Greek Mythology, Part 1: The Epic Cycle (IBR2026)

Let us finally return to the question we originally posed at the start of this introduction: is the Epic Cycle, as recoverable by fragments and the (incomplete) summary of Proclus, worth studying today? We have already seen how Aristotle and the Alexandrian critics perceived that the poets of the Cycle were not only different from, but qualitatively inferior to, the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey.
… The main motive for continuing to study these poems must be what has already been stated as their main attraction in antiquity. They did preserve, however inadequately and inelegantly, a good deal of interesting mythological information. In many cases they may have been the earliest literary sources to contain these details. Homer’s elimination of the crudely fantastic allowed him to achieve a personal and inimitable poetic vision. But what Homer left out clearly appealed to a substantial number of Greeks .… Homer’s poetic world does not comprise the whole of the Hellenic outlook. The folk-tale motifs one finds preserved in the cyclic poets are often fascinating in their own right and widen our perspective, especially of the ‘darker side’ of Greek myth.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 1, The Epic Cycle

When I read Laura Jenkinson-Brown’s You Are Odysseus last year, I was puzzled by the first entry. Where did this story about Odysseus and Diomedes come from? I was pretty sure it wasn’t in the Odyssey; I’d just read it a few months before. And, indeed, it wasn’t; it was in the Little Iliad, one of the books of the Epic Cycle. I vaguely remembered having heard of this before, but at that point I became obsessed with these epics.

Alas, there aren’t many print books about them aimed at a general readership, so I started out with what was available: The Greek Epic Cycle by Malcolm Davies, which presents a scholarly analysis of all eleven books, focusing on the descriptions written by Proclus plus the few available fragments. Because this book was a bit over my pay grade, I supplemented my investigation with what was available on Youtube.

All this means that if you are here to find answers for your homework, you’d better look elsewhere, because I am not a reliable source; I’m just fumbling around, trying to reinforce my memory and preserve something for later review. I did have a lot of fun playing around with the material, however, and learned a great deal.

For instance: the Epic Cycle is where the mythology is! Oedipus; the Judgment of Paris; the sacrifice of Iphigenia; the actual sack of Troy: all the stuff that isn’t in the Iliad and the Odyssey but seems to be common knowledge. I finally get it! The story begins earlier, and ends later, than the Homeric epics let on. There are other sources of some other myths, but this collection, written down sometime around 700 BCE , is the OG for much of what we call Greek Mythology.

For instance: This is where so many of the tragedies come from. Sophocles didn’t make his stuff up, he adapted myths that had been passed along orally for centuries, then were finally written down sometime around the same time as the more famous Homeric epics. But, because the poetry was inferior, they weren’t copied and recopied as extensively, so were, for the most part, lost. Phrased more eloquently:

Aristotle specifically argues that the Homeric epics work so well because their scope is defined by their protagonists while the shorter epics are so dispersed that there are multiple tragedies nestled within each, so they work better when further broken down into the tragedies…. These plays strike the balance of Homer’s primary focus on character with the comfortable scope of very contained stories. And due to the communal aspect of theater, they had a far broader audience than all of the written epics but the Iliad and Odyssey. Ultimately, this disparity in popular engagement explains why many Trojan tragic plays survived the next several centuries while the written epics withered away.

Non-Academic Video: History-Makers: Quintus of Smyrna and the Fall of Troy by Overly Sarcastic Productions (a resource I’ve used many times over the years)

A quick check of Aristotle’s Poetics on Project Gutenberg shows books 24 and 26 bear this out:

Epic poetry differs from Tragedy in the scale on which it is constructed, and in its metre. As regards scale or length, we have already laid down an adequate limit:—the beginning and the end must be capable of being brought within a single view. This condition will be satisfied by poems on a smaller scale than the old epics, and answering in length to the group of tragedies presented at a single sitting.
Epic poetry has, however, a great—a special—capacity for enlarging its dimensions, and we can see the reason. In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem. The Epic has here an advantage, and one that conduces to grandeur of effect, to diverting the mind of the hearer, and relieving the story with varying episodes. For sameness of incident soon produces satiety, and makes tragedies fail on the stage.

Aristotle: Poetics, Book 24, S. H. Butcher, translator

Moreover, the art [of Tragedy] attains its end within narrower limits; for the concentrated effect is more pleasurable than one which is spread over a long time and so diluted…. Once more, the Epic imitation has less unity; as is shown by this, that any Epic poem will furnish subjects for several tragedies.

Aristotle: Poetics, Book 26, S. H. Butcher, translator

For instance: I also discovered that Homer’s point of view, expressed via the Iliad and Odyssey, wasn’t necessarily the only one in antiquity. Over and over, Davies remarks how Homer removed a great deal of magical and fantastical material: omens, dreams, etc. He downplayed the role of women. And he cleaned up Odysseus to some degree. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong and the others are right; this is mythology, not journalism. But it does show the ancients had different ideas about their heroes.

I’ve also seen different definitions of what comprises the Epic Cycle. Davies’ book covers ten poems, which in some cases overlap:

• The Titanomachy (war between the Titans and Olympians)
• The Oedipodea (The Oedipal myths)
• The Thebaid (the Theban wars)
• The Epigoni (the sons of the Theban war)
• The Cypria (the beginning of the Trojan war; the Iliad would follow here)
• The Aethiopis (the death of Achilles)
• The Little Iliad (the Trojan horse)
• Iliu Persis (the Sack of Troy)
• The Nostoi (the Return Home; the Odyssey would follow here)
• The Telegony (the death of Odysseus)

Some focus on the Trojan war, limiting this to five or six poems, beginning with the Cypria. It might seem strange to go back farther, but as will be seen, the early books feed into the Trojan War story.

Keep in mind we’re dealing with extreme uncertainty here. These poems are being recovered from later summaries by Proclus in his Chrestomathia, Apollodorus in his Epitome and Bibliotheca, and a few fragments quoted here and there. That sounds impressive; I have no idea who these people are (I did run into a Proclus, described as “the successor to Plato’s academy,” back when I was playing around with Euclid’s Elements, but it seems this is a different Proclus, whom Davies calls “an author of unknown date and origin”) or what these books are, but I have to start somewhere.

The Titanomachy

I was surprised to see this included. Didn’t Hesiod do this already? Davies points out differences, but I was more interested in the one character I knew something about:

F6 deals with Chiron, a particularly humane and wise centaur whose beneficent attitude to mankind is often praised in Greek literature. The two verses in question clearly emanate from a longer list of kindnesses towards mortals:

And he brought the race of mortals to a state of justice by revealing to them the use of binding oaths and joyous feasts and to the signs of heaven.

…. Such ‘culture heroes’ are conspicuously absent from Homer; and, though Chiron is mentioned a handful of times in the Iliad, that poem keeps quiet about the tradition that he acted as tutor to such heroes as Achilles or his father Peleus.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 2, The Titanomachy

The golden apples of the Hesperides also come into play. So even at the beginning of the world, when Zeus was a young upstart breaking away from Dad, the seeds of the Iliad were being sown.

The Oedipodeia

Only two fragments of the story of Oedipus exist, and they seem to contradict the story as we have come to know it via Sophocles’ plays: Haemon, son of Creon, the king of Thebes, was killed by the Sphinx prior to Oedipus’ arrival and slaying of same; thus Haemon could not have been engaged to Oedipus’ daughter Antigone for the third play in the series. The second fragment seems to indicate the gods revealed the incestuous nature of Oedipus’ marriage immediately, making four children unlikely, but I’m finding Davies’ ‘academicese’ difficult to parse so that could easily be a misread. It fits, however, with the Evelyn-White edition, which proposes the children were by a different woman.

The Thebais

Oddly, I was most interested in the first fragment Davies reports: “Of Argos sing, goddess, the thirsty city from which the lords <of the expedition against Thebes set forth… >” What interests me is not so much the content, but the form. In spite of having read that these are lost epic poems, it wasn’t until I read the invocation to the muse that I really understood that. Sometimes I have to be hit over the head with something to really absorb it.

I was also interested in Davies’ discussion of the curse Oedipus puts on his sons, related by two fragments that apparently cite two different reasons: first, Polyneices served him wine in a forbidden goblet, which reminded him of his fallen status, and second, he served an inferior cut of meat. It’s interesting, and quite unfair, that Polyneices commits the errors but both sons are cursed to continuing struggle between them, particularly since Polyneices is the son who comes across more sympathetically, to me at least, in the Theban plays.

In any event the poem is mostly about the battle recounted by Aeschylus’ play Seven Against Thebes, which I could swear was a blockbuster movie in my youth, but it seems not.

The Epigoni

I’m completely unfamiliar with this, so I’ll leave it to Davies:

Familiarity with the story of the Seven’s assault on Thebes may have dulled our awareness of just how unusual the framework of the tale is. Unlike most other accounts of the siege of a city, in particular that of the Trojan War, it deals with failure not success: the Seven’s onslaught is frustrated, their army defeated, all the leaders bar one destroyed.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the notion of a second, successful and avenging expedition against Thebes arose at some time….. Symmetry entailed that the leaders of this expedition be the offspring of those chieftains engaged in the earlier unsuccessful attempt….

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 5, The Epigoni

Davies uses parallel analysis of the invocations to speculate a phrase about the younger men winning their war, though there is no text or summary to support that.

It seems there’s also something about the Teumessian fox, who can’t be caught, and Cephalus’ hound, who can’t be escaped; Zeus was so annoyed by this, he turned both to stone. Tiresias’ daughter Manto might appear as well, but both of these threads, if I’m reading this correctly, might be part of the Thebais rather than the Epigoni.

The Cypria

This epic is a gold mine in that it contains many of the stories perpetuated in drama, and, for that matter, in the Homeric epics as well. Even Davies’ opening of the chapter cheers me more than the others:

Antiquity assigned this poem either to Homer or to the Cypriot poet Stasinus. The delightful story that the impoverished Homer gave the poem to his son-in-law Stasinus, as a substitute for a dowry for his daughter, is probably a relatively late anecdote of a familiar kind, bringing together contemporary but differently aged practitioners of the same genre and intended to reconcile these alternative attributions.
…. Why did the epic bear the title Cypria? The most popular and convincing explanation talks in terms of Stasinus’ place of origin….

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 6, The Cypria

The content of the epic has a more important, if less amusing, start:

The requirement to supply details of all the multifarious events that occurred before the start of the Iliad seems to have resulted in a work even more rambling (it amounted to eleven books), ramshackle and lacking in cohesion than the average, though a rather spurious unity was ingeniously imposed in F 1:

Once upon a time the countless tribes the broad surface of the deep-bosomed earth. And Zeus, seeing this, took pity, and in his cunning mind he devised a plan to lighten the burden caused by mankind from the face of the all-nourishing earth, by fanning into flame the great strife that was the Trojan War, in order to alleviate the earth’s burden by means of the death of men. So it was that the heroes were killed in battle at Troy and the will of Zeus was accomplished.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 6, The Cypria

Davies points out the nearly identical statement about the Will of Zeus which appears in the Iliad 1.1-5, which  seems to be about reducing the earth’s population. Apparently there is speculation that the Cypria refers to something larger: to what Hesiod termed the end of the Age of Heroes, and the beginning of the Iron Age, or our current, less impressive civilization. “In fact one could not ask for a clearer illustration of the difference in ethos between Homer and the Epic Cycle,” says Davies; I’m not 100% sure what he means by that, but it seems to align with Homer’s dislike of the more fanciful explanations. As if Zeus thinning the herd isn’t fanciful enough.

Zeus’ plan starts with Thetis, and carries through to the place, well into the Trojan War, where Achilles wins Briseis. The Iliad, remember, opens with him losing her to Agamemnon. I won’t list all the episodes; there are too many, and they’re too good to skim over – I was almost giddy as I read about this. Don’t worry, they’ll come back into play in my next post when I write about the tragedies I’ve investigated. 

I should mention here that I do have another book titled The Cypria, a self-published reconstruction by DM Smith. I became disillusioned with it when I noticed it included the full text of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (the Coleridge translation, in the public domain, perfectly legal) since that seems to me to be moving beyond reconstruction. However, it is very readable, and perhaps a good starting place for simply enjoying the mythology. I can be hard to please: Davies is too academic; Smith isn’t academic enough. The just-right version of the Epic Cycle hasn’t yet been published. But I’ll keep hoping.

The Aethiopis

This book starts out with the arrival of an Amazon, Penthesileia, who has come to help the Trojans. Davies writes: “Proclus tells us Penthesileia enjoyed the traditional epic aristea or display of valour before being killed by Achilles.” On the amusing side, it seems Thersites, the Greek warrior Achilles already slapped around in the Iliad Book 2, got all second-grader and teased Achilles about having a crush on the Amazon. Achilles slaps him around again, this time killing him. He gets a time-out and goes off with Odysseus to be purified of the miasma.

Then another Trojan support arrives, this time Memnon from Ethiopia, giving the poem its title.  He kills Antilochus, and in turn Achilles kills him. Davies spends a fair amount of time on vase paintings that seem to indicate some comparison between Achilles and Memnon, but I’m not sure what the point is.

However: they really buried the lede, because this epic is where Achilles is killed, by Paris of all people, Paris, who entered combat twice, once ran away, and once was rescued by Aphrodite. Then again, he had Apollo on his side, guiding his arrow.

Davies spends some ink considering “the interesting but difficult question” of whether this epic is the source of the Achilles’ Heel trope, that Thetis dipped him in the Styx and only the heel she grasped was vulnerable. He notes that Homer wouldn’t fuss with such a thing – not only was he against folk tale motifs, but an invulnerable hero would have been less useful to his story and themes – and different ideas pop up at different times. The academicese is daunting (so many references!), and I gave up trying to parse it. Suffice it to say I, in 2026, run into a reference to Achilles’ Heel maybe once a week (just yesterday, in fact, though I can’t remember in reference to what), so it came from somewhere and is very deeply embedded.

The Little Iliad

This seems to be where Achilles’ armor is distributed, culminating in the madness and suicide of Ajax. It’s also about bringing Philoctetes back to Troy to fulfill a prophecy, without which the city cannot be taken. Proclus’ summary has Philoctetes killing Paris; Menelaus then mutilates the corpse. Once again, Davies points out how this contrasts with the Homeric epics:

Menelaus’ mutilation of Paris’ corpse is one more of the poem’s unHomeric features … that Menelaus (a notably mild and humane character within the Homeric tradition) should have been portrayed as doing this to his enemy’s corpse speaks volumes for the difference in ethos between the Iliad and the Odyssey and a poem like ours.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 10, The Little Iliad

A great deal of battle action takes place in this epic. Odysseus brings Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, to the battlefield and presents him with his father’s armor; the youngster defeats Eurypylus, son of Telephus, in a duel (which confuses me, because it looks like there are several Eurypyluses, one of whom is Greek; this appears to be a different one. This is why I need a beginner version of all this). Odysseus disguises himself (Davies compares this to Zopyrus cutting off his nose to infiltrate Babylon in Herodotus – hey, I know about that!) and goes undercover into Troy. He and Diomedes steal the Palladium. Davies argues that fragment 9 only makes sense if the story about Odysseus preparing to stab Diomedes in the back and take the Palladium on his own is included in this epic. He again points out how this conflicts with the much cleaner portrait of Odysseus that Homer paints.

The most dramatic moment comes with the murder of Andromache’s infant son at the hands of Neoptolemus, which Davies calls the “longest extant fragment” of the poem, then compares the moment to Homer’s treatment of the same moment:

But the glorious son of great-hearted Achilles arranged for Hector’s wife to be sent off down to the hollow ships. And taking the child from the bosom of his fair-tressed nurse he whirled him around by the foot and then cast him from the top of the tower. He fell and then dark death and mighty fate seized upon him.

…. The death of the infant Astyanax, which might have been anticipated as a moment of high pathos and tragedy, is described (as numerous scholars have complained) in a dry, dull manner, as if it were a sack of potatoes, rather than a human being, that was being dumped over the walls. In comparison with the moving anticipation of the same event by Hector in [the Iliad,book 6], the Little lliad‘s passage does not exist as poetry. But this is ever the way of the world: a great poet like Homer can foreshadow an event more poignantly than a second-rate poet (like the Little Iliad‘s) can actually describe it.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 8, The Little Iliad

I’m not all that surprised that a father’s contemplation of his infant son’s demise can be fraught with more emotion than a battle maneuver by a recently bereaved, and very young, soldier. Both love and hate rage through war.

The Sack of Troy

The Trojan Horse finally shows up, Most of what I’d expect to be here was covered in the Little Iliad, so it’s not surprising there are overlaps.

The Return Home

Again, I find this very difficult to parse with the references and citations.  Menelaus and Agamemnon argue about whether they should stay and make offerings to appease Athena, who has several reasons for being upset (the theft of the Palladium and the assault of Cassandra at her shrine, to name two). Tiresias meets his end and is buried. Other than that, it’s a lot of who went where. Except for what Davies calls the last sentence of Proclus’ summary:

It begins with the return home of Agamemnon: he was killed by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, and avenged by Orestes and Pylades. Unfortunately for those interested in the Pre-Aeschylean history of the story of the house of Atreus, this account is far too concentrated and elliptical.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 10, The Return Home

Oh. Yes, that’s disappointing. Davies turns a bit snarky as he remarks “The very last item in Proclus’ summary … is the safe arrival home of Menelaus, a detail about which we know and care less.”

The Telegony

If I was giddy when reading about the Cypria, this epic left me downright euphoric.

Back in 20214 (how time flies), I took a mooc offered by Penn about Greek and Roman mythology. It was my first exposure to all of this. The Odyssey was a significant part of the curriculum. One of the great features of this mooc, back when moocs were actually good (don’t get me started), was a biweekly AMA with the professors. I had a lot of questions, but one of them was something like, “Was there ever a sequel to the Odyssey, a sort of Odysseus II, the Continuing Adventures?” I didn’t preserve my question, but I did preserve the answer in my notes, and I see now it was a description of the Epic Cycle and a summary of this epic:

Great question, Karen! We do actually know about one strand of Odysseus’ further adventures, and thinks get a little strange!
…. We know of other non-Homeric epic poetry about the Trojan War, before and after, known as the Epic Cycle…
…. According to Proclus’ summary the Telegony picked up with the burial of the suitors, it told of Odysseus’ final voyage to Thresprotia, probably to carry out the sacrifices to Poseidon as Tiresias advised him, but apparently while there Odysseus also married the queen, had a son with her, and was involved in various battles. When the queen was killed, Odysseus then returns to Ithaca. The Telegony also then relates the story of Telegonus, Odysseus’ son by Circe who was raised by her on Aeaea. Telegonus travels and by accident arrives on Ithaca, and without realizing who he is, Telegonus ends up fighting and killing his father, Odysseus. Apparently then Telegonus then takes Odysseus’ corpse back to Aeaea and buries him there, and Circe makes Penelope and Telemachus immortal. Telemachus then weds Circe and Penelope weds Telegonus.
I said that it got a little strange! But yes, there was definitely a rich tradition of mythic material that supplemented Homer and filled in the before, after and other episodes during the Trojan War that weren’t included in the Iliad or the Odyssey.

Material from the Penn mooc, Greek and Roman Mythology, on Coursera, led by Prof. Peter Struck

It took me more than ten years to get to it, but I finally did.

Davies puts it a little differently:

The final poem in the Epic Cycle was the Telegony, in two books, generally ascribed to Eugammon of Cyrene. For information as to its contents we are almost totally dependent upon Proclus’ resume…. After all, the Telegony was intended as, in some sense, a sequel to the Odyssey; and the scholars alluded to believe that the latter epic, in the form in which we now know it, has been altered by the importation of motifs and details borrowed from the former, perhaps to make it more independent and dispense with any need for a sequel.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 11, The Telegony

First, I can’t tell which is the former and which is the latter – I would assume the Odyssey is the former – and second, it seems like he’s saying the sequel was written to obviate the need for a sequel. I don’t read academicese very well.

But I shouldn’t snark too hard on Davies, since he does have an interesting theory on how Odysseus’ death fit with the prophecy he got from Tiresias in his visit to the Underworld in the Odyssey. That prophecy, as translated by Fagles, was for “a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes to take you down, borne down with the years in old age with all your people there in blessed peace around you.” Davies reconciles this with the event from the Telegony:

It is Apollodorus who makes clear what must have originally been stated in our epic: that the rather odd weapon wielded by Telegonus against his father was a spear barbed with the spine of a sting-ray. This strange detail represents an attempt to re-interpret Tiresias’ prophecy to Odysseus in the Nekyia. There Odysseus is guaranteed a death when he is very old: the death will be gentle or soft and ex halos. As we saw above this last phrase must originally have signified ‘away, far from, the sea’, a promise that the wanderings and dangers which had marred Odysseus’ homecoming would be a thing of the past. The Telegony‘s poet has altered the significance of the words (as the Cypria‘s poet gave a new twist to ‘the will of Zeus’ mentioned in the lliad‘s proem) so that Odysseus’ death comes (with his son Telegonus) ‘from [or out of] the sea.’ The deadly wound inflicted by a barb from a sting-ray can hardly be termed gentle, and the Telegony presumably twisted the Odyssey’s words still further in a new (and perverse) direction by detecting in them an allusion to the soft flesh of the sting-ray.

Malcolm Davies, The Greek Epic Cycle, Ch. 11, The Telegony

I’m with you on the out-of-the-sea part, but the gentleness referring to a sting-ray seems a stretch. That’s ok, I’ve been known to stretch things a bit myself, and it’s probably examples like this that inspire me to do so.

I have loved this preliminary investigation of the Epic Cycle. I’m sure I’ve missed many important points; I’ve pretty much stuck to what interested me most, and ignored a great deal of academicese in favor of a first-read level of understanding. But I have a much better understanding of the whole system of mythology. It didn’t just spring up in random stories, which is how it’s always seemed in collections of myths. I used to have Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a classics standard, but I seem to have purged it at some point, probably out of frustration at the randomness of it. Just a few months ago I bought Stephen Fry’s Mythos, the illustrated edition, hoping it would inspire me; it didn’t. A hard-to-read <100 page paperback, described by the author himself as “a pendant” to his more substantial work, along with Youtube videos of widely assorted expertise, did the trick. When you’re ready to learn, you find a way.  

I’m beginning to work on a post about the tragedies that came out of all this mythology. I’ve already done the reading and watching, so it should only be a week or so. That will bring Greek Mythology January 2026 to a close.

Resources:

• My post on Laura Jenkinson-Brown’s You Are Odysseus, a choose-your-own-adventure treatment of Homer
• Non-academic video discussing the transition from Epic Poetry to Drama, by Overly Sarcastic Productions (a resource I’ve used frequently over the years)
• Aristotle: Poetics, Project Gutenberg
• Prof. Gregory Nagy’s translation of fragments of five books of the Epic Cycle:
• Prof. Nagy’s mooc, The Greek Hero in 24 Hours; not specifically about the Epic Cycle, but valuable nonetheless.
• H. G. Evelyn-White’s translation of the fragments of all ten books
• Adam Fries – high school class lecture, The Epic Cycle Part I – The Cypria. If nothing else, there’s a decent map of all the important sites at 38:44.
• Casual summary and discussion of the Telegony
• Mooc: “Greek and Roman Mythology” from Penn, on Coursera
• Playlist for Prof. Joseph Hughes’ 1996 Classical Mythology course at Southwest Missouri State University

Homer: The Iliad (Emily Wilson, translator) via the Catherine Project

Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath
of great Achilles, son of Peleus,
which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain
and sent so many noble souls of heroes
to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs,
a banquet for the birds, and so the plan
of Zeus unfolded — starting with the conflict
between great Agamemnon, lord of men,
and glorious Achilles.

The Iliad, Book 1.1, Emily Wilson, Translator (2023)

Several years ago, I took the edX mooc titled “The Greek Hero in 24 Hours,” which, among other things, looked at the Iliad with a focus on how Achilles conformed to the heroic archetype. I must’ve read the poem; I have the Fagles edition, all duly underlined, but it would have been a very quick read, and thus not a very thorough or thoughtful one.

While I’d been eyeing the Catherine Project listings for the poem since I began joining their Reading Groups, I wanted to get a bit more background first, acclimating both to the process of the Groups and to thinking about ancient Greece (ok yes, I got distracted by bright shiny medieval things for a while there). Finally the stars aligned this Fall, and I’ve just completed the eight-week read – a wonderful experience, a great chance to sit down with this work again and get to know it in more detail.

The Poem

Those of us who aren’t Classics scholars typically consider The Iliad to be “that Trojan War thing.” While it does indeed take place within the war, it begins nine years into the war, ends before the war ends, and the event that sets things in motion is a conflict between two Greek commanders. The oft-proclaimed hero of the piece, Achilles, makes an appearance early on, starts trouble, then… disappears into his tent to sulk for most of the poem. And there’s no Trojan Horse; that happens after the end of this poem, but you can read about it in the sequel, The Odyssey.

So much more fun than “that Trojan War thing,” isn’t it?

Not that there isn’t plenty of war. Things start out very politely with duels, agreements, and gods who butt in for whichever side they’re on. Even when the fighting starts in earnest, the narrator occasionally inserts compassionate comments identifying the effect of a warrior’s death on his family:

Diomedes mingled with the Trojans…
and went to Abas and Polyidus,
sons of Eurydamas, the old dream-seer.
The old man never read their dreams again.
They never went back home to him. Instead,
powerful Diomedes killed them.

Then,
he moved towards the sons of Phaenops – Xanthus
and Thoon, who were both full-grown. The father
was frail and weakened by severe old age.
He could not get another sun as heir
for his possessions. Diomedes killed
both of them there, took both their lives away,
and left their father grief and limitation.
He would not welcome them back home again
alive, after the war. His whole estate
would be divided among the distant heirs.

The Iliad, Book 5.~150, Emily Wilson, Translator (2023)

Then there’s an almost comic scene where Diomedes (Greek) and Glaucus (Trojan) pause before trying to stab each other to death and brag of their illustrious ancestry. In the process, they realize their grandfathers were guest-friends – a special relationship in the revered Greek tradition of xenia, hospitality – and so they cease fighting and exchange armor, with an additional comic touch: “Zeus robbed Glaucus of his wits,” and he gives up his gold armor for Diomedes’ bronze.

No one’s missing Achilles so far.

But things get nasty, and warfare norms, sort of the ancient equivalent of the Geneva Convention, start falling by the wayside. Towards the end, we begin to understand why the Greek version of the poem begins with the word “wrath,” and why Wilson translated it as “cataclysmic rage.” Yet even these scenes are lightened by moments of humor. Book 14 is one of the clearest examples of this humor/horror combination. First we have Hera, going to great lengths to seduce Zeus so as to put him to sleep so the gods can intervene in the battles of men. He admits he finds her particularly desirable; he’s more aroused than he slept with the wife of Ixion, or when he went for Danae, or Europa… He goes through the list of women and goddesses he’s seduced and impregnated, while Hera just waits patiently in clothing, amulets, and fragrances designed by Aphrodite, waiting for him to get around to her. Hera’s a woman on a mission, she doesn’t have time for hurt feelings.

This is followed by one of the most horrific battles of the war. Gone are the niceties of duels and truces, of agreeing to break off hostilities to care for the dead, of finding common ground even on the battlefield. Violence becomes desecration; casual trash talk becomes cruel taunt, and each death becomes the impetus for another in revenge. This culminates in a vicious moment:

… Phorbas was the father
of only one son – Ilioneus,
born as his mother’s only child. But now,
Acamas stabbed him underneath his brow,
drove deep into the socket of his eye
and popped the shiny eyeball out. The spear
passed through the skull and out behind his neck,
and stretching out both hands, the man collapsed.
Peneleus drew out his strong, sharp sword
and drove it through the middle of his neck,
and cut the head, complete with helmet, off.
The strong spear was still stuck inside his eye.
Peneleus held up the spear and head,
just like a poppy, showed it to the Trojans,
and boasted,

“Trojans! Go and tell the parents
of Ilioneus, who loved him dearly,
to grieve and weep for him inside their halls.
Moreover, Promachus, Algenor’s son,
will never give his loving wife the joy
of welcoming him home again.

The Iliad, Book 14.~490, Emily Wilson, Translator (2023)

The resolution of all this warfare, when it comes, seems tenuous, but it allows for humanity to come forth once more, this time in mourning. I won’t go through the plot; plenty of excellent resources are available (and, if you’re in the mood to have some fun with this, be sure to check out Overly Sarcastic Production’s hilarious video summarizing it all in a little over ten minutes). But I’ll just snapshot some elements I either particularly enjoyed, or that seemed most important.

I was surprised by the emotion in the poem. Yes, there’s violence and gore, but there’s also great tenderness, heartbreak, friendship, humor, and, that watchword of the epic, honor.

The relationship between Achilles and his mother, the sea nymph Tethis, is one of the sweetest in the poem. Twice she comes to him from the sea when she hears him crying: in Book 1, in bitter anger, in Book 18, in grief. In both, she arranges with the Olympian gods to please her son. That the first arrangement causes the second is one of the subtle ironies in a text loaded with surprisingly sophisticated ironies.

“Mother, you birthed me for so short a life.
that Zeus, high god of thunder, on Olympus,
should give me glory at the very least—
but I get nothing! Now this lord of lords,
this Agamemnon, son of Atreus,
has disrespected me! He took my trophy!
He seized it and now keeps it for himself!”

He spoke through tears. His goddess mother heard him
down in the salty depths where she was sitting
Beside her father. Instantly she rose
out of the dim saltwater like a mist
and sat beside him as he wept, and touched him,
stroking him with her hand, and said his name,
spoke and asked him,

“Child, why are you crying?
What pain has touched your heart? Do not conceal it.
Tell me and let us both know.”

The Iliad, Book 1.~350, Emily Wilson, Translator (2023)

When Achilles whines, “He took my trophy!” it’s easy to see him as a spoiled brat. But consider the rest of the passage: he was born under a curse (not fully explained in the text) that he could either live a long, pleasant life of anonymity and die unknown, or he could live fast and die young, with great honor and fame. In taking his prize, Agamemnon has cheated him out of a token of the glory he deserves. This then is the source of the rage of Achilles, that he will not get the compensation he was promised for an early death.

It also sets up the rest of the story. He is known to be by far the best fighter, and he is feared by the Trojans. By sitting out this phase of the war, he wishes for the Trojans to overrun many his fellow Greeks; at some point, when they acknowledge their need for his ability, he will swoop in and save the rest. This of course comes back to haunt him, as his beloved friend Patroclus is one of the casualties of war and a fresh round of new rage boils up in him, a rage that threatens to destroy heaven, hell, and earth.

One other point I don’t want to ignore: the prize he is missing out on is a woman. It’s one of those realities of antiquity: to the victor belong the spoils, including the women, to do with what they will. This is common knowledge. One of the most heartbreaking scenes has Hector, the leader of the Trojan forces, bidding his family goodbye as he goes out to fight. He discovers his wife Andromache, holding their baby, is already mourning his death because she knows what will come: her mother was enslaved by Achilles, though ransomed by her father. Andromache has no family to ransom her. Hector, too, knows exactly what she will face, because he, too, has brought home women as slaves; one is holding his baby even as he speaks;

“One day some bronze-armed Greek will capture you,
and you will weep, deprived of all your freedom.
Then you will weave to serve another woman
in Argos. You will have to carry water
from river Hyperia or Messeis,
entirely against your will, but forced
by strong necessity. And sometimes people
will see you weeping there and they will say,
‘That woman used to be the wife of Hector,
who was the greatest champion of Troy
during the Trojan War.’ When they say that,
your pain and grief will feel brand-new again,
because you do not have a man like me
to save you from the day of your enslavement.
But as for me, I hope I will be dead,
and lying underneath a pile of earth,
so that I do not have to hear your screams
or watch when they are dragging you away.

The Iliad, Book 6.~455, Emily Wilson, Translator (2023)

While Andromache’s fate isn’t given in The Iliad, Euripides’ play The Trojan Women bears this out in particularly cruel fashion: she is made the slave of Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus.

The gods feature prominently in many ways: Discord sets up the entire situation; some gods favor Troy, some Greece; they deflect arrows, instill courage or lust for war, send messages to leaders to direct the action. It often seems like the immortals would be bored without having human playthings to watch, so they make sure things get interesting once in a while.

There’s an interesting balance in the poem. You’d think the Greeks would be the ‘good guys’ and the Trojans would be the ‘bad guys,’ but sympathy and blame are pretty evenly distributed. A few characters lean heavily one way or the other: Patroclus is almost universally liked; Agamemnon seems to make incredibly poor decisions for a general; Paris, who started the whole thing by kidnapping Helen, is often portrayed as a young rake with little substance beyond good looks. Some of the gods have their quirks as well: Aphrodite is frivolous and high-maintenance, Poseidon is an old grump. But in general, I was surprised at how fairly everyone was presented.

The Translation

Our reading group primarily used the recent Emily Wilson translation. In her Introduction, she explains why she chose to use iambic pentameter as the basis for her translation:

I began with sound…. Nonmetrical renditions of Homer do not provide the auditory experience of immersion in a long narrative poem, where the immutable pattern of sound is as omnipresent as the waves beating against the shore. I wanted to honor the poem’s oral heritage with a regular and audible rhythm, and with language that would, like the original, invite reading out loud, and come to life in the mouth.

Emily Wilson, The Iliad, Translator’s Note

In order to experience this, I got the audio book, read (beautifully!) by Audra McDonald, in addition to the paperback book. I’m afraid I have a tin ear; the rhythm didn’t particularly strike me, though it’s evident on close examination. It is, however, a very readable, and listenable, text. I used the Fagles translation when I read this before. I tried to compare the two as I read, though time didn’t always permit this. By the way, I also got the audiobook for the Fagles translation; I was seriously disappointed. The readings by Derek Jacobi and Maria Tucci are excellent, but when they describe it as abridged, believe them: entire books are cut to a couple of lines. It’s also packaged in chapters which do not correspond to the Books of the Fagles translation, so it’s very hard to follow along.

As a comparison between the two print translations, let’s use the opening of Book 12: The Greeks are building a wall to protect their ships from attack. I find this passage particularly interesting because 1) the narrator does a flash-forward which happens to be a spoiler, letting us know who will win the war; 2) it compares this wall, erected literally overnight but without the proper sacrifice to the gods, to the impenetrable wall around Troy, the ongoing subject of annoyance to some of the gods who built it but did not receive their compensation, and 3) I have to wonder, they’ve been at war for nine years, why haven’t they built a wall before this? For that matter, what have they been doing for nine years, besides raiding nearby towns? It is a lovely passage, which I’ll cut a bit short:

One day, the wide wall of the Greeks would fall.
They built it around their ships and dug the trench,
but failed to give the gods fine hecatombs,
so that they would be safe behind the wall –
the men themselves, their ships, and all their spoils.
The wall was built without divine consent,
against the wishes of the deathless gods,
and therefore it would not stay standing long.
While Hector was alive and while Achilles
was wrathful, while the city of King Priam
was not yet sacked, so long the Greek wall stood.
But after all the finest Trojan fighters
were dead, and many of the Greeks were killed,
though some survived, when in the war’s tenth year
the city of King Priam was destroyed,
after the Greeks had sailed back in their ships
to their dear fatherland – that was the time
Apollo and Poseidon formed their plans
to wipe the wall away by flooding it
with all the energy of all the rivers
that flow down from Mount Ida to the sea….

The Iliad, Book 12.2, Emily Wilson, Translator (2023)

The Argive trench could not hold out much longer,
nor could the rampart rearing overhead, the wide wall
they raised to defend the ships and the broad trench
they drove around it all – they never gave the gods
the splendid sacrifice the immortals craved,
that the fortress might protect the fast ships
and the bulking plunder heaped behind its shield.
Defying the deathless gods they built that wall
and so it stood there steadfast no long time.
While Hector still lived and Achilles raged on
nd the warlord Priam’s citadel went unstormed,
so long the Achaeans’ rampart stood erect.
But once the best of the Trojan captains fell,
and many Achaeans died as well while some survived,
and Priam’s high walls were stormed in the tenth year
and the Argives set sail for the native land they loved –
then, at last, Poseidon and Lord Apollo launched their plan
to smash the rampart, flinging into it all the rivers’ fury.

Robert Fagles, The Iliad, Book 12.3

Besides the more rhythmic line, the Wilson version includes extensive notes on the text, giving historical background, translation details, allusions to myth and other sources, and occasionally a humorous take on a  passage. Alas, these notes are grouped, by book and line, at the end, so there’s no way to tell, while reading the text, what has an annotation. Part of my process (overly complicated as always) was to go through the notes, before reading the assigned text for the week, and underline the passages that have notes, as well as to read the notes. I wouldn’t necessarily remember the details when I went back to read, but sometimes I had a vague idea of what I’d find; I looked them all up as I read.

I also found her Introduction to be wonderful and enlightening in many ways. Her focus is on loss and restitution. Achilles exhibits this, trying to recover his loss, first of Briseis to Agamemnon, then of his friend Patroclus. He is successful on the first count, but no one can bring back the dead. Instead, we come move to what Kübler-Ross would later call acceptance. This is the arc of the Iliad for Wilson, driven home in the final paragraph of her Introduction:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

Emily Wilson, The Iliad, Introduction

There are those who quibble with some of the translation. One passage – one word, really – seems to have sparked (ahem) particular pique. In Book 8, Hector addresses his horses by name: Swiftfoot, Blondie. Flame, and… Sparkle. Fagles uses “Golden and Whitefoot, Blaze and Silver Flash” while Lattimore, as well as many older translations, use the Greek names: Xanthos, Podargus, Aethon, Lampus. I don’t know Greek, but apparently Lampus – to glitter, to shine – is the source for Sparkle. Here’s the thing: yes, using the Greek words sounds more dignified, more like what we would expect a warrior like Hector to name his horses. But to Hector, they were words, and descriptive words for the horses. To us, Lampus feels very classy; to him, in an era long before laundry detergent and My Little Pony, it might very well have felt like Sparkle.

The Group

And now we come to the foundation of the Catherine Project: the group read. This is my tenth (or so) participation since 2022, and I have yet to be disappointed. Ten to twelve of us covered three books a week in  90-minute Zoom meetings. And again, the main value of reading together is that other people bring other ideas to the table, things I wouldn’t have thought of.

We’d start each meeting with a round of questions: each of us would bring up one thing from the reading that we wondered about, or found curious. As a group we’d all chime in with our own thoughts on the matter. This led to some great cross-pollination and expansion of the text with the interaction of different interpretations.

In some cases, another reader would put a fine point on a vague idea I was kicking around, making it much easier to work with it. For instance, one of our readers came up with a brilliant phrase: “offloading responsibility onto the gods.” The gods stir up courage or send messages or omens on how to proceed. Sometimes it’s away from violence; in Book 1, when Achilles is furious with Agamemnon for stealing his prize and considers attacking him – going so far as to reach for his sword – Athena “grabbed him by his chestnut hair” and convinces him to cool it. Most notably, in book 24, Thetis convinces her son Achilles to accept Priam’s ransom of Hector’s body; he accepts instantly, though he’s been refusing to do so for days. It was also a fellow reader who helped me be less judgmental about Achilles and his bratty narcissism, and find compassion for his existential plight.

Sometimes there were no definitive answers. I still wonder why it took nine years to get to the point where the story began. Several factors seem to control events: the Fates, the gods who sometimes respond to offerings and sometimes don’t, pure human motivations and everyday human flaws. Additional sources were sometimes offered: As we discussed the shift in Book 14 where the norms of warfare were completely lost, a reader mentioned a book, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character by Jonathan Shay (1995), giving us all a way to see how much we have in common with the mythical warriors from close to 3000 years ago. [Addendum: I read Shay’s book and posted about it here.]

An Extra-Special Bonus!

Towards the end of the group, the facilitator arranged for a real treat: he contacted Emily Wilson who agreed to join us for a brief AMA session. I’m a big fangirl of Wilson, and follow her on social media where she’s sometimes posted various comments about the works she’s translated. Each of us presented a question to her. Several of them involved translation issues (leading to another FMI work, Richard Martin’s The Language of Heroes); others focused on the final stages of Achilles’ arc. It was a wonderful end to our study.

While every Catherine Project group may not have the same finale, they all give an opportunity to expand one’s knowledge of literature and understanding of how we are affected by words on paper. I’m grateful to have been able to participate in this group, and I’m already looking forward to whatever offerings the Spring listing may provide.

Homer’s Odyssey and Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus via The Catherine Project

I spent this Fall sailing the Mediterranean with a war hero, matching wits and muscle with monsters and gods before enjoying a vengeful and ultimately celebratory homecoming at last; then traipsing around Asia Minor, doing battle and struggling to survive in a mercenary force without a sponsor before, again, coming back to where it began, only to launch again – all this without leaving my desk, as part of the Catherine Project tutorial group reading Homer’s Odyssey and then Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus.

I had read the Odyssey, the Fagles translation, once before for a mooc on Greek and Roman mythology. I’d also bought the Wilson translation a few years ago when it was released in paperback, but hadn’t read beyond the Introduction; I was waiting for the opportunity to read it side-by-side with Fagles. And here was my chance! I threw in the Lattimore edition, which the group leader was using, just for fun.

Each week we’d read through three books of the work, and meet for two hours to discuss what we’d noticed and/or what we wanted to know more about. The inability of Penelope and Telemachus to eject the suitors, so strange to us in the 21^st century, was a frequent topic, as was Odysseus’ lack of control over his men, who kept creating dangerous situations, ultimately resulting in their deaths. We also discussed at length the attack on the suitors, the viciousness of the revenge, particularly of the maids who were brutally murdered for sleeping with the enemy rather than for outright deeds of disloyalty; and the touching reunion between man and wife that hinged on an olive tree.

A few weeks before we began the group, the Twitterverse exploded when a reader, in anticipation of Wilson’s forthcoming edition of The Iliad, complained about her use of the word “complicated” to describe Odysseus in the opening line: “She just can’t help insulting Odysseus.” Maybe this is why I found Book XIX so interesting as it reveals how Odysseus was named at the suggestion of his maternal grandfather Autolycus, described in all three translations as a thief and liar, given those gifts by Hermes, and therefore despised by those he’d tricked; the name he chose for his grandson reflects this, varying from “son of pain” to “distasteful.”

Lattimore:

Autolykos came once to the rich country of Ithaka,
and found that a child there was newly born to his daughter;
and, as he finished his evening meal, Eurykleia laid him
upon his very knees, and spoke him a word and named him:
“Autolykos, now find yourself that name you will bestow
On your own child’s dear child, for you have prayed much to have him.”
The Autolykos spoke to her and gave her an answer:
“My son-in-law and daughter, give him the name I tell you;
since I have come to this place distasteful to many, women
and men alike on the prospering earth, so let him be given
the name Odysseus, that is distasteful.”

Wilson:

He went there
with his maternal cousins and grandfather,
noble Autolycus, who was the best
of all mankind at telling lies and stealing.
Hermes gave him this talent to reward him
for burning many offerings to him.
Much earlier, Autolycus had gone
to Ithaca to see his daughter’s baby,
and Eurycleia put the newborn child
on his grandfather’s lap and said, “Now name
your grandson-this much-wanted baby boy.”
He told the parents, “Name him this. I am
disliked by many, all across the world,
and I dislike them back. So name the child
‘Odysseus.’

Fagles:

The man was his mother’s noble father, one who excelled
the world at thievery, that and subtle, shifty oaths.
Hermes gave him the gift, overjoyed by the thighs
of lambs and kids he burned in the god’s honor-
Hermes the ready partner in his crimes. Now,
Autolycus once visited Ithaca’s fertile land,
to find his daughter’s son had just been born.
Eurycleia set him down on the old man’s knees
as he finished dinner, urging him, “Autolycus,
you must find a name for your daughter’s darling son.
The baby comes as the answer to her prayers.”
“You,
my daughter, and you, my son-in-law,” Autolycus replied,
“give the boy the name I tell you now. Just as I
have come from afar, creating pain for many-
men and women across the good green earth-
so let his name be Odysseus …
the Son of Pain, a name he’ll earn in full.

It’s interesting that this is in the section describing how Odysseus got the scar on his foot that identifies him to his former nurse Eurycleia, which emphasizes the element of identity and recognition with the familial connection to his name. While it isn’t clear to me that it is Odysseus who will be distasteful – as opposed to coming from one who is distasteful, or reflecting his grandfather’s distaste for the world – it’s still a distinctive passage in a work that goes out of its way to sing his praises at every turn.

And here I went off the reservation. One of the few ‘rules’ of the Catherine Project is that we stick to the text and don’t bring in other commentary or analysis. But as I typically do – hey, research is my thing – I went looking for more information about this. The most interesting paper I found goes into detail about this short section of verse, distinguishing between being hated by the gods (such as Poseidon) and being hated by people, which is minimal, and discussing Homer’s particular interpretation of the naming:   

To conclude : if the arguments offered here are valid, Homer intended the name Odysseus to be understood primarily in a passive sense, as “the man doomed to odium.” In the interests of heroic decorum he minimized the natural unpopularity of his favorite hero among his heroic associates, and confined his etymological allusions to the odium of Poseidon toward Odysseus. But since unpopularity was an inevitable concomitant of Autolycan wiles, and Odysseus had inherited a share of these, Homer did not completely expurgate this characteristic from Odysseus’ Iliadic and Odyssean career. He wrote about men, not about plaster images. By the end of the Odyssey Homer clearly intends us to believe that Odysseus’ days of hatred were over. As a profound humanist Homer rejected the stricter doctrine of etymological predestination.

W. B. Stanford (Trinity College, Dublin): “The Homeric Etymology of the Name Odysseus” available online at JSTOR

It’s interesting to see Homer described as a “profound humanist” considering the age in which he lived, the inhuman events he wrote about, and the uncertain connection he, or any individual, may have had with the  text we know today. However, with all this as background, it seems to me that “complicated” is perhaps a generous term to apply to Odysseus.

Some of us in the group found the ending – the very ending – to be a bit unsatisfactory, at least by contemporary literary standards. Maybe it’s the moment in time at which I was reading this, but Athena’s declaration of peace – especially after her support of Laertes to hurl his final spear – just seems a facile and unconvincing ending to what has been a complex story that revels in unforeseen consequences and reversals.

Then it was time for Xenophon. I’d heard of him vaguely as an alternative biographer of Socrates to Plato, but I’d never read anything by him. I’d never heard of The Anabasis of Cyrus and had no idea what we were about to read. It turns out “anabasis” means “ascent” and refers to travelling, usually from the shore to inland, to do battle.

The collection of seven books is a historic account of war between the King of Persia and his brother Cyrus that starts with lies told by one Tissaphernes; Cyrus hires an army of Greek mercenaries, including Xenophon, to overthrow his brother. The Greeks win the battle at the end of Book I, but Cyrus is killed, mooting their mission, and leaving them mostly unpaid and abandoned by the Persian units that had joined them in battle.

And here, in Book II, is where Xenophon steps into the spotlight: he makes a series of speeches that get him appointed leader. The focus is on getting out of Persia in one piece. This involves treachery, double-crossing, enemies chasing them up the Tigris, negotiations and/or plundering for provisions (an army does indeed travel on its stomach, and the stomachs of its animals), before reaching Greek-held territory on the south coast of the Black Sea (“The sea! The sea!” Always a cheering sight for the seafaring Greeks) in Book IV.

Here’s where the tide turns, in Book V: while they’re supposedly amidst friends, now they argue, break into factions, run into less-than-friendly friends, endure desertions and more betrayals as they march and/or sail to Byzantium where they end up pushed around and threatened by the Spartans in charge. More battles, more plundering, but eventually, by the final Book VII, they get back to almost where they started – and the army transfers itself to another leader and goes off to fight Tissaphernes, creating a delightful circularity of geography and plot. But that’s not part of Xenophon’s story; he’s had it, and he, presumably, heads back to Athens.

I’m not big on war stories, but there are many other scenes of great interest. For instance: Xenophon was, before he ran off to join the army, a student of Socrates. How he came to join the army is revealed in Book III:

(4) In the army there was a certain Xenophon, an Athenian, who followed along even though he was neither a general, nor a captain nor a soldier; but Proxenus, a guest friend of his from long ago, had sent for him to come from home. He promised that if he came, he would make him a friend of Cyrus, whom Proxenus himself said he believed to be better for himself than his fatherland was.
(5) So Xenophon, on reading his letter, took common council with Socrates the Athenian about the journey. And Socrates, suspecting that becoming a friend of Cyrus might bring an accusation from the city, because Cyrus had seemed eager in joining the Lacedaemonians in making war against the Athenians, advised Xenophon to go to Delphi and to take common council with the god about the journey.
(6) Xenophon went and asked Apollo to which one of the gods he should sacrifice and pray in order to make the journey he had in mind in the noblest and best way and, after faring well, return to safety. And Apollo indicated to him the gods to whom he needed to sacrifice.
(7) When he came back again, he told the oracular response to Socrates. On hearing it, Socrates blamed him because he did not first ask whether it was more advisable for him to make the journey or to remain, but he himself had judged that he was to go and then inquired how he might go in the noblest way. “However, since you did ask it in this way,” he said, “you must do all that to the god bade.”
(8) So after sacrificing to the ones that God had indicated, Xenophon sailed off.

Xenophon: Anabasis of Cyrus, trans. By Wayne Ambler

This made some of us wonder if Xenophon asked the wrong question by accident, or if he did so deliberately because he’d already decided he was going. His motivation for joining the army seemed to be making connections with Cyrus. Footnotes indicate Xenophon was later exiled from Athens, and though the reasons aren’t clear, his friendship with Persians who’d helped the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War, as well as his friendship with a particular Spartan, might have been involved. But don’t worry about Xenophon: we learn he’s given land by the Spartans, where he builds a kind of theme park to Artemis with a temple that rivals the Ephesian temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The two works had the common ground of a long journey, but there was another similarity: the questionable reliability of narration. In the Odyssey, Odysseus tells most of his story himself to the Phaeacians. While he includes many details that aren’t flattering – his taunting of the Cyclops as he sails away, leading to Poseidon’s rage that delays his homeward journey, for example – he also blames his crew for disobedience that causes considerable trouble, and eventually gets them all killed. As a leader, shouldn’t he have been able to prevent this? Or was his expertise in battle, not leadership?

Leadership is, however, one of Xenophon’s strengths: the willingness to present alternative plans and proceed with an almost democratic vote, giving the troops ownership of the mission and thus more enthusiasm; use of techniques of psychological support that improves morale and unity; a logical outlook rather than bloodlust or battle glory as an operational method. Don’t get me wrong, he’s interested in glory, that’s clear from the text: he considers starting his own town, and his plans for the Artemis Theme Park likewise is self-aggrandizing. But he’s also loyal to his men, and indeed, at one point, is accused of being “too friendly with the troops” – a criticism that ultimately saves him in an interesting little twist of fate in Book VII.

There are similarities: both are silver-tongued devils, able to talk their way out of tight spots. But the method is a little different: what Odysseus does with charm and weaving stories (“I come from Athens…” “I once met Odysseus…”), Xenophon does with logic. I’m still thinking, based on Xenophon’s interaction with Socrates, that he’s got some of Odysseus’ slickness; and Odysseus is often able to put pieces together and come up with plans, such as when he and Telemachus plot the murder of the suitors.

The biggest difference between the books is that the Odyssey, composed some time in the 8^th or 7^th century BCE, is mythology – gods appear, send thunderbolts to indicate approval, disturb the seas, deflect arrows, etc. – while the Anabasis was written four to five hundred years later about 370 BCE, and is considered history; gods are referenced in numerous sacrifices for guidance, but there’s nothing supernatural. Whether the details Xenophon gives are exactly as indicated is debatable (he overstates the size of the Persian army: it was not composed of a million men, but more like a hundred thousand) and the speeches are almost certainly embellished, but it is history. It was written decades after the events took place, so it wouldn’t be considered historical in contemporary terms. Someone in our group used the term “memoir” which feels right to me.

One member of our group was an Army brat who lived at West Point in his youth, and remembers that the Anabasis was taught there, perhaps as history. Alex Petkas, a former Classics professor who has created a lovely podcast/Youtube channel Cost of Glory (ah, here I am off the reservation again) that includes detailed discussion of the Anabasis, indicated that it was in days of yore taught in prep schools as an elementary Greek text as well as for its leadership techniques; he mentions throughout some of the elements of Xenophon’s approach that are still applicable in business management. I’m pretty sure I’m going to explore the rest of Petkas’ podcasts; he uses as its backbone Plutarch’s Lives, another work I’ve never read. And I’m going to be keeping an eye out for more Catherine Project groups exploring Greek history and literature.

While I’ve participated in several CP reading groups and seminars, this was the first Tutorial I’ve attended. It turned out to be a small reading group, with the additional requirement of a written “reflection” on the assigned chapters sent via email to all group members prior to the meeting. In this particular tutorial, this wasn’t required, and as time went on, fewer reflections were sent. I found the process of writing up my thoughts to be extremely helpful; having been blogging for the past twelve or thirteen years, I think my brain has relocated to my fingertips, and I think via typing. I will probably continue the practice of writing up my own reflections prior to meetings even when they aren’t part of the official group, as they help me focus and organize my thoughts on the material.

This was a highly successful experience for me in several ways. It still took me a couple of weeks to hit my stride and speak up more, but the smaller size of the group was helpful. I enjoyed the reading itself; I loved simultaneously reading the three Odyssey translations in particular. I remembered a study technique I’d used for the Kierkegaard group but forgot about: Make index tabs on pages for book divisions, and especially for end notes! Yes, it takes time, but it makes hunting things down so much easier, and thus I’m more prone to flip around to find things in other sections when questions arise. The writing assignment, as I’ve already mentioned, was a revelation; I wonder why I didn’t think of it before. And as always, hearing the ideas others brought gave new insight into a number of passages and opened up possibilities.

I’m grateful I was able to participate, and look forward to my next Catherine Project adventure!