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The Man of Many Turns
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Homer: Odyssey
In this course, Professor Barbara Graziosi (University of Durham) explores Homer's Odyssey. We begin by thinking about the figure of Odysseus himself, focusing in particular on his status as a man 'of many turns' (Greek: polutropos). After that, we provide a brief summary of the plot and structure of the poem, before turning in the third module to the workings of divine justice in the poem. In the fourth module, we think about Odysseus relationship with various women in the poem, focusing in particular on the importance of clothing, as well as the potential dangers of women – especially non-mortal women such as Circe or the Sirens. Finally, in the fifth module, we think about Odysseus' descent into the Underworld, thinking in particular about other literary journeys to the Underworld (Gilgamesh, Aeneas, Dante, etc.).
The Man of Many Turns
In this module, we think about the figure of Odysseus himself, focusing in particular on his status as a man 'of many turns' (Greek: polutropos), his various roles in the poem, and his different transformations – including his transformation into 'nobody' on the island of the Cyclopes.
Hello, my name is Barbara Graziosi.
00:00:03I'm professor of classics at Durham University.
00:00:05And I'm here today to talk about the Odyssey.
00:00:08I'm going to do it in five mini lectures,
00:00:12and I'm going to start with Odysseus.
00:00:15The Odyssey means a poem about Odysseus,
00:00:18and so it makes sense to start with this character,
00:00:21the main character.
00:00:24But the interesting thing about the beginning
00:00:26of the Odyssey, the problem where the poet asks the Muse
00:00:28to tell him about a specific topic,
00:00:32is that we never hear his name.
00:00:35The beginning of the Odyssey is like a riddle.
00:00:37We have to work out that this is a poem about Odysseus.
00:00:40Rather than his name, what we get right at the beginning
00:00:45is the word andra.
00:00:49That's the very first word in the Odyssey.
00:00:51And it means ‘man’.
00:00:53So we know that this is a poem about man, or a man.
00:00:55And I would suggest it's a poem about both man in general,
00:01:01and a very specific and puzzling individual
00:01:05that we need to work out as we listen to the poem.
00:01:09So it's generally a poem about man
00:01:13because Odysseus's quest for knowledge,
00:01:17his travel, his desire to go back home to his wife and child
00:01:19are all themes of universal interest.
00:01:24It is what defines a human being.
00:01:27And so in that sense, the Odyssey,
00:01:30like the Iliad, the other great poem attributed to Homer,
00:01:32does try to define what it means to be human.
00:01:36And in order to do that, it thinks
00:01:39about both life and death, although in different ways
00:01:41from the Iliad.
00:01:45And I'll say more about that in other mini lectures.
00:01:46But for now, I'm more interested in a specific man.
00:01:50Tell me, muse, about a man of many turns.
00:01:54That's the next bit that we hear in the poem.
00:01:58And this word in Greek, "polutropon,"
00:02:01is a very odd word.
00:02:03It's not a common word in Greek either.
00:02:04And it means ‘of many turns’, in the sense
00:02:08of turns and travels in space.
00:02:10But it also suggests many turns and ruses of the mind.
00:02:14Knowledge and travel go together in the Odyssey.
00:02:18And I would say they often go together
00:02:22in life because through traveling,
00:02:23we do learn a lot of things.
00:02:25And the next line of the poem says that Odysseus--
00:02:28or rather the man because we don't know his name yet--
00:02:31traveled through many cities and learned the mind of many men.
00:02:36So again, we have both travel in space,
00:02:40and also, we have this acquisition of knowledge
00:02:43that is very important to this character.
00:02:46Now these two aspects are similar,
00:02:50but they're not the same.
00:02:53And the Odyssey, more generally, is
00:02:55both a story of returning to a specific place,
00:02:57and a story of traveling around and seeing
00:03:01different cities and different men and learning new things.
00:03:04And depending on the emphasis that we give to each of these
00:03:08elements – the return to a specific city,
00:03:12and the survival and adventuring around in many different
00:03:16cities –
00:03:21we get a different poem, not just in
00:03:22terms of how we evaluate the main character,
00:03:25whether he's a survivor or someone who has a specific aim
00:03:28to go home, but also in how we appreciate the poem ourselves.
00:03:32So if we look at the Odyssey as a story of homecoming,
00:03:38of a return home, then there's a lot
00:03:45that we can learn about the human condition
00:03:48and the many limitations it imposes:
00:03:50death, rocky Ithaca, no good for horses, an aging wife, a son
00:03:53who is about to take over –
00:03:59all these things have to do with what we
00:04:00have to learn about human life.
00:04:02But if we look at the Odyssey as a poem of survival
00:04:05and of adventure, then it's not so
00:04:10much about knowledge and learning, what
00:04:13it means to be human, but it's more about pleasure.
00:04:15What it means to go through a whole series
00:04:18of terrible adventures and impossible situations
00:04:21and come out on top and remain afloat every time.
00:04:26And this also has implications for the structure of the poem.
00:04:30Because a return story has an end.
00:04:34And also the ultimate end always is death.
00:04:39So you have a story of life, and then a return home,
00:04:42and then the end of the story, and the end of the life.
00:04:45But a story of survival has, potentially, no end.
00:04:48You go through more and more adventures and more scrapes
00:04:54and more stories and more additions.
00:04:57And on and on you go.
00:04:59And it seems that Odysseus is dead,
00:05:00but then, all of a sudden, he's not dead anymore,
00:05:02but he's managed to survive.
00:05:05He manages to go even to Hades, to the underworld,
00:05:07and return from there alive.
00:05:10So Odysseus has these different aspects.
00:05:15He is a tricky character.
00:05:18And it is tricky to balance these different elements
00:05:20in his story of return, homecoming, but also
00:05:23of survival, adventure, and exploration.
00:05:27And both of there.
00:05:30As well as being polutropos, of many turns,
00:05:32he is also polumechanos, of many tricks, of many councils.
00:05:35He is polutlas, of many sufferings.
00:05:39Or we would say much suffering, much enduring.
00:05:42And all these different, multifarious adjectives
00:05:45start with "poly," which means many.
00:05:48So he has many different aspects that we need to put together.
00:05:51If we look at the similes, at the comparisons,
00:05:56of what Odysseus is compared to, he
00:05:59compared to a wider range of animals
00:06:01than any other character.
00:06:04So he's a lion, like many Homeric heroes.
00:06:06But then we find out that when he
00:06:10survives shipwreck and attaches himself to a rock,
00:06:12he's like an octopus.
00:06:14And just like the suckers of the octopus
00:06:16have some bits of rock still attached to them,
00:06:21so the skin of Odysseus gets ripped away by the rock
00:06:24as he tries to hang onto it.
00:06:27So as often, this simile is more about the contrast
00:06:30between the two than the absolute similarity.
00:06:34On a different occasion Odysseus is telling the story himself.
00:06:37He says when he is shipwrecked –
00:06:41one of his many shipwrecks – and he's
00:06:44paddling on the remains of his ship,
00:06:47a few planks put together.
00:06:49He paddles past Charybdis,
00:06:51and Charybdis is a monster that sucks you in with its current
00:06:54and then eats everything that is alive in the vessel that
00:06:57is sucked into its whirlpool.
00:07:00And as the timbers are about to get sucked in,
00:07:04Odysseus leaps up and attaches himself
00:07:10to a fig tree that is jutting over the edge of the land
00:07:13in Charybdis's whirlpool.
00:07:18And he remains attached there like a bat,
00:07:20he says, for a good part of the day,
00:07:22until the wood is spewed out again by Charybdis.
00:07:24And he jumps down and he paddles off.
00:07:31So he's a bat.
00:07:33He is an octopus.
00:07:35He is a lion.
00:07:37And of course, when he enters the cave of the Cyclops
00:07:39and then he manages to get out again hidden under a ram,
00:07:43he disguises himself in the form of a ram, too.
00:07:47There are many, many different disguises to Odysseus.
00:07:51And even when he is not compared to a strange animal,
00:07:56or when he doesn't actually disguise himself as a sheep,
00:07:58he is still difficult to recognize.
00:08:03So when he arrives at the island of Nausicaa,
00:08:07this lovely princess sees him horrible and naked
00:08:11on the beach.
00:08:15And the word used in Greek is smerdaleos,
00:08:16which means something like gross or disgusting,
00:08:18absolutely revolting.
00:08:21And that's the first impression he makes on her.
00:08:23But she is well-brought-up.
00:08:26She knows that a shipwrecked stranger almost dead on a beach
00:08:27needs help.
00:08:31So she helps him anyway.
00:08:32And later, after he's had a bath and Athena
00:08:35has broadened his shoulders and thickened his hair,
00:08:38she thinks he doesn't just look good, he looks divine.
00:08:43She compares him to a god.
00:08:46And the same reaction happens later
00:08:48in the poem when he, Odysseus, finally gets home
00:08:50and Penelope sees him for the first time.
00:08:53And he's disguised as a beggar and she
00:08:56doesn't think much of him.
00:08:58But she's also well-brought-up and thinks that beggars need
00:08:59to be supported and helped.
00:09:02And later, when he avenges the Suitors
00:09:05and he's standing there in the middle of the massacre,
00:09:09she thinks he looks like an avenging god.
00:09:12And only slowly does she start to pick up
00:09:15a resemblance to her husband of old, whom
00:09:18she hasn't seen in twenty years.
00:09:22So Odysseus appears to different people in different ways
00:09:24at different times.
00:09:29And arguably, his most incredible disguise
00:09:30is when he says that his name is Nobody.
00:09:33And that saves him when he's in the cave of the Cyclops,
00:09:37and he blinds the Cyclops.
00:09:40And the other Cyclopes around run
00:09:42to the rescue of their friend.
00:09:45And they ask him, who's hurting you?
00:09:48And the Cyclops answers, ‘Nobody is hurting me.’
00:09:51And so they just go away.
00:09:54And Odysseus is like that.
00:09:57He appears and he disappears.
00:09:58He's recognizable and he's not recognizable. These
00:10:00appearances and disappearances
00:10:03are not just a matter of his personality, or the character
00:10:05that he has, or of the similes, or of the adventures
00:10:10that he has.
00:10:14They actually shape the plot of the Odyssey.
00:10:15And it is precisely the plot of the Odyssey
00:10:19that I'm going to talk about in this next lecture coming up.
00:10:21
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Graziosi, B. (2018, August 15). Homer: Odyssey - The Man of Many Turns [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/homer-odyssey-graziosi/plot-and-structure
MLA style
Graziosi, B. "Homer: Odyssey – The Man of Many Turns." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/homer-odyssey-graziosi/plot-and-structure