An Iliadic Odyssey as a song of the Sirens

Abstract

This short essay about the Odyssey of “Homer” is a playful experiment. But it is based on an even shorter essay that is quite serious in intent. That essay (Nagy 2020) appears in World Epics, an on-line site edited by Jo Ann Cavallo, whose own work on comparative epic I very much admire. She had asked me to submit a brief essay on the Homeric Odyssey that matches another essay, written by Casey Dué, on the Homeric Iliad. In writing my essay, I found myself in a predicament: it seems to me that I need to say as much about the Iliad as I am saying about the Odyssey. And I am starting to think that such a predicament is inevitable, since my aim in writing my essay on the Odyssey is to provide a companion-piece to the essay by Casey Dué on the Iliad, already mentioned, which as I should now add I very much admire. But here is a relevant question, which makes the text of my essay here more playful than the text I submitted for World Epics: am I now falling victim to a “siren song”? I leave it to my readers to decide. But at least one thing is for sure: Odysseus clearly avoided the doom of falling victim to the song of his own Sirens.