Achilles seems to tell Odysseus in Hades that he made the wrong choice (11.488- 91), but we are not told that Odysseus had any regrets. The power of Homer's poetry, in any case, largely consists of persuading us that the morality of either choice-of Achilles in rescuing the Achaeans from a dire situation and of Odysseus in saving the life of his son and putting a stop to Penelope's tears-is overshadowed by the fatefulness of either choice. We are forced to look at justice from a perspective beyond justice, even if neither Achilles nor Odysseus ever came to such an understanding. It is here, in the difference between Odysseus's self-understanding and Homer's understanding of that self-understanding, that Homer possibly parts company with Odysseus and recovers a point of view as much beyond good and evil as he assumed so readily in the Iliad. How Achilles comes to put on his fate is shown for the most part in the events of the Iliad; we do not have and we do not need to have Achilles' own account.Our access to the grounds for Odysseus's choice, which he already made before Homer picks up his story, can only come from Odysseus himself. He has to explain from the inside, as it were, what was involved in his coming home.

Note: Self-understanding

Location 102

he must once he gets home soon depart, staying perhaps no longer than a month (cf. 14.244-45), and come once more to many cities of mortals (23.267). The Odyssey catches Odysseus betweena return and a departure. Odysseus's choice, then, seems to point not so much to home as to mortality. Odysseus chooses to be human and remain incomplete; or he understands there to be a completeness in the incompleteness of a certain kind of human life that is preferable to either the fixity of memory or the everlastingness of divinity.

Location 122

In the last book, Odysseus effects a kind of reconciliation with his father whose rule he had taken over in some unknown way. The paternal rule that prevailed in Ithaca before the Trojan War and exemplified the highest possible achievement within the ancestral was gained only by a usurpation. That usurpation, which had the consequence of preventing Laertes from defending Penelope from the suitors, merely confirms the riddle in Odysseus's choice. Odysseus's former rule was only in appearance traditional; he had broken with the equation of the good with the ancestral long before he had been given the possibility of not following in the ways of the fathers. The struggle between natural and ancestral right, with which the Iliad begins, had already been settled in Ithaca in favor of the son, though the son, as Athena reminds Telemachus, is rarely superior to…

Location 128

Homer seems to have reflected on the Platonic possibility of philosopher-kings, and either condemned it in advance of its explicit formulation or confirmed the necessity…

Location 137

might be less operative than it seemed. Homer, however, has chosen an event after Odysseus's twelve ships had been reduced to one, and there is nothing in Odysseus's own account to warrant the view that everyone who lost his life was the victim of his own wickedness. Had it not been for Odysseus's use of force, those who wanted to remain with the Lotus-eaters would have survived. Homer, moreover, gives the impression that the Sun punished Odysseus's men; but we are later told that the Sun cannot punish…

Location 142

The clarity Homer gains about the connection between justice and wisdom by simplifying the story seems not only to have a narrative advantage but also to support completely Zeus's contention that men blame the gods for their own evils while in fact they alone are responsible, by their own reckless wickedness-Zeus simply repeats Homer's own phrasing (1.7, 34)-for the suffering they have beyond their fate.10 The poem confirms the first half of Zeus's contention absolutely: there is hardly anyone who does not fault the gods and in particular Zeus. Odysseus has no sooner escaped from…

Location 162

illustrate his thesis, that the gods are blameless for human evils, and all the suffering that is beyond fate is due to a…

Location 172

A four-year stay with Calypso, then, instead of seven, would have allowed Odysseus to return prior to the suitors' arrival; and since Poseidon's anger is completely discharged after he stirs up a single storm against Odysseus (5.375-81), Poseidon cannot really be the sole obstacle to Odysseus's delayed return. The apparently empty time that Odysseus must spend with Calypso is dictated no less by the need for Telemachus to grow up and experience fully the indignity of his position than by the need for Polyphemus's curse, which provided for Odysseus to meet with sufferings athome (9.535), to be realized. Neither Zeus nor Athena mentions any of this. The only nonfated event involves Telemachus' achievement of maturity, of which Teiresias in Hades tells Odysseus nothing. It would seem, then, that the gods' causality as well as their justice…

Location 184

Telemachus represents the political problem of succession. Penelope's entire effort for twenty years has been to preserve the throne for her son, and for the last years to distract attention from the succession by dazzling the suitors with her own attractions and making it seem that the household and not the city is at stake. Telemachus knows nothing of this. When he is directly asked whether he has called an assembly for a political reason he denies it (2.30-32). Telemachus, then, is hardly less resentful of his mother than of the…

Location 196

Only in Ithaca has the war been completely devastating. An entire generation has been wiped out, not only in Ithaca but also in the other parts of Odysseus's small empire (11.631-35). The evident usurpation within Odysseus's palace has covered over this central fact; and the suspension of all political life for twentyyears-no one has called an assembly in all that time (2.26-27)-seems to have suspended time itself. Telemachus's coming of age and the death of Odysseus's dog Argus are the only measures of real time left. Odysseus's rule was so beneficent, it seems, that it could seal up Ithaca for twenty years and allow it to run for that long without a ruler. That there is no ruler shows up only in a reputed disorder…

Location 202

The suitors, then, whose older brothers and cousins went with Odysseus to Troy (cf. 2.17-22), contain in themselves the general disaffection of the people (cf. 3.214-15). They make it possible for Odysseus to cut out surgically the most deeply infected part of the body politic (2.265-66)-we learn in the last book that he did not cut deeply enough (24.463-66; cf. 2.166-67)-and hand over the city in a sound enough condition for a Telemachus to rule it.', Whether the other parts of the empire…

Location 210

political problem Odysseus confronts reminds one of an imaginary situation Plato's Athenian Stranger presents to a Cretan and a 16 He supposes that a single father and a single mother have many sons, most of whom are unjust, but the minority is just; and if a judge could be found for these brothers, the question he poses is who would be a better judge, one who destroyed everyone who was bad and ordered the better to rule themselves,…

Location 214

Behind the supposed ingratitude of Odysseus's people, however, there lies a smoldering resentment, fueled not by his long absence, but by the universal recognition that if Odysseus does return he returns alone (2.174-75). The father of Antinous puts it strongly and irrefutably: "First, he went and lost his ships and his…

Location 221

Odysseus's story is not fit for…

Location 225

One wonders whether the gifts Odysseus receives from the Phaeacians, which Zeus wants to be greater than what would have been his share had he returned unscathed from Troy (5.38-40), are meant to be distributed to the Ithacans and…

Location 229