explain how Homer’s decision to open The Odyssey in medias res, twenty years into the story, creates urgency and sets up the poem’s central theme, and cite specific lines as evidence.
Instruction
An epic is an extended narrative poem written in elevated language about the deeds of a hero whose actions decide the fate of a people. Epics began as oral performance. Before Homer’s poems were written down, singers called aoidoi performed them from memory across whole evenings, and that performance history is visible in the text itself.
Oral performance demanded fixed machinery. A singer holding thousands of lines in memory needed reusable material: a steady metrical line, repeated stock scenes, and above all the Homeric epithet — a formulaic descriptive phrase permanently attached to a name. Odysseus is ingenious, much-enduring, of many devices. Dawn is rosy-fingered. Athena is gray-eyed. These phrases do two jobs at once. They fill out the metrical line, giving the singer a breath of thinking time, and they train the listener: every time the epithet returns, the trait it names is reinforced. Characterization in an oral epic is cumulative rather than gradual. A trait is not revealed once and developed; it is repeated until it becomes the person.
Structure in an epic is equally deliberate, and it is not chronological. The poem opens with an invocation, a formal appeal to the Muse — a daughter of memory — for the authority and the material to tell the story. The invocation is not decoration. It tells the audience, before a single event occurs, what the poem is about. Butler’s opening line asks the Muse to sing of a man of many devices who wandered far after sacking Troy and who could not save his companions because they destroyed themselves through their own folly. The poem announces its theme in its first sentence: a man’s endurance, and other men’s self-destruction.
Immediately after the invocation the poem plunges in medias res — literally, into the middle of things. Homer does not begin at Troy. He does not begin with Odysseus setting sail. Book 1 opens twenty years after the war began, and Odysseus is not even in it. Instead we are in Ithaca with his son Telemachus, watching a hundred suitors occupy the house, consume the herds, insult the queen and plan the boy’s murder.
That choice does two things at once, and both are the reason this structural decision is worth a full lesson.
First, it creates stakes before it creates a hero. We see what the absence has cost before we meet the man who is absent. When Odysseus finally appears, in Book 5, weeping on Calypso’s beach, we already want him home for reasons that have nothing to do with liking him.
Second, it builds a thematic contrast that runs the length of the poem. The disorder in Ithaca — guests who abuse a host, young men who take what is not theirs — is a violation of xenia, the sacred obligation between host and guest. Odysseus’s journey home is not only a journey; it is a restoration of that order. Structure, in other words, is not a container for the theme. Here, the structure is the argument.
As you read, hold two questions open: what does Homer withhold, and what does withholding it buy him?
Reading: The Odyssey, Book 1 — the invocation and the state of Ithaca
Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler (1900) · Public domain
Read the passage twice. The first time, read for what happens. The second time, annotate for epithets and for any phrase that tells you what the poem values.
Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.
So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him into a large cave and wanted to marry him.
… Then Minerva said, “Father, son of Saturn, King of kings, it served Aegisthus right, and so it would any one else who does as he did; but Aegisthus is neither here nor there; it is for Ulysses that my heart bleeds, when I think of his sufferings in that lonely sea-girt island, far away, poor man, from all his friends.”
Formative check
Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.
Homer could have begun The Odyssey with the fall of Troy. He begins twenty years later, with Odysseus’s teenage son, and Odysseus does not appear for four books. Before you read the explanation below — why?
In Butler’s opening sentence, Homer states that Odysseus’s companions “perished through their own sheer folly.” What does placing this detail in the invocation, before any event is narrated, accomplish?
An epic opens with an to the Muse, then plunges the audience into the action rather than at the chronological beginning; throughout, the poet leans on formulaic descriptive phrases called to hold the meter and to fix a character’s traits in the listener’s memory.
Find two epithets in the passage above and quote them exactly. For each, state in one sentence what the phrase trains the audience to believe about the character — and then say whether the events of Book 1 support that belief or complicate it.
How confident are you that you can explain, using a specific quoted line, how beginning in medias res changes what a reader feels about Odysseus before he appears?
Printable: Unit 1 Student Workbook
Every organizer for this unit in one booklet — the reading schedule, the vocabulary pages, all five lesson organizers, the peer review sheet and the scoring rubric. Print it before the unit starts and bring the page to each lesson.