign to keep
company with
King Ahab, so at the end of his reign does he make a deal with
Ahaziah,
another wicked king of Israel.

22. In addition to his dynamic personality, Jehoshaphat’s ability to
feel
and to express fear also sets him apart from most classical
heroes.
Unlike Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, who is so mighty in battle
that he
fears no man on earth and even takes on a god, Jehoshaphat is
admirable precisely because he is aware of his own limitations.
He
cannot defeat the army that is approaching Judah through his
own
strength. This awareness motivates him to take his most
significant
action: calling directly on God in prayer.
The prayer itself makes an interesting contrast with prayers that
we will find later in classical literature. For the Greeks, prayer
is often a
form of "deal-making" with the gods that places man in the
position of a
spiritual trading partner, offering to perform sacrifices, build
temples,
and carry out other “god-honoring” acts in return for favors
from the
11
gods. In the Iliad, a priest of Apollo begins his prayer to his
god by
reminding the god of all the good things the priest has done for
him:
Hear me, Apollo! God of the silver bow . . .

23. If ever I roofed a shrine to please your heart,
Ever burned the long rich thigh bones of bulls and goats
On your holy altar, now, now bring my prayers to pass!
Jehoshaphat’s prayer, on the other hand, shows that the God of
the
Bible cannot be manipulated, because he cannot be motivated by
greed
or vanity. Man, as understood from a Biblical perspective, has
nothing
to offer an entirely self-sufficient God as part of a deal-making
process.
If the cattle on a thousand hills belong to our God (Psalm
50:10b), He
will not be impressed with our small sacrifices. More
importantly, the
gospel of grace tells us that God’s favor cannot be won through
works of
goodness; our works cannot make him love us more, nor can our
neglect
of works make Him love us less, since His character is
unchanging and
eternal. Thus, Jehoshaphat's prayer to this self-sufficient God
simply
reminds God of His character in the past and asks Him to act in
a way
that is consistent with His protection and provision of past
times.
Most importantly, the prayer ends with a statement of utter
dependence: "...we have no power to face this vast army that is
attacking
us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon you." If
Jehoshaphat is the hero of this story, he is a very different kind
of hero
from those we will encounter in classical literature. We admire

24. Achilles
and Odysseus for their courage, their resourcefulness, and
above all
their splendid independence. But Jehoshaphat admits his own
inability
to help himself, declaring himself entirely dependent on God.
God's
answer to Jehoshaphat's prayer reveals a great deal about the
nature of
Biblical heroism and the ancient Hebrew worldview: "Do not be
afraid.
For the battle is not yours, but God's." In the context of the
Hebrew’s
belief in a God controlling all human affairs, traditional
classical heroism
is impossible. Man cannot win any genuine glory for himself,
for all of
his accomplishments are only expressions of the glory of God.
Thus, Biblical heroism differs from classical heroism mainly in
its
dependence and passivity. Biblical heroes are utterly dependent
on God
for their strength, for their skill, and for the favor that they find
from
others. Biblical heroes often express their heroism simply by
believing
God and waiting for him to work. Consider Daniel, a giant of
faith; his
greatest act of heroism was not being eaten by lions. Daniel
doesn't tear
the lions to pieces as Achilles would, or trick them into
destroying
themselves as the wily Odysseus would have. He simply stands
and
waits for God to take care of the situation. Joseph's heroism

25. consists of
waiting patiently in jail— or worse still, running away from a
woman
(Potiphar's wife). Try to imagine Achilles running from a
woman! Homer
does not ask us to admire his characters based on their moral
behavior.
View of World
12
All the events that occur in this story are under the control of
an
omnipotent God. But this God is invisible, separate from the
creation
that he watches over. How God manages to make the
Ammonites,
Moabites, and Meunites destroy one another—what ruses or
disguises he
uses, how he manipulates their thinking—is of no interest to the
narrator
or, presumably, the audience. God’s presumed omnipotence
makes
defeating such an army so laughably simple that it seems to be
not worth
narrating at all. Compare this with Homer’s careful description
of the
intervention of the gods in the fighting before Troy.
View of the Divine
The prayer of Jehoshaphat also points to a critical distinction

26. between Greek and Hebrew ideas of God: where the Greeks
gods are
capricious, changing their minds, shifting alliances, and
abandoning
their favorites without warning, for the Hebrews, God is
unchanging, the
same yesterday, today, and forever. Thus, remembering God's
behavior
in the past becomes a critical part of understanding how He will
behave
in the present and future. God asks us to be familiar with His
Word
because it reveals His character to us, a character that remains
the same
throughout history.
The Greeks, as we will see, had no such assurance. Aside from
their powers and their immortality, the Greek gods are
ultimately no
different morally from any human being; and their actions show
it. Out
of gratitude toward a particularly pious individual like Hector,
they may
act for a time to protect his interests. But when their own
interests
conflict with his, they withdraw their favor and allow him to
die.
Artistic/Aesthetic
A second great difference between classical and biblical
narrative
styles emerges early in Chapter 20, where we are told that
"some men"
came to warn Jehoshaphat about the approach of the armies out
of

27. Aram. Who are these “men”? How did they learn this news?
What was
their relationship with Jehoshaphat? The Bible never tells us.
Compare
this with Homer's treatment of the embassy to Achillles in Book
IX of the
Iliad. There, we learn the identities of all of the messengers,
we learn the
relationship of each of these men to Achilles, and we are treated
to a long
speech from each man that expresses his unique personality and
relationship to Achilles.
The narrative also points to another difference between classical
and Biblical narrative style: the comparative reticence of the
Bible with
regard to specific detail. Biblical narrative uses much greater
economy of
detail than Homeric narrative. Homer will often stop and
lovingly
describe objects – Achilles’ armor and shield, for example - that
have
nothing to do with the plot of the story. In classical narrative,
details
are often included for their aesthetic value. The greater
economy of
13
Biblical narrative underlines the fact that the Bible was written
and read
according to a very different set of assumptions than those that
animated

28. the production and consumption of classical works of literature.
As
grand as Homer's works are, and as fully as they express the
ideals of
classical civilization, they were ultimately created as
entertainment, a
way to kill time around the campfire. Thus, details are often
included for
their own sake. The Bible was produced as a didactic religious
text,
designed to teach us something about God, the world, man, and
man's
relationship with God. Details not relevant to the didactic
point of the
story are relentlessly stripped away, and we are left with only
what is
most important. It follows that ALL details in Biblical
narrative are
included for a reason.
We might also note that the Biblical narrative includes no
details
about the armies beyond their size and their points of origin.
Unlike
Homer, who skips effortlessly back and forth from the Greek to
the
Trojan army and introduces characters from both sides, the
Biblical
narrator is not interested in the makeup or character of the
Moabite,
Ammonite, and Meunite fighting forces. All we need to know is
that they
have opposed themselves to the people of God and that God will
take
care of them. Are there great heroes accompanying this army?
Will

29. there be a clash of mighty men like the struggle between
Achilles and
Hector that is the climax of the Iliad? Such issues are of very
little
interest or significance to Hebrew writers or readers. There are
no such
“clashes of the Titans” in the Bible; the only significant head-
to-head
physical combat in the Bible involves an insignificant shepherd
boy
fighting against the giant Goliath, and here the whole point of
the story is
the didactic lesson that God can empower even the lowliest and
weakest
to do battle with the mightiest hero on earth. Unlike the Greek
gods, the
God of the Bible is not impressed with physical prowess.
This particular battle becomes a powerful expression of that
truth.
This army does not have to strike a single blow; they simply
believe God
and act on his commands. God does the work. When
Jehoshaphat's
army arrives on the battlefield, the enemy is already conquered.
They
have nothing to do except pick up the pieces and go home
rejoicing.
Story of Joseph (Genesis 37, 39-46) Introduction
General
I suggested in the introduction to 2 Chronicles 18-20 that the
Bible
follows a principle of “narrative economy” so that every
specific detail

30. will have some relevance for the story. If that principle holds
true in
relation to the story of Joseph, the mention of Joseph's exact
age,
seventeen, (in Gen 37:2) must be significant. Joseph's age at
the
beginning of the story puts him on the cusp between childhood
and
adulthood. The second mention of Joseph's age comes after he
has
14
taken the reins of power in Egypt, when we learn that he is
thirty, and
has thus come to full adulthood. The events in between
represent a
kind of "coming-of-age" story that allows us to see Joseph's
early
immaturity and to compare his earlier behavior with his later
more
mature behavior. Thus, the story reflects the Bible's
characteristic
focus on individual moral development. We must understand
Joseph's past in order to understand his behavior in the present,
for
like other Biblical characters, his personality is the sum total of
his
experiences.
Joseph's character at the beginning of the story is clearly that of
a
spoiled youngest child. He is not only sheltered from doing the

31. kind of
work his brothers must do, but he is given what must be for the
brothers
an incredibly annoying symbol of his status as his father's
favorite: a
many-colored coat entirely inappropriate for a man of his age
and birth
order. Such a mark of favor should by rights be given to
Reuben, the
oldest brother. Jacob's decision to "play favorites" sets the sons
of
Zilpah, Bilhah, and Leah against Joseph, the son of Jacob's
love-match
with Rachel.
The first indication of Joseph's immaturity is his acting as
"tattle
tale" against these brothers, bringing home "their evil report" to
Jacob.
This does not endear Joseph to his brothers, but he makes
matters
considerably worse when he decides to tell his brothers about
the dream
he has had. Joseph's brothers immediately understand the
meaning of
the dream: at some point in the future Joseph will have power
over them.
The brothers assume, probably correctly, that Joseph too
understands
the meaning: "Shalt thou indeed reign over us?" In the Hebrew
culture of
Joseph's day, age and birth order were critically important for
establishing a hierarchy of authority within the family; for
Joseph, a
youngest brother, to wear clothes that symbolize his favored
status and

32. to report to his brothers and parents a dream suggesting that he
would
rule over them would have been extremely offensive. Their
resentment
over this episode plays a large part in the brothers’ dislike of
Joseph.
Remember their remark as they see Joseph coming from afar,
just before
they sell him into slavery: "Behold this dreamer cometh."
Joseph's
behavior at the beginning of the story shows us an immature
young man,
displaying his desire for personal glory by lording his favored
status and
prophetic dreams over his older brothers and parents.
Jacob's behavior, like Joseph's, is more intelligible if we
know his
past. In particular, his choice of Joseph as his favored son is
understandable when we remember that Joseph is the product of
Jacob’s
love for Rachel, the woman he loved so dearly that he was
willing to work
14 years for her father in order to win her hand in marriage.
Because at
this point Joseph is the only son Rachel has produced, Jacob is
probably
more inclined to favor him because of the love he bears his
mother. But
if Jacob's behavior is in part the product of his experiences and
his
15

33. environment, it is also consistently and unmistakably his own:
his
tendency to play favorites (which he undoubtedly inherited from
his own
parents, Isaac and Rebecca, who each had a favorite among their
twin
sons Jacob and Esau) is a constant feature of his personality
from the
beginning of this section of his history until the end: the
favoritism he
shows Joseph will be transferred to Benjamin (also a son of
Rachel) by
the story's end. Jacob's actions and speech are also marked by
consistent melodrama and self-pity, as he repeatedly “refuse[s]
to be
comforted” and threatens his children with mourning himself to
death:
“in mourning will I go down to the the grave to my son” (37:
35). Later,
he repeats the threat when Reuben proposes taking Benjamin to
Egypt:
“[Y]ou will bring my gray head down to the grave in sorrow”
(42:38b).
View of the Divine
Though God is very rarely mentioned in this narrative, His
presence is nevertheless significant at every point. In fact, the
entire
narrative embodies the claim of Psalm 73, which is that
although short-
term observation may suggest the contrary: ultimately, God’s
righteousness is knowable through the outward appearances of
the
observable world—in this case, the details of Joseph’s
experience. As in

34. 2 Chronicles 20, the narrator does not feel obliged to explain
how God
manipulates events or works behind the scenes to preserve and
bless his
people. God’s transcendent power is so great that such
explanations
would either be incomprehensible to limited human beings, or,
if
accommodated to our understanding through symbol and
metaphor,
would serve to lessen our sense of the power and majesty of our
God.
Like the speaker of Psalm 73, Joseph comes to understand
God’s
purpose fully only after passing through difficult experiences.
View of Man
Joseph's heroic qualities are uniquely Biblical and contrast
powerfully with those character qualities we will see held up as
heroic in
classical literature. The chosen vessel of an omnipotent and
omniscient
God, Joseph is "heroic" primarily in his passivity, in his
willingness to
wait and see what his God will do. He is the helpless victim of
his
brothers. He has to wait patiently in prison, unable to free
himself by his
own exertions. He is principally distinguished from other
characters in
the tale not by his superior courage or strength, but by his quiet
hope
and trust in God and his constant willingness to deflect glory
away from

35. himself and toward God. When Joseph is praised for his ability
to
interpret dreams, he turns aside the praise: “Do not
interpretations
belong to God?” (40:8) or, “I cannot do it, but God will give
Pharaoh the
answer he desires" (41:16).
16
Joseph is not a warrior, not a king, but merely the spoiled
youngest son (in a culture with very little value for youngest
sons) of a
sheep-herder. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that
Joseph is the
last person in the world anyone would expect to have heroic
qualities.
And yet his obscurity and lack of early promise set Joseph
firmly in the
line of Biblical heroes, who often seem chosen by God precisely
for their
obscurity and lack of promise. Consider David, another
youngest son
whose primary responsibilities in his youth are sheep-herding
and
cheese-carrying. Yet David is chosen by God to defeat the
mightiest
warrior in the Philistine army at an age when the armor and
weapons of
an adult warrior are far too large for him. Or consider Gideon,
the great
military leader who begins his career cowering in a hole in the
ground.

36. Christ himself is perhaps the greatest example of this Biblical
theme: an
obscure son of an obscure carpenter living in an obscure corner
of the
earth. God chooses losers, underdogs, cowards, youngest sons,
the
obscure and unpromising, and makes them heroes.
The defining character quality for Biblical heroes is a trust in
and a
dependence on God. The Biblical hero is always dependent on
God.
Traditional heroism, particularly in its proud independence—the
strength and courage of Achilles, the wily resourcefulness of
Odysseus—
is not even a possibility for Biblical heroes. Joseph's lack of
responsibility for his own personal success is underlined so
often that
it approaches the comic; he arrives somewhere—Potiphar's
house, jail,
the palace of the Pharaoh—and immediately "finds favor" and is
put in
charge. By the last repetition of this pattern, hardly ten minutes
can
have passed between the time Joseph is brought up from
Pharaoh's
dungeon and the moment he becomes the second most powerful
man
on Earth. The speed with which this happens, and the obvious
disproportion between the duties Joseph performs and the
Pharaoh's
generous response (consider that at this point Pharaoh does not
even
know if Joseph's prediction is going to come to pass), all point
very

37. strongly to the fact that Joseph is still by and large a passive
participant in his own meteoric rise to the top, utterly dependent
on
God for all he has.
The story also embodies another important Christian theme: the
value of suffering. Joseph suffers horribly, yet in the end sees
that God
is in control of all the events of his life. This new awareness of
the value
of suffering brings about not only greater emotional maturity
for Joseph,
but also a better life for his entire family.
View of the World
Is Joseph’s world orderly? Not at first glance; it cannot have
seemed
like an orderly world to Joseph when his brothers tossed him
into a
17
pit and sold him into slavery. Yet by the end of his life, Joseph
is able
to forgive his brothers precisely because he understands their
behavior as part of a larger order imposed by God: “I am your
brother
Joseph and the one you sold into Egypt! And now, do not be
distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me
here,
because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you”
(45:4-5).

38. As Joseph comes to recognize the hand of God behind his sale
into
slavery, so too does he see God’s hand in all of the events that
have
brought him to this place: “So then it was not you who sent me
here,
but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire
household,
and ruler of all Egypt” (45:8). For Christians, God’s pattern of
provision, though hidden from man in the short term, reveals
itself in
larger patterns. Perhaps the largest pattern, one unavailable
even to
Joseph, is God’s preservation not of Joseph, but of Judah, for it
is
through Judah’s line that Christ will come (Matthew 1:3); so
God here
is not merely preserving Joseph and his brothers, but exercising
his
plan of salvation for all humanity.
Dreams play a key role in revealing the orderliness of the world
in the
story of Joseph. Though they often seem random, the dreams
ultimately come to pass. That God can impart dreams that give
a
clear vision of the future means God knows what is going to
happen.
At the very least, this means that the created world operates
according to a pattern that is visible to God. But as the story of
Joseph makes clear, the dreams of Joseph not only reveal a God
who
knows what will happen, but a God who wills those things to
happen,
a God who sees into a future in which His will for His people
unfolds.

39. The movement of this future from vision to reality, confirming
the
orderliness of creation and the sovereignty of God over that
creation,
is embodied in the story of Joseph.
Aesthetic/ Artistic
This section of Genesis sets up a leitmotif, or a series of
repeated
parallel scenes, that is based on Jacob's earlier deceptions and
trickery.
Jacob deceived Isaac through the use of clothing, taking some
sheep's
skin and laying it across his arms and breast to convince his
dying father
that he was Esau. In chapter 37, Genesis takes up the theme of
poetic
justice, "the kidder kidded," and repeats it four times before the
story of
Joseph ends. In the first instance, Joseph's brothers return from
the
fields with a torn piece of Joseph's coat dipped in blood. They
use this
item of clothing to convince Jacob that Joseph has been killed
by a wild
animal. The parallels with Jacob's deception of his own father
should be
obvious, particularly in the use of an item of clothing as the
major prop
for the deception. The theme appears a second time in the 38th
chapter
of Genesis (not included in our selection) in which Judah, a
grown man

40. 18
now with children of his own, is in turn deceived by his
daughter-in-law,
Tamar, again through the use of clothing. Joseph himself falls
victim to
this form of deception at the hands of Potiphar's wife, who uses
a bit of
Joseph's clothing to convince her husband that Joseph has
attempted to
rape her. Finally, Joseph himself uses his robes and jewelry to
deceive
his brothers at the end of the story.
Biblical narrative makes significant demands on the reader.
This
pattern of deception is never explicitly mentioned by the
narrator or by
any of the characters, though it very easily could have been.
For
example, at the moment Jacob realizes that Joseph is not dead,
he might
cry out: “God has revenged himself on me for deceiving my
own father!”
or words to that effect. But neither he nor any of the other
characters
notice the justice of what has happened. Nor does the narrator
go to any
great length to point this out. The work of discovery is left to
the reader.
In like manner, God's shaping hand in the events of Joseph's life
is never
specifically mentioned until the very end. Biblical writers

41. expect us to do
the work. The Bible demands a far more active engagement on
the part
of the reader and may be far more subtle than classical
literature.
19
Homer’s Iliad Introduction
General Notes
The Iliad begins in the middle of a complicated situation. We
find
ourselves with an army encamped on a beach before a city. The
leaders
of this army are bickering among themselves over women and
other war-
prizes. Beginning readers are often confused by the opening of
the poem
that assumes our familiarity with a wide array of strange
characters and
events—kings, heroes, gods, goddesses, wars and scandals long
past.
Who are these people? Why are they fighting the Trojans?
Why are they
fighting with each other? What are their relations with one
another?
How many "kings" are on this beach? Who's the boss?
However, our confusion over these matters can actually be
instructive, since it leads us to a critical conclusion about

42. Homer's
audience: they were bound together by a common knowledge of
a
tremendous body of myths and legends that most contemporary
readers
have never learned. Homer's readers did not need the author to
fill in
the background of the events he describes because Homer could
assume
his readers already knew why the Greeks were fighting the
Trojans, why
an argument over a woman was important enough to overturn
the war
aims of the entire Greek army, how the chain of command in the
army
was supposed to work, and so on.
In fact, not only did Homer's readers know the background,
they
knew the story itself; it will remain true of classical literature
before
Virgil that audiences were already familiar with the plots of the
stories
they heard or watched. Greek audiences already knew the
outcome of
Agamemnon's dispute with Achilles. They already knew that
Achilles
would kill Hector, and that Troy would fall. The pleasure that
they
received in hearing these stories had very little to do with the
kind of
tension regarding outcome that contemporary adult audiences
value so
highly. Instead, Greek audiences took pleasure in the tale
itself—hearing
Achilles or Agamemnon speak in their characteristic fashion,

43. watching
the wiliness of Odysseus, hearing the long-windedness of old
men like
Nestor and Phoinix, waiting to see how this storyteller would
handle the
battle between Achilles and Hector—since the outcome of the
battle was
never in doubt.
The lack of what we call "plot tension" will remain a constant
in the
classical literature that we will read. Even in the Athenian
tragedies,
writers are simply reworking mythological materials that are
already
familiar to their audiences. Everyone already knows that
Clytemnestra
will murder Agamemnon, that Jason will desert Medea, and that
Oedipus
is guilty of unwittingly killing his father.
The "deep background" for the war in Troy involves a wedding
in
heaven. All the gods and goddesses were invited to the wedding
except,
logically enough, the goddess Discord, whose name means
"trouble."
Discord, angry at her exclusion from the festivities, disrupts
them by
20
rolling a golden apple into the wedding hall; on the apple are

44. written the
words "for the fairest." Three of the goddesses, vain creatures
that they
are, step forward to claim the apple: Hera, wife of Zeus and
goddess of
political power; Athena, daughter of Zeus and goddess of
wisdom and
battle; and Aphrodite, goddess of passionate physical love
between men
and women.
None of the gods are stupid enough to involve themselves in
this
dispute, so the goddesses decide to find a human to judge
between them.
Their choice ultimately lights on Paris (also called Alexandros),
one of
many sons of Priam, King of Troy, and a man considered to be
the most
handsome among mortal men. Given a choice between political
power,
martial prowess, and sexual attraction, Paris not surprisingly
chooses
Aphrodite. It will be a fatal choice for him and for many
others.
As his reward for choosing her, Aphrodite gives Paris his
request:
the love of the most beautiful woman in the world—Helen, "the
face that
launched a thousand ships." Unfortunately, Helen is already
married to
Menelaos, a Greek king, son of Atreus and brother to
Agamemnon.
Paris, accepted as a guest into the home of Menelaos, "kidnaps"
his

45. willing wife (she's been charmed by Aphrodite) and takes her
back with
him to Troy. Menelaos and his brother Agamemnon gather
together the
other kings of Greece to help them to avenge their insulted
honor, and
set off for Troy. (The poem takes its name from the Greek
name for Troy:
Ilium or Ilias.)
This tale, not included in the Iliad, gives us a great deal of
critical
information for understanding the behavior of the gods,
especially the
hatred of Hera and Athena for Troy and the love of Aphrodite
for the city
and its inhabitants. It will also explain why Aphrodite, in the
Aeneid, will
become the protector of Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who escapes
the ruin of
his city to found Rome.
View of Man
The Iliad is not “didactic.” That is, it does not explicitly set out
to
teach any particular lesson. Nevertheless, the story of Achilles
and
his withdrawal and its disastrous consequences embodies or
incarnates a very specific lesson about the value of the human
community and the dangers and consequences of leaving it.
Achilles'
decision to withdraw from the Greek army not only affects him,
but
causes suffering to all of those around him. So does

46. Agamemnon's
decision to ignore the plea of Chryses to return his daughter,
which
causes the terrible plague in Book One. Indeed, we are told
that the
entire community supports the return of Chryses' daughter to
him,
and that only Agamemnon is not pleased with his offer. By
pointing
out this contrast, Homer clearly underlines here that
Agamemnon is
setting himself against the will of the entire community;
Agamemnon
ultimately learns his lesson and admits that this refusal was a
mistake. By the opening of Book Nine, he is ready to admit his
error
21
(though he blames it on the gods). Achilles never admits that
deserting the community was a dangerous and irresponsible
thing to
do, but the loss of Patroclus causes Achilles deep regret.
Hector and Achilles, the tragic heroes of the Iliad, are torn
between
their public responsibilities and their private desires. Generally
speaking, responsibility and desire are in harmony for the Greek
warrior.
The warrior has the public responsibility to face danger and
death in
defense of his comrades, family, and city; he is prompted to do
so not

47. only by public duty, but by his private desire for personal
"glory," which
consists in outward shows of his worth given to him by the
community
he protects. These “shows” can take the form of precedence in
speaking
in the assembly or the bestowal of gifts such as horses, women,
gold
bars, armor, or even whole cities. Generally, these public
duties and
private desires work in harmony.
When Agamemnon takes Briseus away from Achilles, he brings
these goals into conflict. Achilles has been publicly insulted by
Agamemnon and his honor has been lessened by having his “war
prize”
taken from him. As a result, Achilles loses his motivation to
fight. When
his three friends approach him in Book IX and urge him to
return to the
battle because his friends need protection, Achilles turns a deaf
ear to
their pleas. He is not moved by his responsibility to the
community.
In Homer’s worldview, two factors limit human freedom. The
first of
these is the constant interference of the gods in human affairs.
Gods
instill desires in humans to do things they might not have done
otherwise, although often the interference of the gods simply
causes
people to act in accordance with their own personalities.
Aphrodite
inflames Paris and Helen with uncontrollable desire for one
another,

48. so that they seem not to be in control of their own actions, but
neither
of them seems to possess much self-control at any point in the
tale.
Agamemnon blames the gods for his disastrous decision to take
Briseus away from Achilles, but Agamemnon has never been a
very
good leader and is accused by Achilles of constantly taking the
best
prizes for himself even before Agamemnon takes Briseus.
The gods’ interference with human behavior does not mean that
human life is completely under the control of the gods; only
when the
gods choose to interfere is human freedom limited. Otherwise,
characters in Homer are “free” to behave in any way they
choose,
though almost all of them tend to behave in ways that are
consistent
with their predispositions: Nestor is long-winded, Agamemnon
is
selfish and self-aggrandizing, Ajax is laconic, Paris is
shameless, and
so on.
A more troubling limitation on human freedom in Homer is
“fate”
or “destiny.” Achilles knows more about his own destiny than
any other
22
human character. He knows that he will die in battle before

49. Troy falls
and that he will never see his home again. He knows that he is
“fated” to
die shortly after Hector. But even the fate that governs the
lives of these
heroes does not completely restrict human freedom. The Greeks
understood “fate” as a destination or goal, a pre-determined
endpoint.
Thus, Hector may be fated to die at the hands of Achilles. But
what
happens before that time, and even the manner of that death,
may not be
determined at all. No human chooses his own fate, but he does
have a
choice about how he conducts himself on the way to that final
destination. He may behave heroically and win glory, or he
may behave
shamefully.
The central facts of human existence as it is portrayed in the
Iliad
are its brevity and its ultimate end in death. The Iliad can
properly be
described as a poem of death, since the poem itself is primarily
concerned with fighting and dying. Having no real belief in the
afterlife,
impending death is the central concern of all the heroes; their
courage in
battle and desire to win glory for themselves is one way of
cheating death
of its sting. Being remembered in songs and stories is the
surest path to
the only form of immortality the Greeks accepted. Achilles’
experiences
here are meant in some ways to be representative of all
humanity;

50. despite his “godlike” excellence, Achilles knows that he is
going to die
young in Troy and that he will never return home. The death of
Patroclus is so upsetting to Achilles that he loses his mental
balance,
becoming a terrifying monster of slaughter and desecration in
his
fruitless attempts to satisfy himself through revenge.
View of World
As the Iliad begins, a plague is destroying the Greek army. Its
origins are unknown to the Greeks, but are assumed to involve
the anger
of Apollo, the god of plague. Taking the initiative because of
his concern
for his fellow soldiers, Achilles calls an assembly of the leaders
to discuss
the problem. Unfortunately, by doing so Achilles is making
himself a
stench in the nostrils of Agamemnon, who as leader of the army
should
have called this meeting himself. Achilles makes things worse
when, in
urging the seer Calchas to speak his mind, he promises to
protect him
from the anger of anyone, including Agamemnon; this is of
course before
anyone knows that the plague really is Agamemnon's fault. It is
not
surprising then that shortly afterwards, Agamemnon lashes out
against
Achilles, promising to take away Briseus.
The political world of the Iliad is purely aristocratic. The great
heroes on the beach before Troy are all kings in their own
homelands.

51. The only way of determining precedence is “greatness,” a
quality that
includes, but is by no means limited by, physical courage and
strength.
Agamemnon is the “greatest” of the kings on the beach, but is
no match
for the killing power of Achilles, the strength of Ajax, or the
wisdom of
23
Odysseus. He is, however, clearly blessed by the gods above all
the other
heroes by virtue of his superior wealth; because he possesses
more men,
more ships, more cities, more slaves, and more gold than any of
the
other kings, Agamemnon can claim to be the greatest of the
Greeks, even
though others may excel him in particular strengths. This
reveals an
assumption implicit in the Greek worldview: great wealth is the
equivalent of great favor from the gods. There is assumed to be
a direct
relationship between material prosperity and the love of the
gods.
Agamemnon is “the best” because the gods are assumed to love
him the
most. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the
worldview
expressed in Psalm 73, which tells us that material prosperity is
not a
measure of how greatly we are loved by god.

52. Though the gods themselves do not seem to be particularly
moral,
engaged as they are in all kinds of petty bickering and
jealousies, they do
take some interest in the careful observation and preservation of
particular kinds of human relationships, particularly the
relationship of
guest to host, the suppliant relationship, and family
relationships. These
relationships must be observed and respected, or swift
punishment will
result. Consider, for example, the place of the suppliant
relationship in
the Iliad. For the Greeks, to supplicate someone meant going
and asking
someone of higher rank for a favor. The suppliant kneeled
before his
patron, taking his knee in one hand and his chin in the other,
and
followed a highly ritualized pattern of requesting his favor.
Greeks who
were the recipients of supplications were expected to respond in
some
way that would address the needs of the suppliant. The Iliad
begins with
a supplication refused; Chryseis, the priest of Apollo,
supplicates
Agamemnon for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon refuses
and
chaos results. The Iliad ends with a supplication accepted;
Priam comes
to Achilles and begs for the return of the body of Hector.
Achilles accepts
and order is restored. The Trojan war begins because Paris
violates the
guest-host relationship. Oedipus Rex and the plays of the

53. Oresteia
explore the consequences of violating family relationships.
Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the Homeric worldview
is
the shield of Achilles. Forged by Hephaestus, the god of the
forge, as a
favor for Thetis, Achilles’ mother, the shield is a microcosm,
or, literally, a
“little world” that contains within itself the entirety of the
Homeric
universe: earth, sky, sea, sun, moon, and stars. The human
world as it
is pictured on the shield is as static and unchanging as the
physical
universe. There is one city at peace, where civility and order
are
expressed in weddings and feasts, and in particular with the
public court
deciding a blood feud that otherwise might lead to clan warfare.
There is
another city at war, in a state very much like Troy’s. The point
of
showing both cities is that both of these states are, in the
Homeric
worldview, normal and inescapable. Times of peace are
followed by times
of war. The rest of the shield contains other scenes of cyclical
human
activity: plowing, planting, harvesting, cattle-herding, sheep-
grazing,
24

54. dancing after the harvest is gathered. The shield expresses the
Homeric
view of history as cyclical; there is no progress. Man is static,
as is the
world that he lives in. Neither has any ultimate purpose, but
exists for
its own sake, going nowhere in particular. Virgil, in the
Aeneid, will
“adapt” Achilles’ shield for his hero, Aeneas, but will express
on it a very
different view of history.
View of the Divine
The ancient Greeks were polytheists, worshipping a large group
of
anthropomorphic gods, the most powerful of which was Zeus.
These
gods possess only limited control over the physical world. For
example,
though they can fly and move about with blinding speed, they
are
restricted in space and cannot be in more than one place at one
time.
Compare the accounts of Iris and Hermes, the female and male
messenger gods, moving between heaven and earth with the
Biblical
accounts of God’s interaction with men. The Bible never tells
us about
God having to move from one place to another to speak with
Abraham, or
suggests that, like Zeus, God’s attention can be distracted from
events in
one place on earth by a visit to another place on earth.
Greeks gods are subject to creation because they are a part of
it.

55. According to Greek mythology, the current group of Olympian
gods took
their power by force from Rhea and Cronos, their parents. They
did not
create the world in which they live, and thus cannot transcend
certain
aspects of it, such as space and time. They also cannot
transcend the
workings of the force called Fate or Destiny. Though Homeric
works
occasionally suggest that Zeus could overturn a hero’s Fate if
he wanted
to, he never does. Instead, Homer treats Fate as a force
operating
outside the will of Zeus and over which he has no control
(although being
immortal he is not “Fated” himself). For example, as Achilles
chases
Hector around the walls of Troy, Zeus takes up a set of golden
scales and
weighs the “portion” of Achilles against the “portion” of
Hector, and
Hector’s sinks. Zeus makes no decision in this case. He simply
consults
“Fate” and ultimately abides by its dictates.
Though the members of the Greek "pantheon" (the term means
"all
the gods") differ from human beings in their immortality (they
cannot be
killed) and in their tremendous powers, their morality is not
superior to
the morality of normal humans. In some cases, it is worse.
Their
motivations are basically the same as those moving the humans
in the

56. Iliad to act: vanity, vengeance, lust, wounded pride, and greed.
They are
capable of love, but they are equally capable of implacable and
irrational
hatred and are willing to destroy innocent humans to get their
way. To a
certain extent, everyone in Troy is a victim to the wounded
vanity of Hera
and Athena.
Homer constantly encourages us to compare the life of the gods
with
the life of mortals; the gods’ problems are always temporary
and always
25
trivial. For humans, the same difficulties are matters of
ultimate
importance. For example, when Homer shifts from the human
world to
the world of the divine in Book 1, we find many similarities
between the
situation there and the situation but on earth, but where things
go
disastrously on earth, they go very smoothly in Heaven. Where
Chryseis’
supplication to Agamemnon in the first half of Book 1 is
refused, in
Heaven Thetis’ supplication to Zeus in the second half of Book
1 is
accepted. Where the first half of Book 1 recounts the
beginnings of a

57. disastrous human power struggle between Achilles and
Agamemnon, the
power struggle between Zeus and Hera in the second half of
Book 1 is
brief, its outcome never in doubt, and ends happily. When Hera
criticizes Zeus about his plans to favor the Trojans temporarily,
he
responds:
Ah but tell me, Hera,
Just what you can do about all this? Nothing.
Only estrange yourself from me a little more—
And all the worse for you . . .
Now go sit down. Be quiet now. Obey my orders,
For fear the gods, however many Olympus holds,
Are powerless to protect you when I come
To throttle you with my irresistible hands. (1.675-683)
Zeus speaks and the gods quake with fear. Hephaestus tells the
story of
his disastrous attempt to oppose the will of Zeus, provoking
healing
laughter. On Mount Olympus, there is no struggle for
supremacy. Zeus
is firmly in control, which ultimately turns out to be a good
thing in
Homer’s view, for the gods quickly end their feud and return to
feasting,
laughing, and lovemaking. Contrast this with the power

58. struggle
between Agamemnon and Achilles, which takes 24 books and
countless
deaths to patch up.
Artistic/Aesthetic
Despite the fact that it embodies the values of classical culture
and
has a great deal to teach us, the Iliad, and classical literature in
general
(with the exception of the Aeneid), was generally not didactic—
that is,
was not written in order to teach a lesson. The primary purpose
behind
recitations of the material (probably done by a professional
reciter of
poetry called a "bard" for audiences gathered in a public place -
- perhaps
around a campfire) was entertainment. Thus, unlike the Bible,
where
material not explicitly related to the unfolding drama is
generally
excluded, in Homer such “extra” material is often the whole
point; extra
stories are included for an audience that loves extra stories.
The story of
26
Meleager included by Phoinix in his long-winded speech to
Achilles in
Book IX is a great example; such an interpolated narrative

59. would never
appear in the Bible--imagine the story of Abraham's sacrifice of
Isaac
interrupted for a three chapter explanation of the birth of his
mule and
you get some idea of how alien this narrative technique would
be to
Hebrew readers.
It is also the case that the Iliad makes far fewer demands on its
readers than the Bible. For example, Homeric characters remain
almost
entirely static. Even Achilles does not really change; rather,
when his
rage passes, he returns to being the man he was before he was
insulted
by Agamemnon. Homer’s heroes wake up each morning as if it
were the
first day of their lives; Odysseus is always wily, Ajax taciturn,
Agamemnon self-glorifying, and so on. Biblical heroes, on the
other
hand, carry their pasts along with them, so that the behavior of
Jacob
late in life makes no sense unless one knows all of Jacob’s
history. Yet
the Bible never tells us “Jacob loved Joseph the most because
Joseph
was the son of Rachel, the wife he loved the most.” We are
expected to
understand issues like this in light of what we know about the
past of
these characters. Homer never makes this kind of demand.
One of the most characteristic literary techniques employed by
Homer is the “epic” simile. Such similes were designed to
describe and

60. explain the mythic, heroic world of the epic for common
farmers and
herdsmen who had no experience with sieges, walled cities, and
heroic
combat. Homer draws his points of comparison in these similes
from the
world familiar to his listeners, from farming, herding, and the
behavior of
animals in the natural world. Thus, in Book VI, Homer
compares Paris,
running out to battle in his gleaming armor, to a “stallion full-
fed at the
manger” breaking free of his tethers and running out across the
plain to
a river. Or, in Book VIII, Homer compares the campfires of the
Trojans
surrounding the Greek ships to the stars in the night sky.
Homer’s epic
similes have the effect of familiarizing the unfamiliar. For
Homer’s
audience in the 8th century, the Trojan war was part of a very
distant,
heroic past, no longer part of history, but of myth.
Homer in his invocation announces his subject as the rage of
Achilles and it will be this rage that gives the poem its unity.
Some
readers are surprised to find that the poem does not follow the
Trojan
war through to its conclusion, but the war is for Homer and his
audience
only the (very familiar) backdrop against which the human
drama
unfolds. Homer no more needs to "finish" the story than a
contemporary
American writer using the American Civil War as a background

61. needs to
inform a Southern audience about how things turned out. The
great
unifying subject here is anger: the poem begins with the
beginning of
Achilles' anger—originally directed at Agamemnon—but the
poem does
not end when Achilles and Agamemnon are reconciled to one
another.
27
Nor does the poem end when Achilles defeats Hector in revenge
for the
death of Patroklos, for afterwards his rage is redirected not only
toward
himself because of his part in the death of his friend, but toward
the very
order of existence and the human imperative to cope with death
and loss.
It is not too much to say that this is true of Achilles' anger all
along: his
rage is the anger of the adolescent who discovers that the world
is unfair.
When Achilles puts aside his "godlike" rage, when he "grows
up" and
returns to the human family -- accepting supplications, eating
and
drinking, weeping, mourning for his own father, sympathizing
with the
father of his enemy, accepting the inevitability of his own
impending
death, then (and only then) is the poem really over.

62. Individual Analysis of Major Characters
Achilles
When, in the first few lines of the Iliad, Homer announces as
his
topic the "anger" of Achilles, he uses the Greek word mênis.
Menis is
probably better translated as "wrath," since it is a word that is
used
elsewhere exclusively for the anger of gods. The word points to
Achilles’
"godlikeness," a point to which the poet constantly draws our
attention
by labeling him over and over as "godlike" Achilles. Not only
the greatest
warrior of his age, Achilles is also the child of a union between
a goddess,
Thetis, and a human, Peleus. He will constantly be torn
between his
humanity and his divinity, his "godlikeness." Remember,
though, that in
Homer’s view of the divine, calling a character “godlike” is not
necessarily
a compliment.
The temptation Achilles constantly faces is to withdraw himself
from human concerns and affairs and to deny his human
connections.
He is, in a sense, godlike in his refusal to battle together with
the other
Greeks, godlike in his decision to ignore Agamemnon's
apologies and
pleas that he return to battle, godlike in his ultimate return to
battle

63. (twelve Trojan warriors die of fright before he ever picks up a
spear), and
finally in his grief for Patroclos, which expresses itself in his
refusal to
join the other Greeks in eating and drinking. No human being
can deny
his own humanity for long without suffering the consequences,
and to a
certain extent the entire Iliad traces the trajectory of Achilles'
"godlike"
decision to put himself outside the concerns of mere mortals,
and the
slow and painful process of his realization that he is mortal
after all and
must ultimately return to the human family.
It is worth noting that Achilles is very young and has spent
almost
his entire adult life on the beach before Troy. His behavior in
some ways
is similar to the behavior of many adolescents in his refusal to
face his
own limitations. He provokes authority figures from
Agamemnon to
Apollo, he refuses in his fury to accept a supplication from
Hector - as
other men do, refuses to relent in his fury toward Agamemnon -
as other
men do, refuses to accept inadequate compensation for the
damage to
28

64. his honor - as other men do, refuses to accept the death of a
friend and
move on - as other men do. Even after he returns to the army to
fight, he
refuses in his fury and grief to eat, drink, or engage in sexual
relations
with the women he has won. All of these refusals are
characteristic of
Achilles’ adolescent fury at discovering that the world is unfair
and
resistant to his desires. Achilles’ confrontation with his own
limitations
becomes all the more poignant because Achilles is “godlike” in
so many
other ways.
Hector
Homer sets up a stark contrast between Hector, the greatest of
the
Trojan heroes, and Achilles, preparing us for their final
showdown in
Book 22. By introducing us to Hector’s family in Book 6
(Andromache,
his wife, Astyanax, his son, Queen Hekabe and King Priam, his
mother
and father, Paris, his brother, and Helen, the woman Paris stole
away
from Menelaos), Homer places Hector in the kind of domestic
context
that we never see for any of the Greek heroes—certainly not
Achilles, who
has deserted his lonely old father to go to war, nor Agamemnon,
who will
return to Greece with a concubine only to be murdered by his

65. wife, nor
even Odysseus, who takes up with a series of women before
returning
(temporarily) to his wife. Hector, Homer makes plain, has a
great deal
more to lose than his honor and glory.
In our selection, we first see Hector returning into the walls of
Troy, where he is surrounded by Trojan women asking about
sons,
brothers, husbands, and neighbors. The scene establishes Hector
as a
man solidly rooted in a particular place and community, in stark
contrast to Achilles in particular, who has left home and family
long ago
and knows he can never return, and to all the Greeks in general,
who
have by choice or force remained absent from their own homes
for ten
years.
But it is in his charming reunion with Andromache (historically
perhaps the most popular episode in the Iliad) that Hector’s
character is
best established. Hector’s gentle and considerate treatment of
Andromache, herself an early victim of kidnap and ransom,
contrasts
starkly with the Greek camp, where women are simply property
to be
traded between heroes. Hector finds Andromache on the city
walls,
where she has gone to watch the fighting out of her concern for
his
safety. She runs to meet her husband and brings with her
Astyanax,
their child. Thus, we see Hector with father and mother, wife

66. and child,
showing him as a far more complete human being than Achilles.
The conflict between his public responsibility to protect Troy
and
his family, and his private, individual pursuit of personal glory
creates
problems for Hector. Andromache, recognizing that Hector’s
pursuit of
personal glory may bring ruin on her and the city, warns her
husband
29
against fighting too aggressively, begging him to come back
into the city
and fight from atop its walls:
“Reckless one,
my Hector—your own fiery courage will destroy you!
Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,
And the destiny that weighs me down, your widow,
Now so soon. Yes, soon they will kill you off,
All the Achaean forces massed for assault . . .
Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here,
Before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow!”
Hector's response makes plain that, for all his domestic
concerns, his
motivation is still, ultimately, the same as Achilles': to gain
personal
glory and honor. Hector’s personal commitment to winning
glory for

67. himself will come at a heavy cost, as he well understands, as he
goes on
predict the fate of Andromache after the destruction of Troy.
She will, he
knows, be taken into slavery and forced to live as the concubine
of a
Greek warrior, and it may be that things will be worse for his
wife and
child because of his own fame.
Hector’s thoughts before his final, tragic death at the hands of
Achilles clarify that his personal priorities as a warrior-hero
outweigh his
communal responsibilities. Having advised the Trojan army to
remain in
the field despite the return of Achilles to battle, Hector refuses
to retreat
with the rest of the army into Troy when the tide of battle turns.
Ignoring the pleas of his mother and father, Hector remains on
the field
to face Achilles. His reasoning shows how important winning
glory and
avoiding shame are to him, even if doing so comes at the cost
not only of
his own life, but ultimately of the family and city he is
protecting:
No way out. If I slip inside the gates and walls,
Polydamas will be first to heap disgrace on me—
He was the one who urged me to lead our Trojans
Back to Ilium just last night, the disastrous night
Achilles rose in arms like a god. But did I give way?
Not at all. And how much better it would have been!
Now my army’s ruined, thanks to my own reckless pride,
I would die of shame to face the men of Troy
And the Trojan women trailing their long robes . . .
Someone less of a man than I will say, “Our Hector—

68. Staking all on his own strength, he destroyed his army!”
So they will mutter. So better by far for me
To stand up to Achilles, kill him, come home alive
Or die at his hands in glory out before our walls.
The key words in the speech are “better by far for me,” because
clearly
Hector’s decision to stand and face Achilles is motivated by his
personal
desire to win glory and avoid shame. By putting Priam and
Hecuba on
the walls at this moment, by having Andromache earlier beg
Hector to
remain inside the walls, Homer makes clear that Hector
understands the
30
consequences of his decision. His family and community will
ultimately
pay the price for Hector’s glorious last moments. Without
Hector to
protect them, Troy and all its people are doomed.
31
Homer’s Odyssey Introduction

69. General
Samuel Butler was only half-joking when he called the Odyssey
"the Iliad's wife." The Odyssey, far more than the Iliad,
concerns itself
with issues traditionally associated with women. In large
measure, this
is because, unlike the Iliad, the Odyssey focuses on the private
realm of
domestic life, a realm associated in the Greek mind with the
women who
occupied it and who were, in large measure, in control of it.
The shaping
principle of the Odyssey is Odysseus’ return home. Compare
this with
the Iliad, which, even in the rare moments when it deals with
the
domestic (Hector’s meeting with Andromache in Book 6, for
example),
does so only to contrast it with the more central business of
warfare.
The Odyssey, on the other hand, focuses on Odysseus’ attempts
to
return home to his family. Warfare is not the be-all and end-all
of this
hero’s life, but rather a means to a larger end: going home.
As a result of this changed focus, the tone of the two epics
could
hardly differ more. Where the Iliad is a tragic exploration of
death and
human limitations in a time of war, the Odyssey explores not
glorious
death but painful and costly survival after the war is over. It is
a comic,
future-oriented look at life and possibility in a time of peace, a

70. fast-
moving tale of a difficult journey undertaken by a man uniquely
prepared
for it. This has led many scholars to conclude that Homer (if he
existed)
probably wrote the Odyssey much later in life than the Iliad; its
vision is
fuller and more humane, its hero admirable both for his physical
prowess and his cleverness.
The Odyssey displays a self-consciousness about the importance
of
art to the good life that is nearly absent from the Iliad,
particularly in the
way Homer uses Demodokos, the Phaiakian poet/bard, to
represent the
bardic tradition that probably produced Homer. Though there is
no
reliable historic evidence, tradition has it that Homer, like
Demodokos,
was blind; yet despite his blindness, the poet possesses the
artistic
capacity to move people very deeply with his art. Both
Odysseus and his
son Telemachus are moved to tears at different points in the
Odyssey by
the song of a bard; this is an especially painful and beautiful
experience
for Odysseus as he hears his own experience transmuted into
art:
There is no boon in life more sweet, I say,
than when a summer joy holds all the realm,
and banqueters sit listening to a harper
in a great hall, by rows of tables heaped
with bread and roast meat . . .

71. Here is the flower of life, it seems to me! (9:5-15)
The songs of Demodokos comment in interesting ways on
Odysseus’
experiences in the past and those yet to come. In his first song,
he tells
of Odysseus’ conflict with Achilles. In Demodokos’ second
performance,
he sings of Hephaistos, the god of the forge, who comes home
to find that
32
his wife has been unfaithful, a future prospect that Odysseus
himself
perhaps is facing. Agamemnon, killed by his unfaithful wife
Clytemnestra at his homecoming, warns Odysseus from the
underworld
that he may face the same fate at the hands of Penelope. The
songs of
Demodokos help Odysseus make sense of his past and prepare
for his
future—the job of all good art!
33
Thematic Comparison of Homer’s Epics

72. Odyssey Iliad
Peace War
Domesticity/Civilizations
eating
sleeping
washing clothes
dancing
singing
telling stories
poetry
athletic contests
families
marriage
funerals
good manners
social rituals
Combat/Savagery
dressing for battle
counsels between men
wounding
killing
boasts and taunting
disorderliness/chaos
desecration of corpses
men behaving like animals
winning glory
sacrificing domestic for
martial
destruction of families
Returning home Leaving home/Destruction of the
domestic
Folk tale

73. monsters
witches
magic
Myth
heroes
gods
Continuing life/Survival Death
Guile/Cleverness Martial skill
Women play significant role Women play no significant role
View of Man
While the Iliad focuses on the tragedy of being human in its
constant reiteration of the themes of death’s inevitability,
human
limitations, and the shortcomings of “this world” versus the
perfect world
of the gods, the Odyssey pays far more attention to the things
that make
life bearable for human beings: eating, drinking, dancing,
storytelling,
lovemaking, and sleeping. It is to this “bearable” domestic
world that
Odysseus and his men long to return; they fight monsters, the
weather,
and the malice of the gods in order to do so. Odysseus even
surrenders
the possibility of immortality offered to him by Calypso in
order to return
to Penelope. He tells her:
I long for home, long for the sight of home.
If any god has marked me out again

74. For shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it.
34
What hardship have I not long since endured
At sea, in battle! Let the trial come!
Nowhere is this focus on the mundane more evident than in the
Odyssey’s repeated treatment of the theme of eating. It is no
exaggeration to say that in the world of the Odyssey, the rule of
life is eat
or be eaten. And if one does eat, one had best be careful about
when
and where. The savage, uncivilized Kyklops Polyphemos, eats
several of
Odysseus’ men; the Laistrygonians are gigantic cannibal
vampires, the
monsters Scylla and Charybdis both threaten to eat Odysseus
and all of
his men. There are also perils related to what one eats. Those
who eat
the lotus root are trapped in a fantasy world and never want to
leave it.
Any man foolish enough to eat or drink in Kirke’s house finds
himself
transformed into a swine; the most shocking part of that
transformation
is that the men, after their transformation, are immediately fed
pig food:
Scarce had they drunk when she flew after them
With her long stick and shut them in a pigsty—
Bodies, voices, heads, and bristles, all

75. Swinish now, though minds were still unchanged.
So, squealing, in they went. And Kirke tossed them
Acorns, mast, and cornel berries—fodder
For hogs who rut and slumber in the earth. (322)
The companions of Odysseus are finally lost to their own
appetites when
they are unable to stop themselves from eating the cattle of the
Kikones
and of Helios. The greatest crime of the suitors of Penelope,
who are all
killed by Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey, is consuming
another
man’s wine and food. How one eats seems to distinguish
casualties from
survivors, the innocent from the guilty, the civilized from the
uncivilized,
even the living from the dead (who crave blood).
As David Denby points out in Great Books, the Odyssey is
built
around a paradox. On the one hand, the body constantly craves
rest and
food. As Odysseus tells Alkinoos, when he washes up on
Phaiakia naked
and starving:
There is nothing more shameless
Than this belly of ours, which forces a man
To pay attention to it, no matter how many
Troubles he has, how much pain in his heart. (Lombardo 7:229-
32)
On the other hand, as soon as one does begin paying attention to
the
shameless belly, one is in danger of losing one’s full humanity,
of ending

76. up drugged, sleepy, and half-alive like the Lotus-Eaters, bestial
like the
transformed men on the island of Kirke, guilty and doomed like
the
suitors who endlessly consume Telemachus’ inheritance, or
nearly
comatose like Odysseus himself and his men after a year on the
island of
Calypso. In the Odyssey, humans live in constant tension
between self-
indulgence and self-denial; they are the Scylla and the
Charybdis of
35
every man’s life, and all of us must learn to sail between them
without
being consumed by either one.
Odysseus’ “heroism” is in some measure defined by his ability
to
practice the kind of self-denial that other heroes lack. Odysseus
possesses the adult’s capacity to defer desire, particularly in the
matter
of personal glory. Odysseus constantly shows an ability to set
aside his
prerogatives as famous hero, for example disguising himself as
a poor
beggar on Phaiakia (or even, in the encounter with Polyphemos,
as
"Nobody"), something Achilles was notoriously incapable of
doing.
However, it's always a deferral of glory—postponing glory now

77. to achieve
it more fully later-- and it's never indefinite--as Odysseus
proves when he
feels compelled to reveal his identity to the furious
Polyphemos, despite
his own men begging him to keep his mouth shut. Odysseus is
willing
to be "Nobody" for a time, but ultimately he's motivated by the
same
desire to be remembered and admired that drives Achilles and
Hector.
It is their inability to practice the same self-denial that gets
many
of Odysseus’ men killed. Their first mistake is insisting on
eating the
cattle of the Kikones right now, refusing to wait until they have
safely
withdrawn from the scene of their recent victory. The scene
repeats itself
again and again as Odysseus’ men surrender to temptation,
eating
Kirke’s food, opening the bag of wind Aiolos gives to
Odysseus, or eating
the cattle of Helios.
Paradoxically, though, it is Odysseus’ ability to deny himself
that
ultimately leads to his fulfillment. For what Odysseus wants,
above all
things, is to live, to survive, even if it means hunkering down
with an
empty stomach, covering himself in a pile of leaves, and
sleeping until
tomorrow, trusting that something better will come along.
During his

78. journey he is constantly confronted with the temptation to dwell
in
"unlifelike" places - the island of the Lotos Eaters or the Island
of
Calypso, or even Skheria, the island of the Phaiakians.
Ultimately, he
rejects the forgetfulness, slothfulness, life-denying nostalgia,
even
immortality, those places represent and instead chooses life,
with all its
pain and change, an unending struggle that makes him "a man of
constant sorrow."
Continually, Odysseus chooses life, which sets him in stark
contrast to Achilles, who kills Hector with the full knowledge
that in
doing so he brings his own death closer, and who constantly
behaves as
though he were not a mortal at all. Odysseus, in his behavior,
recognizes
his human limitations in a way that Achilles never does. The
Odyssey
affirms Odysseus’ choice as the correct one when, during his
journey to
the Land of the Dead, Odysseus attempts to comfort the ghost of
Achilles. “[Y]ou need not be so pained by death,” he tells
Achilles, for
there was never a man “more blessed by fortune than you”
(XI.541, 536-
36
7). Achilles’ chilling reply speaks volumes about how

79. important the
ancient Greeks’ view of the afterlife was to their values:
Let me hear no smooth talk
Of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils.
Better, I say, to break sod as a farm hand
For some poor country man, on iron rations,
Than lord it over all the exhausted dead.
Put simply, Achilles would rather be a live dog than a dead lion.
Odysseus, in his capacity to survive, is, in the world of the
Odyssey, a far
better model for human behavior than the eternally dissatisfied
Achilles.
Odysseus is set apart from Achilles and Hector not only in his
capacity for self-denial. A more obvious difference is
Odysseus’ keen
intelligence. Throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, Odysseus’
defining
quality is his capacity to think his way out of problems; watch
how
Odysseus himself draws attention to this ability as he tells his
stories to
the Phaiakians. We’ll explore this cunning in more depth as we
look
more deeply at the character of Odysseus below.
View of the Divine
The gods of the Odyssey are the same as the gods of the Iliad—
limited, capricious, and immoral. However, perhaps because of
the
Odyssey’s more narrow focus on Odysseus and his son, and
because
both heroes are materially assisted by Athena, the overall

80. impression of
the gods in the Odyssey is that they are more benevolent and
kindly
disposed toward humans. Poseidon, Odysseus’ principal enemy
among
the gods, is mostly absent from the narrative, and seems more
like an
impersonal force whipping up monsters and storms than a
personal god.
Athena and Odysseus share a love for disguises; both of them
use
disguises to put others at a disadvantage. When Odysseus
finally
returns home to Ithaca, he disguises himself in order to
investigate
what’s happening at his house. Encountering the disguised
Athena but
failing to recognize her, Odysseus contrives one of his many
masterful
lies. Athena listens, enjoying the performance, then interrupts
him,
obviously amused:
Only a master thief, a real con artist,
Could match your tricks—even a god
Might come up short. You wily bastard,
You cunning, elusive, habitual liar! (13:299-302 in Lombardo)
As Sheila Murnahan points out in her introduction to Stanley
Lombardo’s translation of the Odyssey, Athena is Odysseus’
divine
double, a warrior-goddess noted both for her mastery of warfare
and her
cunning intellect. Given the obvious affection and admiration
that
Athena feels for Odysseus, their relationship seems more like a

81. partnership of equals than one of goddess and worshipper.
37
Artistic/Aesthetic
Beyond the change in tone, the Odyssey shares a great deal in
common with the Iliad. We see again the use of the extended
“Homeric”
simile, which uses the natural world to describe the heroic
world, again
the rapid-fire narrative shifts between Homer’s descriptions of
the gods’
interactions and those of men. Both share the same meter in
Greek
(dactylic hexameter). The ancient Greeks thought of them as a
pair and
assumed both were by the same author.
As we have noted, the Odyssey pays far more attention to the
domestic and places a higher value on civilization and survival
than on
warfare and destruction. Consider the scene of Nausikaa asking
her
father for permission to take her chariot and wash clothes. His
loving
indulgence of her scolding and his awareness that her real
desire is not
to clothe him or her brothers, but to get a husband, are
delicately,
comically handled. This kind of tender domestic scene, and the
gentle
humor that suffuses it, are almost entirely absent from the Iliad.

82. Of course, not all of the humor of the Odyssey is as delicate.
The
Iliad contains nothing quite so corny and juvenile as Odysseus’
practical
joke on Polyphemos (“Who has hurt you?” “Nobody! Nobody
has hurt
me!” “Oh well, quit complaining then.”) Perhaps this sort of
humor
knocked them dead back in the Bronze Age, but one suspects
that jokes
of this nature were tired even in Homer’s day. That the
Odyssey makes
use of them anyway is part of its comic charm. Like the later
comedies of
Shakespeare, the Odyssey is filled with treatments of love, of
disguise, of
mistaken identity, and concludes with a happy ending. One
senses an
older Homer at work, the youthful thunder and lightning of the
Iliad out
of his system, more amused than disgusted, laughing and
enjoying the
spectacle of life more than he did when he was younger.
View of the World
The long wanderings of Odysseus show how the world was, for
the
Greeks, a larger and more wondrous place than it has become
for us.
Uncertain that there were any limitations or end to the world,
the
possibility of novelty and discovery were high. Who knew,
after all, but
that there might not actually be some place where the

83. inhabitants were
one-eyed giants? Not that the Greeks were entirely innocent to
the
possibility that travelers might return with tall tales. The gentle
humor
of Alkinoos’ reply to Odysseus’ wild stories certainly suggests
the
Phaiakians had heard a few whoppers before:
From all we see, we take you for no swindler—
Though the dark earth be patient of so many,
Scattered everywhere, baiting their traps with lies
Of old times and places no one knows. (11:399-406)
We believe you, Odysseus. Honest. Whether this speech is in
earnest or
another example of the civility and politeness of the Phaiakians
I will
leave to the reader’s judgment. But it does show that the
Homeric
38
Greeks, however little they might have known about the larger
world they
inhabited, were not entirely credulous simpletons when it came
to the
tall tales of travelers.
They were aware, however, that the world outside their small
communities was an extremely dangerous place, one in which
the
traveler has no help from police, banks, public transportation or

84. even
accommodation. Travel was dangerous, slow, unpredictable,
and
dependent on the whims of nature. That the Greeks would
eventually
embody these dangers of the larger world in the form of
monsters—the
vampires, witches, giants, and angry sea monsters who populate
the
lands where Odysseus wanders—is hardly surprising. One must
struggle to survive in this world and constantly be on guard, for
a
moment's forgetfulness can be fatal. The narrow escapes of
Odysseus
from the Kyklops, the Laistrygonians, the Skylla and Charybdis,
come
always at a terrible cost, generally in the lives of his men, all of
whom are
dead by the time Odysseus washes ashore at the beginning of
Book 4
(though they are temporarily “revived” as Odysseus tells his
stories).
If the world was full of more obvious physical dangers like
giant
blood-sucking cannibals, Odysseus’ stories also suggest that it
is full of
more subtle dangers as well. Especially dangerous are the
various
temptations embodied in Odysseus’ encounters with powerful
women;
the temptations of “sloth,” that deadly sin which transforms
men into
animals, seem powerfully incarnated in the episode of Kirke.
At the
moment of their transformation back into human beings,

85. Odysseus’ men
are filled with unbearable sorrow, since they must now face the
pain and
trials of being fully human again:
Their bristles fell away,
The coarse pelt grown upon them by her drug
Melted away, and they were men again,
Younger, more handsome, taller than before.
Their eyes upon me, each one took my hands,
And wild regret and longing pierced them through,
So the room rang with sobs, and even Kirke
Pitied that transformation.
It is one of the strangest and most beautiful moments in
classical
literature, suggesting that most people are content to be
animals, feeding
and sleeping, “hogs who rut and slumber in the earth,” rather
than face
the pain of being fully human. A hero like Odysseus, on the
other hand,
when offered the possibility of surrendering his humanity,
repeatedly
refuses. Kirke and Calypso offer immortality, a life utterly free
from
hunger, cold, and want; Nausikaa offers youth, beauty, and
wealth.
Somehow, Odysseus prefers his aging wife, the rocky soil of
Ithaka, the
uncertainties of returning home after twenty years to a house
full of
dangerous strangers, to any of these temptations. The Odyssey,
like The
Wizard of Oz, confirms a very old truth: there’s no place like
home.

86. 39
Particularly distant from the charms of home is the Land of the
Dead, here represented not as an “underworld” (although the
ancient
Greeks generally understood it as such), but as a physical “on-
the-map”
location. Homer's dark and terrifying picture of the afterlife is
unmatched even in Dante. The “ghosts” of the dead are
spiritless,
miserable shadows longing for nothing so much as to return to
the land
of the living again. Odysseus’ trip becomes all the more
terrifying
because he knows that his choice to leave Calypso means that
he will
have to join these spirits himself eventually.
Character of Odysseus
Like Achilles or Hector, Odysseus is essentially static or
unchanging. He is the same clever, self-possessed, courageous,
resourceful, determined man in the last book of the Odyssey
that he is in
the first. For example, Odysseus shows the same wiliness that
helped
him survive Troy at his first appearance in the Odyssey in Book
6. He
quickly takes the measure of Nausikaa, decides how to approach
her,
what to ask for, and flatters her with a pickup line that was
probably

87. tired even in the Bronze Age: "Mistress, please, are you divine,
or
mortal?” Shortly afterwards, Nausikaa says to her maids:
I wish my husband could be as fine as he
And glad to stay forever on Skheria.
Odysseus reads her age and station in life perfectly, and then
addresses
her accordingly, knowing that as beautiful as she is she must be
slightly
vain and must be thinking about marriage, which of course the
reader
already knows is the case.
Still, it is also true that over the course of his final adventures,
Odysseus is changing somewhat as well. By moving Odysseus
through a
series of transitional spaces ruled over by women (Arete, Kirke,
Calypso),
Homer shows how Odysseus moves toward a more domestic and
peaceful
frame of mind, preparing him to make the transition from the
bloody
“death world” of the Trojan War to the domestic world of
Ithaka. The
land of the Phaiakians in particular seems a perfect preparation
for his
return home; his emergence, naked, bruised, and covered in
brine into
the midst of a party of terrified young girls suggests at the
beginning of
this episode how poorly prepared Odysseus is for this world.
Odysseus,
the hero of Troy, legend all over the world, emerges from the
woods with