In some ancient Greek epics, a Dios boulē ‘plan of Zeus’ helps to motivate and explain the plot. This theme is best known from its appearance at the beginning of the Iliad:

The association of Zeus’ plan with the main plot line here in the proem is, unsurprisingly, predictive: as the Iliad proceeds, the god engineers and maintains the momentum of the Trojan offensive that gives force to Achilleus’ wrath, decides the fates of the major characters, and resolves conflicts that impede dramatic closure.

The Odyssean Zeus, on the other hand, seems reactive rather than proactive, unwilling or unable to control subordinate deities, and generally more remote from the action when measured against his Iliadic counterpart. At the same time, the two seem to differ in what might be termed leadership style. For the Odyssean Zeus acts and speaks in a manner that appears to be, if not more humane, at least less malevolent than that of the Zeus who repeatedly threatens violence against his fellow gods and gleefully pits them against each other in the Iliad. Some rough statistics can help to quantify these impressions. In the main narrative of the Iliad, Zeus has a speaking role in more than a dozen scenes, in which he maintains overall control of events by inducing divine characters to act or to refrain from action, and by sending some dozen omens to mortal characters; at one point, he even lends a hand in battle (Iliad 15.694-695). In all, Zeus’ actions and words make up around 1000 of the Iliad’s approximately 15,000 lines (>6%). In the Odyssey, by contrast, Zeus appears four times in the main narrative; he neither incites nor impedes divine characters, at least overtly; and his direct involvement with mortal affairs is limited to four omens. All told, Zeus’ actions and words make up around 250 of the Odyssey’s approximately 12,000 lines (<2%). [1]

In terms of sheer presence, then, Zeus is less prominent in the Odyssey than in the Iliad. It seems but a small and uncomplicated step to conclude that this quantitative difference reflects a qualitative one, that Zeus is relatively unimportant to the plot of the Odyssey. This has in fact long been and remains the dominant interpretation of the role of the gods in Homeric epic: the Odyssean Olympos is less hierarchical than the Iliadic one, and the Odyssean plot in general depends less on divine guidance. [2]

On the other hand, interpretations that demand more of an orally-derived text than the sum of its words and syntax can be uncontroversial even from an oralist perspective. The Odyssey itself opens with a well-known example: the failure to identify “the man” (ἄνδρα) in the opening line as Odysseus until twenty verses later foreshadows the hero’s penchant for deception. This effect is amplified in the four-book “delay” before Odysseus’ own story commences, and is revisited in his delayed self-introductions to the Phaiakes and to his fellow Ithakans. [3] The suppression of the hero’s name would be especially palpable for those familiar with epics like the Iliad, the opening line of which identifies the ingenuous Achilleus by both name and patronymic.

Within the epic narratives themselves, I shall be arguing, these “facts” are referred to as αἶσα, μοῖρα, μόρος, τὸ θέσφατον or τὸ πεπρωμένον, expressions commonly translated as “fate.” [4] I hasten to observe that these terms are not restricted to this conceptual category; the Iliad and Odyssey also create an air of inevitability, and emphasize their own authority, by referring to what may be specifically Homeric versions of events as “fated.” [5] Context is necessary to determine whether a given reference is to the larger tradition, or to the Homeric tradition specifically. In Odyssey 5, to take an example from Chapter 2, when Hermes tells Kalypso of Zeus’ declaration that it is Odysseus’ μοῖρα to return home (41; cf. 114), he refers to a “fact” that obtains throughout the tradition. When, on the other hand, the goddess Ino/Leukothea shortly thereafter describes Odysseus’ stay with the Phaiakes as μοῖρα (345), the reference is not to a plot-line with universal currency, but to one followed only by the Odyssey and a subset of non-Homeric traditions.

These narrative choices correspond to the three narrative sequences that scholars, employing a broad spectrum of methodologies, have distinguished in the Odyssey. [6] The aim of this book is to demonstrate how these narrative choices define the Panhellenic Odyssey against the backdrop of competing narratives, and how the coordination of these choices lends overall unity to the Homeric version of Odysseus’ story.

It is perhaps due to the aforementioned tendency to dismiss the Odyssean divine apparatus that there has been no systematic treatment of Zeus’ role in the Odyssey comparable to, for instance, Philippe Rousseau’s Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή: Destin des héros et dessein de Zeus dans l’intrigue de l’Iliade (Lille 1996). [7] However, the subject is not tabula rasa among students of the Odyssey. Klaus Rüter’s Odysseeinterpretationen, for example, analyzes in detail the relationships among main divine agents in the first third of the poem; Jenny Clay’s Wrath of Athena provides a detailed account of that goddess’s role; and Erwin Cook’s The Odyssey in Athens explores the theme of divine justice as it relates to narrative structures. At the same time, my methodological and theoretical approach to the text differs sufficiently from previous work to yield a substantially new reading, and therefore deserves special attention.

My overall position on the composition of the epics is “Unitarian.” That is, like most modern critics, I approach the epics in the form we have them as coherent and integrated wholes. Unlike some critics, I understand the complementary relationship between the Iliad and Odyssey to be a consequence of the Homeric epics having emerged, not sequentially, but simultaneously and in a state of mutual awareness. In current critical parlance, my approach can be described as “intertextual,” in the special terms that scholars have developed for the study of relationships among orally-derived texts. Pietro Pucci in particular has argued for a “specular” reading of the poems, by which he means that they each interpret and reinterpret the other, regardless of which if either was first to achieve canonical form. [8]

This approach can be extended to describe the relationship between Homeric and non-Homeric traditions. Thus Pucci also proposes that the Odyssey “acknowledges and limits its own literary territory by gestures of confrontation with the other poems and other heroic traditions from which it emerges, and by controversial acts of appropriation from these sources.” [9] I note that this conclusion resembles in certain respects the one reached through the application of very different methodologies, namely “Analysis” and “Neo-Analysis,” according to which the main themes of the Homeric poems derive from earlier Trojan War epics. Indeed, Pucci could have supported his argument for Homeric “confrontation and appropriation” by observing that such scholars as Reinhold Merkelbach, Alfred Heubeck and Wolfgang Kullmann have demonstrated conclusively that few of the themes that make up the Homeric epics can be considered exclusively Homeric. [10]

Pucci’s synchronic explanation of features of the received texts that (Neo)Analysis interprets in terms of diachronic layers of sources and recipients is both less complicated and easier to reconcile with the oral background of Homeric poetry. For to trace the trajectories of allusions among epic traditions is to gaze down a hall of mirrors, given the feedback between performing poets, who presumably knew a variety of songs about the Trojan War, and their audiences, who were passionately devoted to various epichoric traditions. The mutual referentiality among early Greek epic traditions has been explored to great effect by Laura Slatkin. Borrowing a term from Mabel Lang, Slatkin focuses on instances of what she calls “reverberation,” the deployment of “a constellation of themes that establish bearings for the poem as it unfolds . . . linking it continually to other traditions and paradigms and to a wider mythological terrain.” [11]

Recent scholarship, however, has tended to maintain the basic source-and-recipient model advocated by (Neo)Analysis. Thus it is commonplace to argue that the influence travels in the opposite direction, in other words, to maintain that our evidence for non-Homeric epic, in particular the poems of the so-called Epic Cycle, is for the most part derivative of the Iliad and Odyssey. [12] Here again Pucci’s model of confrontation and appropriation offers an alternative to a historical scheme that is speculative, better suited to texts composed with the aid of literacy, and dismissive of a body of evidence that has from antiquity enriched the understanding of Homeric composition.

The mutual referentiality advocated here is in sympathy with Gregory Nagy’s distinction between canonical and non-canonical epic in terms of relative degrees of Panhellenicity. By Nagy’s interpretation, “the degree of Panhellenic synthesis in the content of a composition corresponds to the degree of diffusion in the performance of this composition.” [13] I shall, however, have occasion to reformulate Nagy’s conception of non-Homeric evidence, such as the Epic Cycle, as consisting of “layering” that has been “sloughed off” by the Homeric tradition, a view that I believe overestimates the impact of Homeric authority on non-Homeric traditions. [14]

According to my approach, then, extant ancient references to Trojan War tradition, Homeric and non-Homeric alike, preserve a rough synchronic cross-section of the oral tradition in which the Iliad and Odyssey took shape. In practice, this means that I shall be using such relatively late sources as scholia, epitomes of lost early epics, historians, mythographers and geographers in order to approximate the kinds of traditions with which the Odyssey engaged as it was achieving Panhellenic status. [15] My analysis cannot of course exhaust the possible narrative twists and turns that are represented in the hundreds, even thousands of stories about and references to Odysseus that have survived from antiquity, let alone those that may await discovery on papyri, in unedited scholia, and so on. Rather, I shall focus on a select set of traditions that are relatively well represented in the extant evidence, and that can be traced to specific locales in ancient Greece. In diachronic terms, these epichoric traditions coexisted with the canonical Homeric traditions before, during and after written texts began to circulate, and together constituted a reservoir for the persistence of non-canonical versions in the face of Panhellenic Homeric authority.

Nagy’s distinction between epichoric and Panhellenic traditions can be refined usefully with the introduction of another category, “proto-Panhellenic.” [16] I shall use this term to refer to epic traditions, such as the Hesiodic Catalog of Women and the poems of the Epic Cycle, that never achieved the authority of the canonical epics, but that nevertheless appear to have been composed and performed for audiences familiar with diverse epichoric traditions. Thus the broadly-diffused canonical Homeric and Hesiodic epics are defined as fully Panhellenic, and stories such as those about local heroes and the foundation of individual poleis as epichoric; “proto-Panhellenic,” on the other hand, describes a middleground between these two levels of diffusion and authority. A proto-Panhellenic narrative is however more akin to fully Panhellenic than it is to epichoric epic in the important respect that the “target audience” transcends the bounds of individual communities: such an epic would, therefore, have reason to incorporate the Dios boulē theme, while a fully epichoric epic would not. [17]

Although such categories are by nature artificial, it may be observed that the evolution of the concept of “Homer” in antiquity seems to acknowledge analogous distinctions. Not only the Iliad and Odyssey, but also the Cyclic epics, Homeric Hymns, and non-hexametrical Margites were attributed to Homer in the early biographical tradition. By the Hellenistic period, however, Homeric authority had become restricted to the Iliad and Odyssey (and sometimes only the former). Likewise, only the fully Panhellenic epics were preserved over the long run in the manuscript tradition. Thus the evolution of Homer into the author of the Iliad and Odyssey can be equated with the emergence of fully Panhellenic discourse, while at the same time proto-Panhellenic traditions became progressively distanced from the figure of Homer. [18] Nor need the differentiation of authoritative Homeric epic from non-Homeric epic be explained in purely aesthetic or literary-critical terms. For the emergence of authoritative texts seems also to have been part of a larger trend in the evolution of Greek cultural identity, and as such was equally influenced by such historical contingencies as the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, the nation- and empire-building of Philip II, Alexander and the his successors, and even the encroachment of Rome. From this perspective, the Iliad and Odyssey do not so much supplant as they survive proto-Panhellenic and epichoric epic traditions.

The existence of a tradition of course assumes a constituency, and in the case of early Greek epic poetry, this means an audience. The demography of ancient Greek audiences cannot of course be recovered with precision, but the concept is indispensable to modern Homeric studies. For the purposes of this book, the “Homeric audience” refers to any hypothetical assembly of Greeks at Panhellenic festivals to hear performances of the epics as they were achieving the form in which we have them. [19] I shall in Chapter 6 review arguments that arenas for Panhellenic performance evolved gradually, and relatively late, toward the end of the Archaic period.