The last few decades have witnessed increased interest in the Homeric Odyssey and stories of Odysseus (which are, importantly, not coterminous). Indeed, I have started to think less of living through Odysseus’ decade and more of an Odyssean century. This may strike as a rather broad claim, but since the release of the Coen Brothers’ O Where Art Thou (2000), through Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018) and the seismic impact of Emily Wilson’s translation (2017; followed by Daniel Mendelsohn’s recent response, 2025), the Odyssey and its main man have enjoyed a sustained interest among the literary and film-going public. Beyond this rarified realm, pop culture has also proved to be fertile ground for Odysseus reception – as in Epic: The Musical (2022–4) – or Odysseus-adjacent material, as in the video game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018).
The academic world has typically been a little late in catching up to this interest, but the last decade has also seen the largest number of monographs and collections about Odysseus since the early 1990s, when a sudden burst of books on the Odyssey like J. Peradotto’s Man in the Middle Voice (1990), E. Cook’s The Odyssey in Athens (1995) and L. Doherty’s Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (1995), to name but a few, changed the way in which scholars read and talked about the poem. Recent monographs like A. Loney’s The Ethics of Revenge and the Meanings of the Odyssey (2019), J. Arft’s Arete and the Odyssey’s Poetics of Interrogation: the Queen and her Question (2022) or my own Many-Minded Man (2020) would not exist if not for the cultural confluence of the bloom in scholarship by women and literary-theory informed scholars a generation ago and the subsequent revving up of the Odysseus-scholarship-complex.
Two of the most recent entries in this new Odyssean wave are Bakker’s Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics commentary on Odyssey Book 9 and Burgess’s The Travels of Odysseus . Both Bakker and Burgess are exceptional Homerists, whose publications span the full generation of renewed interest in the Odyssey. In truth, my own intellectual growth and understanding of Homeric epic and its place in the world were shaped in important ways by each scholar. Bakker’s classic Linguistics and Formulas in Homer. Scalarity and Description of the Particle Per (1988) remains the most compelling read about Homeric particles in English, and his 2013 The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey was probably the most influential book on the epic in the decade. Similarly, Burgess’s The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (2001) changed the way in which many of us talked about myth in and between the so-called epic cycle and the Homeric poems, and his The Death and Afterlife of Achilles (2009) took his multilayered approach to the generation of Greek myth to another level.
Over the same period, the relationship between classical scholars and their subjects has shifted. Various kinds of pressure from academic precarity to the rise of the information age have shifted the concept of the field. The overall effect of politics, capital and technology has been one of greater complication and confusion. While the public has become more interested in the Odyssey, Classicists have become more involved with the world than our bookish reputations might have once led people to predict. Despite growing interest in the Odyssey, Classics as a discipline has been turned inside out. From the backlash against M. Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) almost 40 years ago, through the field’s own self-reckoning about its entanglement with colonialism, racism and white supremacy, our conversations have changed. Both of these new books are fine examples of academic publications that serve their purposes very well. Nevertheless, their vision and scope, however sharp and demanding, seem somewhat distant from these conversations, as a feature of the demands of the commentary and academic monograph in turn. If my praise for each book betrays less enthusiasm than they merit, then, it is less because of some defect in their design or execution and more because I find myself questioning the wisdom and impact of our conventions (even as I mostly stick to them in writing this review).
One might ask what the continued purpose of a single-book commentary in print form is in the information age when parsing tools like Logeion can answer morphological questions and hyperlinks can direct us to scholarship on every line. I cannot presume that Bakker set out to answer this question, but his work demonstrates the vital nature of even so static a form. Bakker offers a traditional commentary on Book 9 of the Odyssey, potentially the most important book of the epic based both on what it can say about the poem’s relationship with other versions of the story and on how it shows Odysseus’ development as a character. For Homeric studies, this commentary ranks among the best of the genre in English, joining C.W. Macleod’s work on Iliad 24 (1982) and B. Graziosi and J. Haubold’s more recent edition of Iliad 6 (2010) in offering an original and moving engagement with the text underneath the prescribed forms. Each of these commentaries manages to present essential and foundational material with the same direct and effective style alongside rare insights into the history and potential meanings of the poem.
Bakker’s commentary moves through the necessary introductory material with economy and precision. His introduction falls into two broad parts: comments on the relationship between Book 9 and the larger epic, with sections for the major thematic components relevant to the importance of the book (e.g. the Apologos, Cyclopes, ‘Forbidden Food’) and on the kind of foundational material one needs in a potential introduction to an author and a genre (e.g. sections on metre, morphology etc.). In the thematic half Bakker alludes to the critique of the Odyssey offered by T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944) in the section subtitled ‘The Colonialist’s Adventure’, but the limits of the introduction attenuate the impact of the settler mindset that shapes and ultimately re-emerges canonised from Odysseus’ story. Bakker’s overview of the symbolic position of the Cyclopes in defining civilisation by negative contrast is effective, but also affectively unsettling. The second half of the introduction on Homeric language is exemplary, fit to be excerpted for any initial or refresher engagement with Homer.
When it comes to the commentary itself, I find myself at a loss at how to characterise its clarity and effectiveness. The comments present a charming mix of necessary (notes on forms and definitions) and probing (see his analysis of Odysseus’ speech in lines 276–9). Bakker’s grasp of Homeric language is impressive, but more so because it comes without losing that sense of what a first-time reader might need. Any commentary leaves seasoned scholars with more questions than answers, but only the best seem to anticipate a beginning or intermediate reader’s needs so adroitly. To my taste, there is less of the theoretical and interpretative boldness that characterises Bakker’s recent publications and more of the linguistic expertise of his earlier work. But that observation comes as well from how many times Bakker reminds me of things I have forgotten or teaches what I never learned.
What this commentary lacks points to the limitations of the genre, and that is a broader sense of the importance of Odyssey 9 intellectually in the last century. As it is, the commentary is a fine accompaniment for someone reading the Odyssey in Greek, either in class or alone. It provides an opening into Homer’s enchanting language and mysterious worlds, but it leaves aside much of the world outside. A reader of this commentary might not learn that Odysseus’ description of the island of the Cyclopes has proto-colonialist resonance criticised by Frantz Fanon or understand that the ethnography of Book 9 has inspired Classicists like P.D. Rankine and J. Murray to trace out genealogies of racism and enslavement from Homer to today (see, e.g., P.D. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African-American Literature [2006]; J. Murray, ‘Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey’, in: D. McCoskey [ed.], A Cultural History of Race, Vol. 1 [2021]). I have no doubt that Bakker knows all these things; the genre of commentary resists such intrusions, and many a reader will want to linger in a work that provides a diverting respite.
If a commentary pushes too hard against its printed limits in a world when all the information it provides is potentially available online, what can be said about the thematic scholarly monograph? Its length and detail lands it on most tl:dr (‘too long; didn’t read’) stacks, even as easily accessible articles languish as unread PDFs on hard drives or cloud storage accounts. One answer is that the monograph offers a sustained conversation with occasional provocation for deeper engagement. In Travels of Odysseus Burgess sets out to re-read the Odyssey from the perspective of the travel narratives, interweaving observations about the material and historical world represented in the poem in pursuit of ‘the paradox of how the Odyssey narrates a Heroic Age story that speaks to an Archaic Age audience’ (p. 2). He moves from broader narrative contexts that shaped the genre of travel literature to a close reading of the wanderings in the Apologos in the second chapter, which deftly shifts from fantasies of myth to their reflections of the real world. When Burgess takes us to a survey of Ithaca in Chapter 3, he traces out links between the travels narrated previously and the lies offered on Ithaca, suggesting provocatively and effectively that Odysseus’ lies should be viewed as such and not as evidence of Odyssean multiforms. We leave Ithaca in Chapter 4 heading into the myths outside the Odyssey’s purview and not just confined to the Telegony but stretching to many other versions of Odysseus’ journeys after the epic’s end.
Each chapter combines effective framing with Burgess’s characteristic insight. The introduction may not do full service to the literature on ethnography in ancient Greece or the genre of travel narratives after the Odyssey, but it moves lightly and quickly through the material, culminating in an excellent overview of Odysseus’ character, names and existence through time. Especially sharp is the closing section on Odysseus as a material man. Similarly pointed is the overview of Odyssean stylistics in Chapter 2. This chapter could have been at least two and used a little more of the signposting that Burgess eschews in the introduction. The reader can get lost amidst all the fine observations. Chapter 3 presents one of the finer surveys of Ithaca alongside a well-structured reading of Odysseus’ so-called lying tales and the earlier ‘wanderings’, but I wish some of the ideas had a little more time to breathe. For example, Burgess ends the chapter alluding to potential alternative narratives that shape the confrontations in Ithaca, such as B. Haller’s (TAPA 143 [2013]) exploration of the stories around Dolios and the vanquishing of the suitors. Rather than seeing these stories as potential parallel narratives shaping audience responses to our Odyssey, Burgess regards them as more apt to post-Homeric wandering tales rather than stories contemporaneous or prior to the poem at hand. Ultimately, Burgess concludes that Odysseus’ lies were not developed to ‘deauthorize alternative versions of Odysseus’ nostos’ (p. 134). Burgess concedes that epichoric traditions that precede our Odyssey may have influenced narratives we believe post-date our poem, but the impossibility of determining this gives him pause. Importantly, Burgess instead poses heroic present and past as intersecting in our particular Odyssey through the generation of tales of travel and Odysseus’ lies.
The afterlife of epic – the travel after its journey ends – looms over Burgess’s book and may leave some readers wanting more. Chapter 4 covers ‘Leaving Ithaca’ at the end of the epic, the end of the epic tradition and in looking forward to the stories told about Odysseus following his homecoming. The longest portion of this chapter looks closely at the relationship between the Homeric Odyssey and the fragmentary Telegony. Burgess does not offer clear conclusions about these poems, but his preference for the Odyssey in quality and priority is clear. His survey of other post-Ithacan tales is effective, perhaps strongest when discussing the Pseudo-Aristotelian ‘Constitution of the Ithacans’. Like Odysseus’ post-epic journeys, the book ends in a series of afterthoughts, not fully returning to the questions posed in the introduction, but allowing each of them to be resolved in its revision through later narrative forms.
The primary question I have at the close of Burgess’s book has to do with that very paradox he anticipates in the introduction: how heroic age narratives function to ‘speak’ to archaic age audiences. At its surface, this could seem naive, ignoring what T. Todorov and E.S. Rabkin have called the ‘fantastic’ genre (see T. Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre [1975]; E.S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature [1976]). The pan-genre of the fantastic has also been called ‘speculative’, including fantasy, science fiction and the domain ancient audiences might have seen as myth. The common ground comes in exploration of human themes in geographically and temporally removed vistas through figures with supernatural abilities, be they divine, magical or in that space between magic and science. Burgess is by no means naive; instead, his formulation may be read as a provocation, to disrupt readers from assuming facile parallels in narrative function from one culture to another. Burgess’s innovation, which I think is understated, is his claim that Odysseus’ travels are transformed into myth through their telling (p. 59), thanks in part to the function of the Phaeacians as an internal audience followed by a steadily less fantastic and mythical action in the epic’s second half. I find the idea of a canonised Odyssey creating canon through its own telling very attractive, especially insofar as the epic comes at the end of the heroic tradition. But this is also why it is somewhat confusing that Burgess seems resistant to the idea of prior or contemporary narratives being at play in shaping audience responses to the poem.
My comments for both Bakker and Burgess will likely come through as more critical than they are intended. In truth, each book offers such a strong invitation to a conversation that I found myself drawn into what might be said in response, failing to give full credit to the erudition and eloquence that is so compelling. In a way, each author makes the form at hand into his own, perhaps taking on an Odyssean impact in turn. Bakker offers a masterful commentary that opens spaces for further investigations by only lightly touching upon some subjects. Burgess takes his readers on a journey through travel narratives that demonstrates how integrated the wandering and lying tales are into the epic’s storytelling fabric. A close reading of either book shows the openness of each scholar to other possible ways of reading the poem. Each example, then, helps to answer why these kinds of interventions remain important: they resist the shifting immediacy of the moment and ask their readers to slow down – maybe even unplug – and consider the Odyssey alongside them.
