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 | THE ODYSSEY Professor Fagles responds... March 13, 1997 |
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What is Odysseus' moral compass, and why are most of his lessons learnt at home ? How do we know that Homer was blind? What explains the lack of colors in the Odyssey? How has James Joyce's "Ulysses" effected your reading of the "Odyssey"? Is a son incomplete without his father in much of Ancient Greek literature? ADDITIONAL COMMENTS Rev. Terry J. Keeley of Florissant, MO, asks: Robert Graves basically maintained that Greek mythology had a basis in historical events, or collective tribal memories personified as the doings of the gods and heroes. Not just Troy having been a great onetime battle, but every story going back to fact, however much it may have later been embellished. What do you think?
Professor Robert Fagles of Princeton University responds:
I think it's altogether likely that, however "mythological" the Greek experience may seem, it nevertheless stems from experience. Was that experience actual or imagined, or a combination of the two? I don't think we'll ever know. I do think that one of the fascinating transitions in our culture is that from the mythological imagination to the historical sense, and I think it's in the Odyssey—especially in its tales of exploration, westward ho! -- that this transition begins to occur. Homer's period in history was in fact time of exploration and new settlements, and these events survive in the poem, strikingly dramatized by Homer's incorporation of the fabulous, the cyclops, the witches, the other monsters and seductresses. All of it is stranger than fiction, as we'd say, and even more compelling than fact.
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