Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T11:38:07.194Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Omens in the Odyssey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Anthony J. Podlecki
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Odyssey is principally the story of a return. A man has spent ten years fighting a war in a distant country and another ten years trying, against all sorts of obstacles and distractions, to get home to his wife and family. Will he make it?

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , April 1967 , pp. 12 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1967

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 12 note 1 Fitzgerald, Robert, Homer, The Odyssey (New York, 1963), 479–83.Google Scholar

page 14 note 1 Stanford, W. B., ed., The Odyssey of Homer 2 i, ii (London, 1959)Google Scholar, cited henceforward by author's name only.

page 15 note 2 Fitzgerald, , loc. cit. 482.Google Scholar

page 16 note 1 LSJ, s.v. 4.

page 17 note 1 Cf. also xviii. 235 ff. (Telemachus, ), 384 ff.Google Scholar (Odysseus, ), xxi. 200 ff.Google Scholar (Philoetius, seconded by Eumaeus).

page 17 note 1 See Stanford at xvii. 541–2, and Halliday, W. R., Greek Divination (London, 1913), 176, n. 4.Google Scholar

page 17 note 2 The relevant material is collected by Moore, C. H., ‘Prophecy in the Ancient Epic’, HSCP 32 (1921), 99 ff.Google Scholar, especially 116–28.

page 19 note 1 ‘The only clear example of ecstatic prophecy in H.’ according to Stanford at xx. 351 ff.

page 20 note 1 Part of Teiresias' prophecy is repeated by Circe in Book xii, the lines concerning Odysseus' return (xii. 137–41 = xi. 110–14). The repetition has offended hypercritics, but it is quite natural, coming as it does at the end of Circe's prophecy of Odysseus' immediate future, the Sirens, Drifting Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of Helios. These immediate adventures play no part in Teiresias' prophecy; he is more concerned with the ultimate, the mysterious, the cosmic.

page 20 note 2 A full list of dreams can be found in Messer, W. S., The Dream in Homer and Greek Tragedy (New York, 1918), 24 ff.Google Scholar

page 20 note 3 Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951, repr. Boston, 1957), 105.Google Scholar

page 21 note 1 Ibid. 104.

page 21 note 2 Fitzgerald, , op. cit. 481.Google Scholar

page 22 note 1 Athena has quite a time convincing Odysseus. To his queries and complaints she retorts angrily, ‘Stubborn! I am a god: we could match fifty troops of men’ (45–51). We see Odysseus here for the first time voicing the kind of sceptical doubts that Telemachus and Penelope had raised earlier.