![]() ![]() He WAS the most "modern" in his sensibilities.ītw, i voted for Hektor. But he does receive a surplus of epithets that point to a manifold nature. He actually only gets called polytropos rarely in the Odyssey. ![]() I received a good deal of complaining about my translation of Odysseus’ famous epithet as “shifty”. So, there is significance both in how we name Odysseus and how we modify that name. It is a principal reason for recommending psychotherapy to people not obviously insane.” The inability to locate one’s own focus, viewpoint, role, and character with respect to conventional stories of leading a life is thought to be pathological and deeply distressing. A role in one story is not isolated but connects to the same role in other stories…Focus, viewpoint, role and character in narrative imagining give us ways of constructing our own meaning, which is to say, ways of understanding who we are, what it means to be us, to have a particular life. People of a particular character are expected to inhabit similar roles in different stories… In general, doing follows from being something behaves in a certain way because its being leads it to behave in that way…Ĭharacter is a pattern of connections we expect to operate across stories about a particular individual with that character or across stories about a group of individual with that character. A fool acts like a fool because he is foolish. A dog guards the house because it is watchful. Someone forgives because she is forgiving. Turner 1996, 133: The stories minds tell (the ways in which we interpret the world) are based on roles and character, “formed by backward inference from such a role, according to the folk theory of “the Nature of Things,” otherwise known as “Being Leads to Doing.” In this folk theory, glass shatters because it is brittle and fragile. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. So, how we name Odysseus and what we think this name means matters (see also Peradotto 1990 among others on this). Second, jumping over 2500 years, there is a cognitive link between what we name something and how we expect that element to emerge in stories. (And don’t even try to explain that away by claiming it is not really a part of the Iliad. Oh, he is also said to have tried to betray Diomedes and even in the Iliad he takes charge of tricking the Trojan Dolon and ensuring that Diomedes kills a bunch of men in their sleep. And in the Trojan myths in general, Odysseus (1) tries to avoid going to war, (2) exposes Achilles so that he has to go to war, (3) and frames Palamedes for treason to get back at him for making sure that he went to war. Euripides has Odysseus as the chief architect of the death of Astyanax. ![]() In the Ajax, he is by no means innocent in the death of Telamon’s son. In Greek tragedy, Odysseus was far from unproblematic: in Sophocles’ Philoktetes, he is responsible for bullying Neoptolemos into convincing the title character to return to Troy. “I think that the story of Odysseus’ suffering was exaggerated by sweet-worded Homer” ![]() Even as early as the fifth century there were some, well, complaints. The important takeaway from this is that such ‘shiftiness” (when it comes to character and reception) is an essential part of his character.įirst, a basic assertion: Homer’s version of Odysseus is not the only one. We think we love Odysseus because we choose an Odysseus we want to love. My basic belief, which I get to eventually, is that Odysseus is popular because of his essential polysemy. This post turns out to be longer than might be ideal, but I am just going to leave it as is. And, as a result, we are confident in who we think Odysseus is. It seems that we as a collective are entirely sure about what we think this word means. My post and translation also drew some ire because I translated polytropos as “shifty”. I can’t say this completely surprises me, but it does trouble me just a little bit. In the recent poll prompted by Dio Chrysostom’s anecdote of Philip asking which hero Alexander would be, Odysseus won by a bit of a landslide. ![]()
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