Odysseus Doesn't Deserve his Reputation

            From the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus is set up to be a legendary hero, who uses his immense strength and cunning to overcome twenty years of obstacles and return home to Ithaca. His renown is so widespread that the audience is expected to have heard rumors of him, and 3,000 years later his story is still remembered as one of the greatest hero’s journey stories of all time. Does he really deserve such a great reputation though? I’m not sure. I think if I had read the Odyssey without any western cultural influence telling me Odysseus is a hero, I would think very differently of him. I would probably see him as a reasonably intelligent man who is good at weaseling out of trouble, but who still has some fundamental character flaws, and so is certainly not worthy of the heroic reputation he achieved.

            The build-up of this reputation starts with the invocation of the Muse, on the very first page of the epic. “Many pains he suffered,” Homer says, “heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home. But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove – the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools” (1.5-9).  Ironically, this single paragraph, meant as praise for Odysseus, describes everything that I think he should have done better on his way home.

            Let’s start with the most frustrating phrase in the invocation, which in my opinion is the assertion that Odysseus is “heartsick on the open sea.” Sure, he misses Penelope and stuff, but he literally sleeps with Circe for a year before even remembering that he is supposed to go home (note also that in this case we don’t see Odysseus trying “bring his comrades home,” but rather those “blind fools” reminding him that they need to leave Circe’s island). Then, after washing up on Calypso’s island, he sleeps with her for ten years before leaving. Again, sure, he cried about it every morning, but the fact that he still chose to sleep with Calypso is evidence enough that he isn’t really that heartsick. Finally, when he gets back to Ithaca, he still doesn’t reunite with Penelope immediately, but instead plots with Athena and comes up with some overblown scheme to massacre all of the suitors, when just revealing himself to them would probably have been enough to get most of them to leave anyway.

            Homer follows this in the invocation by saying that Odysseus “could not save [his men] from disaster, hard as he strove – the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all, the blind fools.” This once again suggests something completely false – that Odysseus, the leader of the men, is completely blameless in their demise. It was he who lead them to Polyphemus’s lair in the ridiculous hope that a cyclops would show them hospitality, it was he who didn’t tell them to watch out for Scylla, and he who didn’t tell them about the bag of winds from Aeolus, which led indirectly to them being blown away from Ithaca.

            All in all, Odysseus doesn’t seem like a guy I would trust with my men (if I had men). Although he is good at getting himself out of trouble, much of that is luck, and he takes a lot of unnecessary risks that get him into trouble in the first place. He doesn’t at all live up to his description in the invocation of the Muse, and this leads him to take twenty years to return home alone, all of his men having died along the way.