Following Odysseus Not the end of the world Amarna city of light ...

Greek literatureFrom the ‘wine-dark sea’Professor Edith Hall traces thecultural journey and influence ofHomer’s epic poem the Odysseyacross the centuriesSome 3,000 years ago,Odysseus returned to theGreek island of Ithaca.Homer’s epic, the Odyssey,tells of all the ordeals he sufferedbefore he finally displayed hissupremacy at archery, killed the1suitors and was reunited with hiswife, Penelope. The poem remainsfresher and more familiar today thanany other ancient text. Who has notheard of the one-eyed man-eatingCyclops, or of Circe, the enchantresswho turned men into pigs?Odysseus has escaped from the narrowconfines of academic librariesinto the world of popular culture– novels and movies and musicals.I wrote my book The Returnof Ulysses because I wanted to discoverthe reasons for its incredibleability never to go out of fashion.The Romans loved Odysseus,whom they called Ulysses. Theyadorned their villas with wonderfulfrescoes portraying his adventuresin the land of the giganticLaestrygonians, who speared menlike fish. The Odyssey was one ofthe first ancient Greek poems everto be printed, in 1488 in Florence,and has since exerted an incalculableinfluence over the culture notonly of the West, but increasingly ofthe world. Since 1991, when it wasfirst translated into Korean, there isnot a major written language in theworld in which a translation of theOdyssey is not available.It has often been used by creativeartists to signal that they are settinga new fashion. Take the invention ofopera: when the composer ClaudioMonteverdi wanted to show thehuge range of emotional effects thatthe singing voice could represent, hechose to create an operatic setting ofthe Odyssey. His Il ritorno d’Ulissein patria (1640) was an instant hitat the time of its first production, inVenice, and stunned his rivals.Revolutionary in their passion,realism and vitality, the recognitionscenes were written with a superbsense of theatre. Monteverdi intuitivelyrealised that the emotionalcentre of the action was Odysseus’loyal, lonely wife Penelope: in aninspirational move, she is confinedto the medium of austererecitative throughout much of theopera, but bursts finally into anecstatic moment of melodic releasein her lovebsong at the climax.Monteverdi showed how song candefine psychological shifts, and thusmade a pioneering statement aboutthe potential of sung drama.One explanation of Homer’sname is that it derives from aMinerva November/December 2012