The Roman Odysseus

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how Roman authors, especially of the Augustan period, comment on their literary relationship with their Greek literary predecessors through the complex character of Odysseus. It argues that Roman writers emphasize Odysseus’ deceptive qualities to distance themselves from the Greek literary tradition, and at the same time to underscore their own inheritance of and indebtedness to that tradition. Odysseus’ multi-faceted character and wide-ranging travels, I suggest, made him an ideal lens through which Roman authors, spanning from Livius Andronicus in the 3rd century BCE to Juvenal in the 1st century CE, could consider their own position as poets in a simultaneously Greek and Roman literary tradition. The dissertation focuses on Odysseus as he is portrayed in extended scenes of Latin poetry and considers the evolution of Odysseus’ Roman character chronologically, beginning with Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey and the establishment of the Latin literary tradition. His next major appearance is in Plautus’ Bacchides, where he serves as an exemplum for the tricky slave as well as the playwright himself. Odysseus is later picked up in the comedic vein by Horace in Satire 2.5, in which the hero acts as a model for the duplicitous figure of the inheritance hunter. After Horace, Ovid employs Odysseus in two different works, first as the ideal Roman orator in Metamorphoses 13 and then later as a foil for the poet’s own trials and travails throughout his exile poetry. Lastly, there is a return to satire, where Odysseus is brought in by Juvenal as an antithesis to his own poetic authority in Satire 15. All of these examples of Odysseus in Latin literature demonstrate how Roman authors use this particular Homeric epic hero to articulate issues that are temporally and culturally specific to Rome. Roman authors furthermore reimagine Odysseus in Roman terms and contexts in an effort to construct and tear down bridges between their own Roman culture and that of their Greek predecessors, which in turn renders Odysseus as a stand-in for the Latin literary tradition vis-à-vis the Greek literary tradition.