What Does Ithaca Mean in the Odyssey?

About the book: I Am Odysseus

A narrative investigation of Homer’s Odyssey through identity, memory, recognition, Ithaca and the historical horizon of the Late Bronze Age.

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The copy and the proof

Odysseus is an awkward case for those who think a person is one and the same as the story that can be told about him. Few characters have spoken so much about themselves. Before the Phaeacians he reconstructs his crossing; on Ithaca he invents false life stories; he adapts his identity to each listener. He is, at once, witness, narrator and suspect. Argos uses his nose. Eurycleia finds a scar. Penelope sets a test to do with a bed that only the two of them know. Laertes hears the inventory of the trees he once gave his son. Recognition comes through traces born of a shared experience: a smell, a wound, a thing built, an orchard learned by heart.

It fits in one hand

Odysseus reaches Ithaca with a treasure the Phaeacians have loaded onto the ship: bronze, gold, woven cloth. The poem goes so far as to suggest that this wealth more than makes up for the plunder lost on the way home. On waking, the hero counts it and hides it in a cave. It does not buy Telemachus' loyalty, does not convince Penelope, does not bring Argos back to life, does not stand in for the house. It stays under a stone while the true homecoming is decided by things that have no price.

Four books without the protagonist

Strictly, the *Odyssey* opens neither on Ithaca nor at sea: it opens in the heavens, at a gathering of the gods, and the first thing said there marks everything that follows. Zeus takes the floor and complains, almost peevishly, of an injustice that irks him: men lay the blame for their misfortunes on us, he says, when it is they who, through their own folly, bring on themselves sorrows that fate had not assigned them. And he gives a fresh example: Aegisthus, who seduced Agamemnon's wife and murdered him on his return, though the gods had warned him it would cost him dear. We warned him, and he paid no heed; now he pays. It is an enormous thing to say at the opening of the oldest poem in our tradition, because it dismantles, from the very start, the comfortable notion of man as the plaything of the gods. In the *Odyssey* the gods give…

The house that lives inside a song

One night the palace singer performs for the occupiers. Of all the subjects he might choose, he sings the homecomings: how the Greek commanders came back from Troy, or how they did not. Penelope hears him from above, comes down and asks him to change his song, because that one — the song of the return — is the only one she cannot bear. Telemachus breaks in and tells her to let the singer sing, that other men too were lost in that war, and sends her back to her rooms. It is brusque. And it is his first gesture as master of the house. And since she has appeared, it is worth bringing her fully into view, though her great scene comes only at the end, because Penelope's resistance is the exact counter-figure to what threatens her husband at sea. While the islands try to wipe out Odysseus' memory, she fights the same war on land, with other…

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