Odysseus’ tale of myth and mortality

The Greeks called him Odysseus; the Romans, Ulysses. He is the hero of “The Odyssey,” the Homeric epic of the 8th century BC, and he also plays an important role in Homer’s “Iliad.” A cool-headed, rational, wily fellow -- short, burly, barrel-chested -- Odysseus stands out among his tall, handsome, hot-tempered comrades-in-arms in the Trojan War. For his habit of dissembling, Dante placed him in Hell. Shakespeare took a more favorable view, giving him some impressive speeches in “Troilus and Cressida.” To Tennyson, he embodied the very spirit of aspiration, of heroic persistence in the face of mortality, as hymned in his inspiring poem “Ulysses,” and in the 20th century, we find him haunting James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” in which Leopold Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin echo the episodes of “The Odyssey.”

A diplomat, a strategist, a politician, a manipulator: The original Odysseus strikes us as a modern man among his archaic contemporaries. When King Agamemnon’s men were rounding up the other Greeks to wage war against Troy, Odysseus feigned insanity to get out of it. His ruse, alas, was discovered, and he had to leave his island home of Ithaca, his wife, Penelope, and their infant son, Telemachus, for a war that lasted 10 years, ending in a rather dubious victory for the Greeks and the tragic destruction of Troy.

It was also Odysseus who finally helped win that war by devising the sneaky strategy of the Trojan horse, which enabled the Greeks to breach the walls of Troy. But his real story, the one that inspired Tennyson and Joyce, is contained in “The Odyssey,” which relates his strange adventures in the 10 years after the war as he voyaged around the Mediterranean trying to get home.

In offering modern readers a “biography” of Odysseus, classical scholar Charles Rowan Beye draws exclusively upon Greek sources, including “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,” two 5th century BC tragedies by Sophocles in which Odysseus plays a role, one by Euripides and other writings. Although no one seems to know for certain whether Odysseus -- or Agamemnon, Achilles, Helen or, indeed, the Trojan War -- is history, mythology or both, these figures and events have had an enduring influence on Western culture.

One virtue of Beye’s book is sheer convenience. Bringing together the material about Odysseus from these various sources, Beye rounds out our picture of this complex and multifaceted man. An even greater virtue is that Beye tells Odysseus’ story chronologically, from beginning to end, giving the details of his family background and locating his life in historical time. What better way for readers who are about to tackle either “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey” to get their bearings?

The Trojan War, Beye tells us, probably took place around 1194 BC -- roughly four centuries before the Homeric epic commemorating it. This was the era known as the Bronze Age: a simpler time, when even a king’s palace was a fairly modest abode. Coming from the rustic island of Ithaca, young Odysseus must have felt like a country rube when he first visited the palaces of the richer, more powerful mainland kings. Ironically, and inadvertently, Odysseus played a part in setting the stage for the Trojan War that he later strove to avoid. As a young man, he came to the palace of Helen’s father, where all the eligible young male aristocrats were competing to win the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world.

To stop these young Greeks from fighting with one another, clever Odysseus had the idea to make them all swear an oath that whoever won Helen’s hand would always have the support of all the others. But, alas, when Helen, who married Agamemnon’s feckless brother Menelaus, either ran off with the handsome visiting Trojan prince Paris or was kidnapped by him (depending on which version you believe -- Beye favors the former), all of the Greeks who had sworn this oath were obliged to fight Troy.

In retelling the story of “The Odyssey,” Beye focuses on one of this epic’s central themes. First, as the lover of the charming witch Circe, Odysseus is tempted to give up his quest to return home. Later, as lover of the beautiful nymph Calypso, he is offered not only a peaceful, pleasant life but also the great gift of immortality. Yet Odysseus opts for wife, son, family, homeland and the tragic condition of mortality.

One notable, often irritating, weakness of the book is Beye’s uneven writing. Clearly, he is aiming at directness and simplicity, an admirable goal. But too often, his writing becomes so off-the-cuff as to fall into mere sloppiness: Some sentences sound rather like a badly written undergraduate paper. But on the whole, such minor irritations are outweighed by the helpful background Beye provides, by his insights into Bronze Age customs, mores, beliefs and values, and by his obvious and infectious enthusiasm for Odysseus, that mortal, deeply human man immortalized by literature.