Montiglio - From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought

The philosopher: such is the name the twelfth-century Byzantine bishop Eustathius time and again gives Odysseus. The man of many turns, the most versatile of all Greek heroes both in Homeric epic and in his later incarnations, by the twelfth century could also boast of a long journey across philosophy, and one that was bound to continue, down through the ages, even to the modern world. The goal of this study is to map a small portion of that journey: Odysseus philosophical adventures in the core period of ancient thought.

From the late fifth century onward, among Odysseus many roles that of the wise man stands out as one of his most compelling performances. Yet no full-scale study of his philosophical impersonations exists. W B. Stanford in his now classic book The Ulysses Theme devotes one chapter and a number of scattered observations to philosophical treatments of Odysseus, but does not go into much detail. Odysseus, however, was exploited and discussed across the philosophical spectrum. No comprehensive examination of these treatments of Odysseus is available, to show the articulations, the elements of continuity and of change, in his philosophical history.

But one might ask: after all, are we justified to single out philosophical readings of Odysseus and devote a separate study to them? An approach driven by moral concerns characterizes interpretations of Odysseus both in philosophical texts and outside philosophy. Every refashioning of him in ancient literature is at the same time a moral evaluation; and each and every picture produced by creative authors is reductive compared to the richness of the Homeric character. Odysseus becomes the deceitful speaker (as in Pindar), the skilled but ruthless politician (as in several tragedies), the glutton (in several comedies), and so forth. We witness something of a paradox: the most complex of Homeric heroes in his post-Homeric reconfigurations is cut into pieces, as it were, and judged for one of his traits. This fragmentation is not simply owing to the tendency of post-Homeric authors (except, we can assume, for the poets of the Epic Cycle) to treat only one episode in Odysseus career rather than many, as in the Odyssey, but is connected to the Growing Hostility (as Stanford entitles chapter 7 of his book) against our hero, which can be traced as far back as Pindar or possibly earlier. Odysseus character, because it invites more and more questions about its goodness, fails to preserve its multifaceted Homeric turns.

In that he becomes close to a type, the nonphilosophical Odysseus rubs elbows with his philosophical counterpart(s). In philosophical texts, however, in addition to serving as the representative of certain character traits, Odysseus serves as illustration of doctrine. He is not merely judged but also utilized to expound a theory or a model of behavior (to be followed or not). Seneca polemically engages with these philosophical exploitations of Odysseus in Ep. 88, in which he blames every school for appropriating Odysseus as the mouthpiece of its tenets. Philosophers found Odysseus good to think with: it will be the main task of this study to investigate how.

HEARING BLAME OF ODYSSEUS: AN ATHENIAN PLEASURE

A second characteristic of philosophical readings of Odysseus, as opposed to strictly literary ones, is that they are generally appreciative of him. From Socrates to his direct disciples as well as his more remote descendants, Cynics and Stoics, from the Epicurean Philodemus (first century BC) to Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch, Odysseus seems more apt than any other hero to incarnate each philosopher's moral ideals.

Why then does Odysseus come to impersonate the wise man? To attempt an answer, we might benefit from looking at the essential features of the nonphilosophical portrayals of Odysseus that were circulating when philosophers firstadopted him as their hero. The treatment here will necessarily be summary: it will focus only and briefly on fifth-century portrayals and in particular on shared perceptions about Odysseus as we can infer them from those portrayals, for it is with such perceptions that Socrates and his followers, including Plato, seem to have actively engaged at the beginnings of Odysseus philosophical history. More background detail, when relevant, will be offered in the course of the discussion in the individual chapters.