For ten long years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus endures one hardship after another as his ships are driven over the ominous, wine-dark sea, but his sufferings are not in vain. In the course of his wanderings, Odysseus sees many cities and intimately comes to know many ways of life. The intelligence he gathers will be of the utmost importance to him if and when he achieves his own nostos ‘homecoming’. Upon his return, he will find his household and his city in shambles. Yet equipped with the knowledge of other cities and other societies of people, divinities, or monsters that he has encountered during his protracted travels, he will now have the resources, physical and intellectual alike, to restore everything to order.

However, it would be imprudent at best to assume that the restoration would not involve a major reorganization. A leader absent for some twenty years could not honestly expect to resume precisely where he left off. This is the fatal mistake Agamemnon makes in Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy the Oresteia: upon his return to Argos after a ten-year absence as the leader of the Greek contingent at Troy, Agamemnon fails to heed the elders’ advice that he make inquiries regarding the fidelity of the kingdom’s remaining citizenry. As a result of his failure to gather this information, he walks directly into the lethal bath prepared for him by his unfaithful wife Clytaemnestra, who, in his absence, had become the city’s acting regent. While Homer’s Agamemnon, like Aeschylus’, is not remarkable for the power of his mental faculties, Odysseus is. When Odysseus returns home and subsequently reorganizes his city, he will presumably aim to do so in the best possible way, to create the best possible society. Ithaka’s pre-Trojan War political “state” is not germane to this endeavor, hence Homer’s relative disinterest in the island’s former social order. Again, it would be imprudent to try to turn back the clock. Utter chaos is Odysseus’ starting point. Therefore, Homer’s purpose would be, at least to some significant extent, to present his audience with the picture of what constitutes an ideal society via the encounters that will inform and guide the hero’s new political settlement (Figure 1). The Odyssey must, in turn, be considered utopian. Moreover, it would not seem inappropriate to view Odysseus’ reorganization as a metaphorical, mythological re-enactment of Greece’s historical evolution from the order of Mycenaean palace-based society through the chaos of the Dark Age to an urban, polis-based society.

Figure 1. Mapping utopia. Map of the wanderings of Odysseus, after Otho Cushing in Charles Lamb, The Adventures of Ulysses (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1894, 1917), frontispiece.

What Odysseus’ polis at home in Ithaka should not strive to emulate is fairly plain. The outstanding example is the apolitical, dystopian “society” of the Cyclopes:

Homer is at pains to inform his audience that these monsters do not practice agriculture; they leave almost everything in the hands of the immortals. The Cyclopes’ choice of habitation, namely caverns hollowed among the peaks of the high mountains, likewise demonstrates their inability, or lack of desire, to create order out of natural forms. Ultimately, they acknowledge no separation between themselves and the natural or animal world. The Cyclopes have neither institutions nor meetings for counsels. There is no body of law, divinely ordained or otherwise, that governs the Cyclopes’ behavior; rather, each creates laws for his own wife and children. Xenia ‘guest friendship/hospitality’, which was so much part of the “civilized” Greek “way” that its breach precipitated the Trojan War, is certainly not a concept for the Cyclopes. A host would never eat his guests. Indeed the Cyclopes’ entire existence may be described as insular; they care nothing about each other nor, apparently, are they curious about much apart from what readily presents itself on their (is)land. [1] There is an island of great fertility with a large population of goats in what would seem tantalizing proximity to the Cyclopes’ own territory, yet they lack the necessary navigation skills to avail themselves of its endless potential. They could never even fathom that this is an island ripe for settlement, a notion precisely rendered by Odysseus (Odyssey 9.130). He describes an island affording a landscape ideally suited to the needs of civilized humanity, providing a wilderness for hunting, ample land for grazing, and farmland, as well as a site for a city complete with spring and harbor. [2]

To give the Cyclopes some credit, they are apparently quite good at making cheese and keeping track of the sheep on their own land. Nevertheless, it is evident that they lack “all forms of communal or non-tribal organization.” [3] Technology, commerce, and communication, all of which the polis fosters and which are the veritable underpinnings of civilization, are nowhere in evidence among them. [4] It is telling, of course, that Aristotle names the Cyclops as the outstanding exemplar of an apolitical being:

… ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον, καὶ ὁ ἄπολις διὰ φύσιν καὶ οὐ διὰ τύχην ἤτοι φαῦλός ἐστιν, ἢ κρείττων ἢ ἄνθρωπος· ὥσπερ καὶ ὁ ὑφ᾽ Ὁμήρου λοιδορηθεὶς “ἀφρήτωρ ἀθέμιστος ἀνέστιος”· ἅμα γὰρ φύσει τοιοῦτος καὶ πολέμου ἐπιθυμητής, ἅτε περ ἄζυξ ὢν ὥσπερ ἐν πεττοῖς.

… a human being is by nature a creature of the polis, and he who is no part of a polis due to natural inclination and not due to a stroke of fortune is, indeed, either inferior or superior to a human being—just like the one reviled by Homer as having no brotherhood, no divinely appointed ordinances, and no hearth, for being thus by nature, he also is eager for war—in as much as he is like an isolated game piece at draughts.

Politics 1253a2–7

It is the Cyclopes’ lack of social ties, their lack of divinely and culturally sanctioned ordinances or codes of behavior, and their lack, even, of a hearth that Aristotle points to specifically in order to mark them as inhuman, bestial, and, therefore, not suited to the life of the polis. [5] In truth, the hearth’s importance to human civilization would be difficult to overstate. For the Greeks, the hearth represented and ensured the physical security and continuity of the family unit and, by extension, of any “political” union of families. The hearth was life-giving and life-sustaining, a source of stability in a mutable universe and a necessary link between the vulnerable human and the invulnerable, immutable divine. [6] Accordingly, the hearthless, lawless Cyclopes, privileged brutes living amidst a Golden Age abundance of natural resources, have nothing positive to offer Odysseus in terms of progressive social organization. Adopting their lifestyle would entail a massive step backwards to a time before humankind had emerged from the cave. Theirs is a lifestyle, Aristotle affirms, characterizing the unenlightened times of old (οὕτω τὸ ἀρχαῖον ᾤκουν, Politics 1252b23–24).

Ironically, the source of Calypso’s sensual appeal constitutes the essence of the threat she embodies. Who and what Calypso is—and what her particular allure—emerges from the manifold symbolic resonances of her cave. As traditional haunt of nymphs, the cave partakes of the divine, but viewed from a human evolutionary perspective, it is “the natural womb out of which man set forth to conquer the world.” [9] Caves are both the source and safeguard of life, and as such they are refractions of Earth herself. So too is Calypso. The fecundity of the wilderness that surrounds her is not something the goddess passively enjoys; rather, she is its source and mistress. There is certainly no question of her comfort in this setting. Nothing here threatens her existence, whereas the security of a mortal settlement would necessitate a substantial, intrusive curbing of Nature. In truth, the proximity of a forest, regarded as Nature at her most intimidating, would suffice to fill the hearts of humanity with profoundest trepidation.

Notably, this island wilderness does not grow unchecked in spite of the lack of walls or barriers keeping it at bay, and a very real sense of order to the landscape is obscured somewhat by the fluidity of the poet’s description. [10] The Earth goddess, it appears, is firmly in control. One who has attempted to create a garden in the forest knows that woodland trees or weeds will soon encroach on and engulf an untended meadow. A tenacious vine too will spread extensively and bury everything in its path. Here, however, meadow and forest have remained distinct, and Calypso’s cave has not succumbed to the strangling intrusion of the vine. The orderliness of this “wilderness” extends even to the presence of four fountains providing fresh water to all parts of the island. These fountains, a small-scale replica of the four waters that nourish life and divide the Earth, must also, one suspects, have issued from some form of artful manipulation. [11]

That Calypso is one with and empowered by the hallowed, generative Earth she inhabits is further expressed by her weaving, that feminine tekhnē ‘skill’ through which “women could weave nature together into clothes, baskets, and tools.” [12] Weaving is a means by which to control Nature and by which, simultaneously, to create. It is also a metaphor for intellectual process; a capable weaver possesses a pliant mind. [13] Calypso possesses what might, from a male perspective, be viewed as a surprising range of creative, craftsmanly skills and knowledge. It is she, for instance, who instructs Odysseus on how to construct the raft that will carry him to the island of the Phaiakians, and she is well aware that the optimum material for building the raft is the buoyant wood of trees whose precise location she had previously mapped. [14]

To the Greek mind, Earth was “self-sufficient” and “self-generating,” qualities that engendered in men no small degree of ambivalence. [15] That which is parthenogenic has no need for sexual reproduction. Calypso, the Earth goddess, has no need of a masculine presence to secure her life and livelihood, since she can seemingly create anything that she might require. Becoming part of her world would be disastrous for Odysseus, and the transference of her world order to patriarchal Greece would be a terrifying prospect. Odysseus’ requiring Calypso to “swear a great oath” (Odyssey 5.178–179) that her help in securing his escape is no lethal ruse is evidence enough of the extremity of his anxiety.

Calypso’s sinister aspect resonates through her physical environment. Her island’s burgeoning flora, for all their lush beauty, include the cypress, alder, and black poplar, all plants that had funerary associations for the Greeks. [16] It is curious that there appear to be no fauna on this island except birds, but it is outright foreboding that the resident population of birds, consisting of owls, hawks, and gulls, all eaters of flesh, are associated with evil omens. [17] Even Calypso’s soft, verdant meadows are not without their latent dangers. In Greek mythology, meadows, like caves, are common settings for sexual encounters, a good many of which result from rape. [18] Moreover, the sexual act itself was viewed as potentially lethal, particularly if engaged in with females, whether god or mortal, due to their “biologically” determined participation both in the workings of untamed Nature, constituting the savage, un-socialized world, and in the occult. [19]

Similar meadows appear in the landscapes of the dead and on the island of the fearsome, man-eating Sirens who, together with Scylla and Charybdis, exemplify the essence of the matriarchal threat, the threat of Nature unbridled. [20] Of these the whirlpool Charybdis, fully elemental in her “being,” constitutes the most basic sort of danger to the survival of humankind. She is no sea monster but rather the sea at her most monstrous. More precisely, she is the sea’s ravening maw. Seafaring was always a risky business in antiquity, and the sea, though abounding with life, presented the possibility of a death more frightening than the most horrible demise on land. Even a relatively calm sea could literally swallow those who fell victim to her, and their remains would likely never be recovered for a proper burial. [21] Those who died at sea thus risked finding their souls condemned to eternal wandering. Such is the peril faced by those unlucky enough to encounter either Charybdis or Scylla, who is, like the Cyclops, a cave-dwelling anthropophage. Scylla, with her six necks and ravening canine heads, may be physiologically more “evolved” than Charybdis, but her instincts are no less primal. She is a predator pure and simple, fishing for any life form that approaches within striking distance (Odyssey 12.94–97). Foolishly, the Greeks themselves attempt to assume the role of predator immediately on the heels of their Scylla Abenteur. Emerging from the cave that had become their shelter, they prey on the sacred cattle of Helios. The result is predictably disastrous. Unless one has no need of the gods—and no need to worry about divine retribution—one may not, as it turns out, slaughter, eat, and sacrifice as domesticated those animals not raised and tended by oneself or one’s community. [22]

As for the Sirens, their predatory response is more sophisticated than that of their monstrous “cousin” Scylla. Whether or not Homer’s Sirens are biform with human and avian physical characteristics is impossible to know, though biformality was certainly the consensus amongst Greek artists. [23] Homer does, however, tell us that the Sirens had sweet singing voices clearly intelligible to the Greeks. Remarkably, their diction is specifically “epic” and, more specifically, Iliadic. [24] Later testimonies clearly associate the Sirens not only with the Earth, who is named as their mother, but also with Persephone in the underworld. [25] Among the Earth’s many powers is her ability to emanate prophecies in the form of dreams. She is accordingly the treasure house not only of life and death but also of all knowledge. Thus the Sirens, the so-called Muses of the Afterlife, combine sexual allure, symbolized by their meadow, with the promise of possessing the most perfect knowledge, knowledge of all things that have occurred or will occur in the world. [26] Those who succumb to their temptation will meet a certain, instant death. In one way or another the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis all embody characteristics of the “Earth” goddess Calypso and also of Circe, her matriarchal counterpart. [27]

When Odysseus and his men pull their ship into a safe harbor at Circe’s island Aeaea, they hope desperately that they will somewhere glimpse the works of humans, erga brotōn (ἔργα βροτῶν, Odyssey 10.147), and hear human voices, both relatively certain indicators, under “normal” circumstances, of a civilized culture and a hospitable reception. Their hopes are not utterly vain, since Odysseus discerns smoke rising in the distance. By now, however, Odysseus has learned to be very, very circumspect in his approach to the inhabitants of such unknown places, and his precautionary measure in sending out a scouting party is definitely in order. Smoke rising from a dwelling in the midst of densely growing woods and thickets signals that the Greeks will likely encounter something unexpected. Certainly “works of humans” such as cultivated fields would have been more comforting than a structure engulfed by forest. [28] It is thus hardly surprising that the inhabitant of this dwelling is a witch, partly a creature of folklore and partly Indo-European/Near-Eastern Nature goddess. [29] Unlike Calypso, who is attended merely by a few handmaids, Circe presides over what might be described as a small community, or, at least, an extensive household consisting both of female servants, some of whom are nymphs of the water and woods, and of wild animals. The attitude of these creatures of the wild is significant; these woodland wolves and lions are described as fawning about Odysseus’ men like dogs greeting their master. [30] The effect Circe has on the animals is precisely that of Aphrodite on the wolves, bears, lions, and leopards of Mount Ida, which are described as fawning around her in the so-called Homeric hymn composed in her honor. [31] Both Circe and Aphrodite have about them something of the Potnia Therōn, the Mistress of Animals known in Greece at least as early as the Bronze Age. If, however, Circe can tame these animals, she could certainly—and easily—incite them to fury. The control she exercises over both the animals in her kingdom and the men whom she has either transformed, or is about to transform into animals, stems from qualities that she shares with Calypso and the Sirens. These attributes include the possession of an agile, scheming, “mantic” intellect and the powerful abilities to seduce and beguile. [32] Fortunately for him, Odysseus receives assistance from the divine sphere that enables him to resist Circe’s manifold threat.

Circe’s peril is directly linked to the theoretical debate regarding the “sex” of architecture that scholars have traced back to Vitruvius but that clearly comes into play in this very much older Greek text. The conceptual gender crisis that has long occupied architectural theorists is perhaps best expressed in the words of fifteenth-century architectural utopian Antonio Averlino, more commonly known as Filarete: [33]

… the building is constructed as a simile for the human figure. You see that I have shown you by means of a simile that a building is derived from man, that is, from his form, members, and measure… You perhaps could say, you have told me that the building is similar to man. Therefore, if this is so it needs to be conceived and then born. As with man himself, so with the Building … Since no one can conceive himself without a woman, by another simile, the building cannot be conceived by one man alone. As it cannot be done without woman, so he who wishes to build needs an architect. He conceives it with him and then the architect carries it. When the architect has given birth he becomes the mother of the building.

Treatise on Architecture 12–16

Filarete’s stumbling block was the Vitruvian idea that a building is based on the proportions of a man and is a male entity. A building, however, must be created, and creation is by nature the province of the feminine. Filarete’s solution was a sort of “transsexual operation” whereby the architect is transformed functionally into a woman while remaining male in gender. [34] In the case of Circe, there is no indication that a male has created her dwelling. Furthermore, this structure is described in terms that clearly suggest a high level of craftsmanship and technical skill. While Homer has not explicitly stated that Circe built it with her own hands, the ability to have done so is certainly within her reach. Like Calypso, Circe is a skilled weaver. Indeed, she is more than simply skilled; her work is not only technically proficient, delicate, but also exquisitely beautiful, lovely and radiant (λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ἔργα, Odyssey 10.223). Weaving, as evidenced by Calypso’s tectonic abilities, is a form of creation that stems from mētis ‘knowledge’, which “embraces both mental and manual prowess.” [35] Simply put, weaving is “an architecture.” [36] One very basic and important manifestation of weaving’s architecture is clothing, the original fabricated shelter enabling humanity to emerge from the cave and brave the elements. The hut or tent, and ultimately the house, are therefore extensions or elaborations of the original, intimate, body shelter. More specifically, tent, hut, and house are modeled on, or are reflections of, the protective umbrella of the maternal skirt. [37] On Aeaea, an island inhabited only by women, it would appear that the creation of all forms of shelter rests in the hands of the current population, a condition consistent with the inherently feminine nature of shelter fabrication. Controlling “space” and creating a culture outside of the house through construction of buildings in the environment constitutes a manifest subversion of the patriarchal order shown to exist in the Hellenic world of Homer’s poems. In the end, Circe’s entrancing small community denies male autonomy on every level.

Lessons regarding the nature and perils of matriarchy learned on Aeaea as well as on Ogygia, Calypso’s fair island, will serve Odysseus well upon his return. [38] What he will find in Ithaka are the seeds of matriarchy, for his house and kingdom had been left by default in the hands of Penelope. In intellect and clever deceitfulness she is a match for Odysseus, and her skill in weaving is such that it permits her to control the passage of time and, thereby, the fate of Ithaka. [39] During the protracted Ithakan crisis, the progress of Penelope’s weaving constitutes the sole constraint of her unruly suitors’ willful, outrageous behavior; without the completion of the shroud she is weaving, no man can claim her as his bride, or, through marriage, claim mastery over Odysseus’ domestic and political domain. Fortunately for Odysseus, Penelope has no matriarchal aspirations and remains faithful to him in body and soul. She will be his ally in effecting a new social order in which her weaving will presumably continue to serve as a vehicle of social cohesion ensuring a stable union of the sexes within the household, harmonious relations between households, and larger unity between collectives of households in the form of villages and poleis. Such, at least, would be the “proper” application of weaving in the patriarchal order forged in post-Bronze Age Greece. [40]

Odysseus does, of course, encounter other groups or individuals that provide examples of social organization comparable to the “matriarchies” in their impracticality or Hellenic inadmissibility. The Lotus Eaters, for instance, are seemingly benign and content enough with their way of life, but their existence is in a sense unreal; theirs is not a vital, productive life because it is passed in a drug-induced haze. It “is actually the illusion of happiness, a dull vegetation, as meager as an animal’s bare existence, and at best only the absence of the awareness of misfortune.” [41] Moreover, succumbing to the temptation of the lotus would be nothing short of “a regression to the phase of collecting the fruits of the earth and of the sea, a stage more ancient than agriculture, cattle-rearing, and even hunting, older, in fact than all production.” [42] It can certainly be argued that the Lotus Eaters exemplify a basic sort of utopia, the so-called Cockaigne utopia, which is characterized by the gratification in abundance of the average person’s desires. Lands of Cockaigne, in which the populace is devoted to “unrestrained enjoyment and pleasure,” are appealing on the surface, but they harbor the potential of deterioration “into excess and satiety, probably also to killing and of riotous disorder.” [43] Odysseus, whose intentions are clearly progressive rather than regressive, wisely resists the temptation of this illusory happiness. In the end, this vegetative life has nothing more to offer than Hades, whose realm Odysseus also visits. It is true that the netherworld yields invaluable information regarding the mechanics of his homecoming, the current state of his household, and a premonition of his death from the sea at some point in the more distant future. In the house of Hades, Odysseus is made painfully aware that his family has suffered and that the creation of a new social order in Ithaka must be preceded by a reaffirmation of the bond between himself and his wife, his son, and his father. Still, the dead are disembodied souls, weak, unproductive, and lacking in sensory perception, and there is ultimately nothing within their current social order that Odysseus can practically apply to his reformative efforts in the world of the living except, perhaps, their sense of justice. [44] Homer’s dead are not, as they will later be, characterized as makares ‘happy’, and the House of Hades itself has been seen as resembling a Bronze Age kingdom with a walled, central palace containing a lordly hall. [45] Odysseus will return to this largely joyless, retrospective place soon enough, and there is certainly no reason to aspire to recreate Hell on Earth.

The dead, the Lotus Eaters, the Cyclopes, Circe, and Calypso all exemplify or offer “lifestyles,” however superficially appealing, that Odysseus could not or would not actually want to adopt, and all can exist in their respective “worlds” without the organization and security provided by a city. They require no urban defense because, in various ways, they are impervious to the threats of wild Nature, some rendered invulnerable by the permanent or temporary loss of vital functions, others through a kinship with the Elemental. Odysseus does, however, encounter beings more like himself, more vulnerable in the face of menacing Nature, and these inhabit poleis. Apart from the city of the Kikones, who are firmly of this world, there are three other-worldly poleis that Odysseus and his men come upon. These are the cities of Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, and the Phaiakians. Not all cities, to be sure, are equal, and the impressively fortified, exceptionally well-ordered city of the Phaiakians will prove to be the only positive model that Odysseus encounters. In the case of Aeolus’ city, there may be formidable fortifications made of unbreakable bronze, but there appears to be no agora and, therefore, no public business. [46] In fact, the only activities on Aeolus’ island about which we hear are feasting, sleeping, and the dispensation of xenia. Strangest of all, Aeolus, his wife, and his children form the only social unit on this island, which leads inevitably to the practice of incest. [47] The Laestrygonians, for their part, seem diverse enough as a population. They have a king and a queen, and they possess a functioning agora from which the king is summoned upon the Greeks’ arrival. Their city has a good, safe harbor, and there is a stream nearby to provide water. Nevertheless, other typical polis components, such as city walls and the works of oxen and men, are missing. It is soon revealed that these “omissions” result from the Laestrygonians’ greater proximity to the bestial than the divine. Like the Cyclopes, they are anthropophages, albeit more advanced in social organization.

The Phaiakian polis, by contrast, is everything these other cities are not. On the way to the king’s palace, Odysseus beholds the harbors, walls, and meeting place of the city (Odyssey 6.261–267). This is clearly a well-developed polis. Unlike the loose society of Cyclopes, this city, with its harbor and ships, is at least theoretically open to, rather than sequestered from, the larger world. The city’s meeting place, agora, by the temple of Poseidon, “provides orderly social, political, and economic communication within, and the city’s walls make distinct this order within from the world outside.” [48] In terms of social or political organization, the king, Alkinoos, is no absolute, hereditary monarch. Rather, as Alkinoos himself says, he is one of thirteen men with the same title, basileus, who hold power as leaders of the people (Odyssey 8.390–391). While he is the most powerful of these and his position is inherited, Alkinoos’ preeminence is nonetheless precarious. He is really primus inter pares ‘first among equals’, and his status is based at least as much, if not more, upon personal accomplishment and reputation as on descent. Just how well the wise Alkinoos (whose name means “strength of mind”) has ordered his polis is directly reflected by the order within his neatly fenced garden, which includes both a vineyard and extensive orchard (Odyssey 7.112–131). Apparently, the good “politician” must also be a good gardener.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Odyssey closes, and Odysseus’ re-settlement of the Ithakan polis is completed, in the garden. An unmistakable signifier of his return, Odysseus must visit his father in his garden and must recall, and in a sense relive, their planting of the garden’s orchard together (Odyssey 24.336–344). The establishment and existence of the polis depends on the containment of Nature. Only after reorganizing or reclaiming the garden can Odysseus hope to make peace with the families of his wife’s slain suitors and legitimately resume the position of civic leader. Arguably, the hero’s slaying of the suitors and the concomitant execution of a number of handmaids are not actions befitting a utopian venture. However, Homer makes it abundantly clear that the suitors and handmaids are eminently deserving of punishment. It can be no coincidence that the poet applies the same epithets to the suitors as he does to the Cyclopes. Both are repeatedly described as utterly insolent, lawless, and brimming with hubris. [49] The suitors may not always appear to be uniformly heinous, but the undeniable fact remains that all of them, selfishly motivated by the desire to possess Penelope and the household of Odysseus, had readily assisted in the plotting of Telemachus’ murder (Odyssey 4.673). The handmaids whom Odysseus condemns to hanging are likewise guilty of grievous wrongdoing. They have abused Penelope and slept with the suitors (Odyssey 22.417–425). In other words, the handmaids have prostituted themselves for the suitors’ amusement, and Homer gives no evidence of their having been forced to do so. Meanwhile, Homer is careful to point out that the singer and herald, both of whom have also served the suitors, are deemed blameless and spared because they had been forced to submit to the suitors’ will (Odyssey 22.340–360). As for the use of violence itself, even Thomas More’s Utopians avail themselves thereof in order to preserve the integrity of their own social order when it is deemed absolutely necessary. Wars are undeniably waged and criminals executed in the archetypal literary utopia.

Having survived and successfully navigated the extreme challenges presented by a decade’s worth of nomadism and, metaphorically speaking, having first survived the end of the Heroic Age as prefigured by the collapse of Troy, Odysseus ultimately finds himself in a position equivalent to that of the historical, eighth-century Greek. Faced with organizing a civic and administrative unit after what might be described as a period of “Dark Age” unsettlement and chaos, he has much in common with those at the forefront of the societal changes inherent in the fashioning and evolution of the polis. Through Odysseus’ many adventures, Homer, together with his audience, explores the relative deficiencies and excesses of a variety of “settlements.” The model for Odysseus’ ideal settlement is clearly the polis of the Phaiakians. [50] They alone practice agriculture and viticulture. They alone worship, and build temples for, the gods. Theirs is a walled, well-organized, architecturally differentiated city with a just and progressive system of government. Of course, the Phaiakians are also particularly close to the gods. Deities physically attend their feasts, and it is due to the gods’ bounty that the Phaiakian crops evince a preternatural fecundity with no dependence whatsoever upon seasonality. In addition, the existence of the Phaiakians is all but free from difficulty and stress. They have a life and lifestyle to which mortals can aspire, but which they can never actually achieve. On the basis of its inimitable perfection Scheria has been viewed by some scholars as the “first surviving Utopia in European literature.” [51] Still, while neither Odysseus nor Homer’s audience could ever hope to approximate the Phaiakians’ closeness to the gods, the Scherian civic organization can be emulated, and one expects that this is what the wise Odysseus—and Homer’s audience—will do. The fact that Homer does not expound the new Ithakan constitution is testimony of his genius as a storyteller and as a political thinker. He relies instead on the formidable power of suggestion, whereby he can most fully engage his audience in the act of polis-building.

As a tale set outside a polis besieged, the Iliad, like the Odyssey, clearly concerns itself with “the city”; however, where the Odyssey focuses on fashioning an ideal polity, the Iliad works towards defining such a polity’s ideal citizen. [52] In order to elucidate this notion, one need merely look at the two most heroic, or larger-than-life, human actors in the Trojan drama. These are Achilles, the foremost warrior among the Greeks, and Hektor, the Trojan prince and staunch defender of his city. Through their dealings with others, it will become clear what values the citizen of a thriving polis must hold.

The Iliad opens with a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the leader of the Trojan expedition. The quarrel is over a prize of honor, a young woman whom Agamemnon has decided to take from Achilles although she had been awarded to the latter by the collective armed forces as a symbol of his preeminence in war. Symbolically stripped of an honor that no individual should be able to “remove,” Achilles withdraws from the war effort. This benefits Trojan defense efforts and leads to the deaths of countless Greeks. From a social standpoint, removing himself from the fray and becoming a veritable island unto himself (ultimately participating in next to none of the activities that mark one as human—such as eating and sleeping) is the wrong thing to do. Homer makes this apparent on many levels, but most vividly by likening Achilles to polis-destroying fire: [53]

ὡς δ᾽ ὅτε καπνὸς ἰὼν εἰς οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἵκηται
ἄστεος αἰθομένοιο, θεῶν δέ ἑ μῆνις ἀνῆκε,
πᾶσι δ᾽ ἔθηκε πόνον, πολλοῖσι δὲ κήδε᾽ ἐφῆκεν,
ὣς Ἀχιλεὺς Τρώεσσι πόνον καὶ κήδε᾽ ἔθηκεν.

As when smoke, rising, reaches the wide heaven
from a city ablaze, and the wrath of the gods has incited it,
to all it brings toil and inflicts sorrows upon many,
thus did Achilles bring toil and sorrow upon the Trojans.

Iliad 21.522–525

Sinking to sub-human cruelty in response to grief over the death of his dearest companion, Achilles becomes the polar opposite of his all too human, family-oriented, Trojan counterpart, Hektor. Likewise influenced by the concerns of a shame culture, Hektor struggles with the issue of what constitutes virtue and honor. Concern for himself, however, readily gives way to his concern for others, for his family and for the welfare of all the citizens of his polis. Hektor is the beloved, compassionate city defender; his very name, likely a shorted form of Ekhepolis ‘city-holder/defender’, casts his role in an unmistakable light. [54] He is the life-blood of the city, and his death is inextricably linked with the fall of Troy. The city flourishes and falls with him. Hektor’s personality and convictions are “an example of the real-time infiltration of the new ethics of the polis,” of a concrete social consciousness. [55] In order to redeem himself in the new world order and achieve a meaningful greatness therein, Achilles must not only comprehend Hektor’s humanity but also embrace and absorb it. This he does in the poem’s climactic scene. It is only when he is able to forgive his friend’s slayer—who happened to be Hektor—and feel compassion for the latter’s bereaved father, that he reaches truly heroic heights. This capacity for compassion, which Achilles has in reality always possessed, is activated by the realization of the senselessness of war and of the inevitability of death that unites all humanity in a common fate. [56] Through Achilles’ realization, the individualistic heroic code of old is proven irrelevant and outdated in the Iliad. A new heroism of social responsibility has been born. The Achilles who emerges at the close of the poem is an individual suited to leadership in the sort of social order he has, previously uncomprehendingly, carried with him on the emblem of his shield.

Ironically, it is over a wedding, and a subsequent illicit union, that the Trojan War began. Such was Helen’s beauty that a contingent large enough to man a thousand ships was easily assembled, for her numerous suitors had sworn an oath to support whomever she selected if a crisis were to arise. Because Paris, Helen’s seducer and abductor, had refused the resolution of the conflict by diplomatic means, the best and bravest of Greece came to the assistance of Helen’s legal consort, Menelaos, in an effort to bring Troy to its knees. While the gods’ interference saw to it that diplomacy would fail, gods in Homer’s portrayal rarely, if ever, cause what human actors would not themselves have occasioned. In the midst of the Trojan drama, surrounded everywhere by the screams of the dying, is Achilles. To this war he has lost not only Briseis, the measure of his valor, but also Patroklos, the person whom he loved most. His first response is to become rage incarnate, sinking lower than a beast and combusting into elemental fire. In his rage, he becomes the Lord of Death himself, unmistakably rendered by Homer’s proliferation of underworld imagery. [59] Accordingly, when Troy’s aged King Priam makes his perilous journey to the underworld of Achilles’ camp, it is Hermes, the Psychopompos ‘conveyor of souls’, who leads.

Achilles’ journey is a search for justice and higher meaning in a rapidly evolving world. Admittedly, Achilles is goddess-born and accordingly functions on a level elevated somewhat above other mortals. He can certainly be more assured of divine assistance when he needs it. Nevertheless, his spiritual quest has a direct bearing on the lives of his audience, whether ancient or modern, in so far as ethical behavior remains among humanity’s leading concerns in its eternal quest for betterment. The same can be said of Odysseus, whose many travails have brought the ultimate reward of wisdom commensurate with creating an ideal society; the quest of Odysseus too has remained relevant throughout the ages. Homer has created a “paradigm for seeing and talking about the world” and for exploring the role of humanity in it. [60] More specifically, the Homeric poems present the view that the polis, the social order in formation at the time the poems were composed, “represents civilization, progress, community, justice, and openness [while] not to live in a polis means primitiveness, isolation, fragmentation, lack of community, and lawlessness.” [61] As Aristotle succinctly asserts, the polis is an institution that “came into being in order to foster life but exists for the purpose of promoting good living” (Politics 1252b29–30). [62] Although Homer was consulted as the authority on religion, philosophy, and pre- (or mythological) history, he was neither a philosopher nor a historian. He was a poet with a grand vision of and for humanity, a eutopian vision realized in the embrace of the polis.