"FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT" - HOMER

“FROM  DARKNESS  TO  LIGHT ”   -   HOMER

Homer was a great “blind” poet of Greek epics “Iliad” and “Odyssey”.  How this 8th Century blind man could write these epics is a mystery even in this modern world.  Both the books are big in size running into 500 plus pages.  The history has recorded these works as that of a genius.  One cannot stop from admiring these great works.  If the Nobel Prize was instituted at that time these epics truly would have merited that award and recognition.

 




      

   

                          

Although very little is known about the life of Greek poet Homer, credited with being the first to write down the epic stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the impact of his tales continue to reverberate through Western culture.

 

Famous quotes of Homer “

“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.”

—Homer

The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend, as to find a friend worth dying for. - Homer

The Greek poet Homer was born sometime between the 12th and 8th centuries BC, possibly somewhere on the coast of Asia Minor. He is famous for the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, which have had an enormous effect on Western culture, but very little known about their alleged author.

Homer is a mystery. The Greek epic poet credited with the enduring epic tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey is an enigma insofar as actual facts of his life go. Some scholars believe him to be one man; others think these iconic stories were created by a group. A variation on the group idea stems from the fact that storytelling was an oral tradition and Homer compiled the stories, and then recited them to memory.

Homer’s style, whoever he was, falls more in the category of minstrel poet or balladeer, as opposed to a cultivated poet who is the product of a fervent literary moment, such as a Virgil or a Shakespeare. The stories have repetitive elements, almost like a chorus or refrain, which suggests a musical element. However, Homer’s works are designated as epic rather than lyric poetry, which was originally recited with lyre in hand, much in the same vein as spoken-word performances.

All this speculation about who he was has inevitably led to what is known as the Homeric Question—whether he actually existed at all. This is often considered to be the greatest literary mystery.

Much speculation surrounds when Homer was born, because of the dearth of real information about him. Guesses at his birth date range from 750 BC all the way back to 1200 BC, the latter because The Iliad encompasses the story of the Trojan War, so some scholars have thought it fit to put the poet and chronicler nearer to the time of that actual event. But others believe the poetic style of his work indicates a much later period. Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC), often called the father of history, placed Homer several centuries before himself, around 850 BC.

Part of the problem is that Homer lived before a chronological dating system was in place. The Olympic Games of classical Greece marked an epoch, with 776 BC as a starting point by which to measure out four-year periods for the event. In short, it is difficult to give someone a birth date when he was born before there was a calendar.

Once again, the exact location of Homer’s birth cannot be pinpointed, although that doesn't stop scholars from trying. It has been identified as Ionia, Smyrna or, at any rate, on the coast of Asia Minor or the island of Chios. But seven cities lay claim to Homer as their native son.

There is some basis for some of these claims, however. The dialect that The Iliad and The Odyssey are written in is considered Asiatic Greek, specifically Ionic. That fact, paired with frequent mentions of local phenomena such as strong winds blowing from the northwest from the direction of Thrace, suggests, scholars feel, a familiarity with that region that could only mean Homer came from there.

The dialect helps narrow down his lifespan by coinciding it with the development and usage of language in general, but The Iliad and The Odyssey were so popular that this particular dialect became the norm for much of Greek literature going forward.

Virtually every biographical aspect ascribed to Homer is derived entirely from his poems. Homer is thought to have been blind, based solely on a character in The Odyssey, a blind poet/minstrel called Demodokos. A long disquisition on how Demodokos was welcomed into a gathering and regaled the audience with music and epic tales of conflict and heroes to much praise has been interpreted as Homer’s hint as to what his own life was like. As a result, many busts and statues have been carved of Homer with thick curly hair and beard and sightless eyes.

“Homer and Sophocles saw clearly, felt keenly, and refrained from much,” wrote Lane Cooper in The Greek Genius and Its Influence: Select Essays and Extracts in 1917, ascribing an emotional life to the writer. But he wasn't the first, nor was he the last. Countless attempts to recreate the life and personality of the author from the content of his epic poems have occupied writers for centuries.

Homer's two epic poems have become archetypal road maps in world mythology. The stories provide an important insight into early human society, and illustrate, in some aspects, how little has changed. Even if The Iliad itself seems unfamiliar, the story of the siege of Troy, the Trojan War and Paris’ kidnapping of Helen, the world’s most beautiful woman, are all familiar characters or scenarios. Some scholars insist that Homer was personally familiar with the plain of Troy, due to the geographical accuracy in the poem.

The Odyssey picks up after the fall of Troy. Further controversy about authorship springs from the differing styles of the two long narrative poems, indicating they were composed a century apart, while other historians claim only decades – the more formal structure of The Iliad is attributed to a poet at the height of his powers, whereas the more colloquial, novelistic approach in The Odyssey is attributed to an elderly Homer.

Homer enriched his descriptive story with liberal use of simile and metaphor, which has inspired a long path of writers behind him. His structuring device was to start in the middle–in medias res– and then fill in the missing information via remembrances.

The two narrative poems pop up throughout modern literature: Homer’s The Odyssey has parallels in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and his tale of Achilles in The Iliad is echoed in J.R.R. Tolkein's The Fall of Gondolin. Even the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? make use of The Odyssey.

Other works have been attributed to Homer over the centuries, most notably the Homeric Hymns, but in the end only the two epic works remain enduringly his.

"Plato tells us that in his time many believed that Homer was the educator of all Greece. Since then, Homer’s influence has spread far beyond the frontiers of Hellas [Greece]….” wrote Werner Jaeger in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. He was right. The Iliad and The Odyssey have provided not only seeds but fertilizer for almost all the other arts and sciences in Western culture. For the Greeks, Homer was a godfather of their national culture, chronicling its mythology and collective memory in rich rhythmic tales that have permeated the collective imagination.

Homer’s real life may remain a mystery, but the very real impact of his works continues to illuminate our world today.

“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.” 

― Homer, The Odyssey

 

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”, widely thought to be the first extant works of Western literature. He is considered by many to be the earliest and most important of all the Greek writers, and the progenitor of the whole Western literary tradition. He was a poetic pioneer who stood at a pivotal point in the evolution of Greek society from pre-literate to literate, from a centuries old bardic tradition of oral verse to the then new technique of alphabetic writing.

Nothing definite is known of Homer the historical man, and indeed we do not know for sure that such a man ever existed. However, of the many conflicting traditions and legends that have grown up around him, the most common and most convincing version suggests that Homer was born at Smyrna in the Ionian region of Asia Minor (or possibly on the island of Chios), and that he died on the Cycladic island of Ios.

Establishing an accurate date for Homer's life also presents significant difficulties as no documentary record of the man's life is known to have existed. Indirect reports from Herodotus and others generally date him approximately between 750 and 700 BCE.

The characterization of Homer as a blind bard by some historians is partly due to translations of the Greek "homêros", meaning "hostage" or "he who is forced to follow", or, in some dialects, "blind". Some ancient accounts depict Homer as a wandering minstrel, and a common portrayal is of a blind, begging singer who travelled around the harbor towns of Greece, associating with shoemakers, fisherman, potters, sailors and elderly men in the town gathering places.

Exactly what Homer was responsible for writing is likewise largely unsubstantiated. The Greeks of the 6th and early 5th Centuries BCE tended to use the label “Homer” for the whole body of early heroic hexameter verse. This included “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”, but also the whole “Epic Cycle” of poems relating the story of the Trojan War (also known as the “Trojan Cycle”), as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and other works, such as the “Homeric Hymns” and the comic mini-epic “Batrachomyomachia” (“The Frog-Mouse War”).

By around 350 BCE, the consensus had arisen that Homer was responsible for just the two outstanding epics, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. Stylistically they are similar, and one view holds that “The Iliad” was composed by Homer in his maturity, while “The Odyssey” was a work of his old age. Other parts of the “Epic Cycle” (e.g. “Kypria”, “Aithiopus”, “Little Iliad”, “The Sack of Ilion”, “The Returns” and “Telegony”) are now considered to be almost certainly not by Homer. The “Homeric Hymns” and “Epigrams of Homer”, despite the names, were likewise almost certainly written significantly later, and therefore not by Homer himself.

Some maintain that the Homeric poems are dependent on an oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets. The Greek alphabet was introduced (adapted from a Phoenician syllabary) in the early 8th Century BCE, so it is possible that Homer himself (if indeed he was a single, real person) was one of the first generation of authors who were also literate. At any rate, it seems likely that Homer's poems were recorded shortly after the invention of the Greek alphabet, and third-party references to “The Iliad” appear as early as about 740 BCE.

The language used by Homer is an archaic version of Ionic Greek, with admixtures from certain other dialects such as Aeolic Greek. It later served as the basis of Epic Greek, the language of epic poetry, typically written in dactylic hexameter verse.

In the Hellenistic period, Homer appears to have been the subject of a hero cult in several cities, and there is evidence of a shrine devoted to him in Alexandria by Ptolemy IV Philopator in the late 3rd Century BCE.

THE ILIAD – SUMMARY

Chryses, a priest of Apollo, journeys to the Achaian camp to request the return of his daughter Chryseis. Chryseis had been captured in a Greek siege and given to Agamemnon as a war prize. Chryses has brought many gifts as ransom for his daughter, but Agamemnon refuses to accept them and sends Chryses away. Apollo then revenges the ill treatment shown to his priest by sending a plague to the Greeks. The plague claims many lives, and a counsel is held to determine how to stop it. Through the advice of a seer, the Greeks agree that the return of Chryses is the only way to stop the plague from taking even more lives. Agamemnon, however, does not give up his prize willingly, and insists that he must have another man’s prize in exchange. He demands Briseis, the woman given to Achilleus in the same siege. Achilleus is so angry with Agamemnon for taking Briseis that he immediately withdraws himself and his troops from the fighting with Troy. He also asks his mother, the goddess Thetis, to plead with Zeus to help him avenge the wrong. Zeus agrees to assist the Trojans in their attack on the Achaians, thus showing Agamemnon that Achilleus is a great man, who would be necessary to succeed in battle.

Agamemnon gathers the rest of his army for a massive attack against the Trojans. The first day of battle opens with a duel between Paris and Menelaos, and a truce among the rest of the armies. After the duel, which ends with Paris being taken out of the battle by Aphrodite, the truce is broken by Pandaros, the Trojan, and the two armies engage in bitter fighting. At the end of the day, there is another duel, this time between Aias and Hektor, which is broken up before its end. The two sides retreat, and the Achaians build a wall around their encampment to protect their position and their ships.

When fighting resumes, Zeus pushes the Trojans to great triumph over the Achaians, and their victory seems certain. At this point, Agamemnon calls his leaders together and admits he was at fault in taking Briseis from Achilleus. He agrees to return her, along with a great deal of treasure and a sworn oath that he has not slept with her, if Achilleus will come back and fight with the Achaians. The message is brought to Achilleus by his good friends Odysseus, Aias, and Phoinix. Achilleus greets his friends warmly, but refuses to make peace with Agamemnon.

The next day the fighting resumes, and the Achaians fight well. However, over the span of the day, most of the best men are injured and taken out of the fight. These include Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Eurypylos, and Machaon. The only remaining champion of the Achaians is Aias. Hektor then leads a strong drive by the Trojans, and they manage to break through the Achaian wall and fight all the way to the ships. As the Trojans attempt to set fire to the Achaian ships, the gods intervene and rescue the Achaians from almost certain destruction. At this point, Achilleus and his companion Patroklos become fearful for the fate of the Achaian army. While Achilleus still refuses to fight, he sends Patroklos out to the field in his own armor with a contingent of men to save the ships.

Because Patroklos and his army are rested and fresh, they easily drive the weary Trojans back to the city wall. Patroklos fights bravely and performs many courageous acts, but he pushes his luck and is eventually killed by Hektor. Hektor takes the famous armor of Achilleus from Patroklos, and a fierce battle is fought over his body. The Achaians manage to retrieve the body of Patroklos, but the battle has turned to the Trojan’s favor, and the Achaians retreat.

When Achilleus hears the news of his companion’s death, he is mad with rage against Hektor, but cannot rush into the battle without his armor. However, the gods transfigure him and when he shows himself on the battlefield the Trojans pull back and the Achaians escape. His mother Thetis acquires immortal armor from the god Hephaistos, and Achilleus announces to the assembled Achaians the end of his quarrel with Agamemnon. The next day the Achaians, mostly through the exploits of Achilleus, are able to drive the Trojans back inside their city walls. Hektor, however, refuses to go inside, promising to encounter Achilleus directly instead. His courage fails at the last minute and Achilleus pursues Hektor twice around the city walls. Hektor’s flight is finally halted through the trickery of Athene, and the two men duel. Hektor is killed and his body is dragged by the ankles behind Achilleus’ chariot back to the Achaian camp.

Achilleus then holds funeral games for Patroklos, giving many great prizes to the victors. Patroklos’ body is mourned and burned in a great pyre. In his grief over his friend, Achilleus has been dishonoring the body of Hektor, but the gods have kept it from mutilation. Priam is secretly guided by the gods to Achilleus to request his son’s body in exchange for a great ransom. Achilleus has pity on him, and returns the body. The Trojans then bury Hektor.

Though the myths describe the Trojan War as a thirty-year cycle of preparations, conflict, and homecomings, the chronological period that the Iliad covers is actually quite restricted, not more than ninety days in the final year of fighting. Despite its focus on the quarrel of only two of its warriors, both of them Greek, Homer nevertheless conveys the full range of human emotions that prevails in war, even as he provides a vivid portrait of Mycenaean culture. The result is that his Iliad, bold and all-encompassing though it is, remains essentially quite limited; that is undoubtedly one of the most distinctive features of Homer’s epic. Homer makes the limits of his intentions clear from the outset. His invocation to Caliope, the Muse of epic, specifies that he will sing of Achilles’ anger.

Obviously, the anger of Achilles operates on several levels and has far-reaching consequences. On the personal level, it refers to the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon for possession of Briseis, a young woman originally given to Achilles by the Achaeans as his prize of honor. Agamemnon, too, had a captive mistress, Chryseis; yet, she was the daughter of a priest of Apollo named Chryses. When Agamemnon haughtily refuses to return Chryseis to her father, Chryses invokes Apollo himself, who sends a plague upon the Achaeans. Once he realizes that the army will be decimated by disease if he takes no action, Agamemnon returns Chryseis to her father, though he simultaneously demands that Achilles surrender Briseis to him as her replacement. Agamemnon fears that the Achaeans will consider him weak if he does not enforce his will upon Achilles in this way, yet the reader perceives only Agamemnon’s pettiness and insecurity.

Achilles reviles Agamemnon in the agora (assembly) of leaders, yet he surrenders Briseis to him without active resistance. More significantly, Achilles announces his intentions to withdraw his Myrmidons from battle and return with them to Phthia, their home in southern Thessaly. These dramatic announcements made, Achilles throws down the skeptron (staff), which gives him the uncontested right to speak, and dashes from the agora. This extraordinary behavior at the least implies weakness and apparently cowardice. It seems to complement the pettiness of Agamemnon, but there are clearly other reasons for Achilles’ actions.

Thetis, the goddess-mother of Achilles, subsequently appears to comfort her son, who is all too aware of how the Achaeans could interpret his sudden withdrawal and threat to return home. She reviews the alternatives that moira (fate) has assigned to him: either to slay Hector, the first of the Trojan warriors, and to be killed at Troy soon thereafter or to live a long and undistinguished life in Phthia, dying there of old age. Achilles well knows these alternatives. His withdrawal, which extends from Iliad 1 to Iliad 22, represents an essential pause to consider these alternatives at a crucial juncture of his life. Worth noting is the fact that Achilles undertakes no preparations to return home; also, although the war initially goes badly for the Achaeans, to the extent that Agamemnon offers Achilles an impressive series of gifts (including restoration of Briseis) for his return, Achilles’ prolonged absence makes relatively little difference overall.

Agamemnon’s embassy to secure Achilles’ return contains elements of magnanimity and self-interest. Significantly, Agamemnon does not personally entreat Achilles. Instead, he enlists the cunning Odysseus and Diomedes (who would together devise the stratagem of the wooden horse), as well as Achilles’ old tutor Phoenix. The appeal thus emerges through a combination of clever argument and sage advice, and the collection of gifts (listed in catalog form) is calculated both to impress the Achaeans with Agamemnon’s megalapsyché (great-heartedness, generosity), as much as it is to force Achilles to make his decision. That is one of several places in which the humanity of the poem emerges. Achilles’ concern for his old tutor, seen in his insistence that Phoenix remain overnight rather than attempt to return immediately, shows that he values privileged relationships such as master and student. It has its counterpart in Achilles’ relationship to Patroclus, his young protégé in the art of war. This relationship, severed by Patroclus’s death, will ultimately provide the impetus that Achilles needs to accept the short but glorious life that moira has offered him.

In one sense, all the characters of the Iliad recognize the inevitability of moira yet remain essentially powerless to change it. The tears of Achilles that precede his mother’s appearance are an indication of this human frailty, but so is Hector’s meeting with his wife, Andromache, and their infant son, Astyanax. In Iliad 6, long before Achilles returns to battle, the Achaeans have advanced to the very walls of Troy. Hector, the bravest of the Trojan warriors, searches for Alexandrus (Paris), whose theft of Helen had been the immediate cause of the war, and finds him in Helen’s rooms. His reproaches make Alexandrus recognize his obligations, and Alexandrus takes up his arms to defend the city, but the primary contrast is clear. Andromache recognizes and regretfully accepts the likelihood of her husband’s death in battle, but Helen belittles Alexandrus as a sensualist willing to allow others to fight for him. Andromache’s fears for Hector correspond to those of the child, Astyanax, who does not recognize his father because of the helmet that he wears. When Hector removes the helmet, the child accepts his father’s embrace, and the couple laughs. There, then, is a contrast between pure love and simple sensual attraction as well as between responsibility and weakness.

Even the deities of Olympus display the flaws of their human counterparts. They, too, remain tied to moira and are essentially powerless to change it. They, too, govern by agorai, and these assemblies inevitably end as inconclusively as those of the human warriors below. The gods and goddesses have taken sides in the war, but these reflect their previous personal antagonisms rather than their concern with humanity. Thetis, for example, does intercede with Zeus for her son Achilles but is aware that doing so will necessarily provoke the jealousy of Hera, Zeus’s wife. She must also know that any favor that Zeus grants to Achilles would necessarily be in the context of glory on the battlefield. Ironically, any such benefaction would necessarily hasten her son’s death. Just as Agamemnon prevails in the human order, so does Zeus in the divine; yet neither appears able to take meaningful and decisive actions that affect outcomes. The power of both is limited to immediate actions and short-term results.

The peculiar powerlessness of Zeus emerges clearly in the Sarpedon episode, Iliad 16. At this point, Patroclus has received Achilles’ permission to reenter battle wearing his master’s armor. Patroclus experiences his aristeia (moment of glory), a series of combats in which he defeats one opponent after another. Sarpedon, a beautiful boy loved by Zeus, is one of those whom moira has determined that Patroclus will defeat. Zeus raises the scales of moira, watches Sarpedon’s weight descend, and realizes that he must accept the young man’s death. His resignation to moira parallels that of Andromache, even as it underscores the similarity of mortals and immortals.

Though Achilles allows his protégé, Patroclus, to enter battle, he himself remains apart. Patroclus is effectively Achilles’ surrogate, however, and his appearance in his master’s armor emphasizes this relationship. So devastating is the effect of his presence that the Trojans at first believe Achilles has returned. In one sense that is true, for Patroclus looks very much like Achilles, and the aristeia that he enjoys is equivalent to any that his master could have enjoyed. It is also true that once Patroclus has entered battle, the moira of Achilles is sealed, for the lives of master and student are tied by the bonds of friendship and obligation. Patroclus dies at the hands of Hector, and while Hector succeeds in claiming the armor of Achilles, the body of Patroclus remains with the Greeks. The announcement of Patroclus’s death sends Achilles into a threnody and leads to his construction of an extravagant pyre for the corpse. This development provides the opportunity for another catalog listing the offerings that formed the pyre. Averse as human sacrifice was to Greek sensibilities, the pyre includes young Trojans captured in battle.

Achilles now recognizes that his obligations to Patroclus have forced his return, but he has no armor worthy of the event. Thetis intervenes again, this time to secure armor crafted by the artisan deity Hephaestus, and once again Thetis’s intervention hastens her son’s moira. In effect, the alternatives that had existed in Iliad 1 are no longer available. The period of introspection has ended, and Achilles reenters battle knowing that he will kill Hector but equally aware that his own death will follow soon after. When Achilles meets Hector in battle, he is, in effect, encountering an aspect of himself. Hector wears the armor of Achilles, and Achilles has donned the glorious new armor that his mother, Thetis, had secured for him. In killing Hector, especially because Homer has already portrayed that warrior’s character so sympathetically, Achilles eliminates his ties to the past and fully accepts the alternative of a short but glorious life. It is his true destiny and, like the armor provided by Thetis, the only moira that is appropriate for him.

The humanity that lies behind so much of the bravado in the Iliad emerges in the final scene of the poem. Old Priam, king of Troy, comes to Achilles to beg for the return of his son’s body. Even though Achilles realizes that Hector had been the immediate cause of his beloved Patroclus’s death and that Hector had forced Achilles to accept his own moira, he grants Priam’s request and declares a truce for ritual mourning and appropriate burial of the dead on both sides. The Iliad thus ends in a suspension, rather than a resolution, of events.

THE  ODYSSEY  -   SUMMARY

Ten years have passed since the fall of Troy, and the Greek hero Odysseus still has not returned to his kingdom in Ithaca. A large and rowdy mob of suitors who have overrun Odysseus’s palace and pillaged his land continue to court his wife, Penelope. She has remained faithful to Odysseus. Prince Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, wants desperately to throw them out but does not have the confidence or experience to fight them. One of the suitors, Antinous, plans to assassinate the young prince, eliminating the only opposition to their dominion over the palace.

Unknown to the suitors, Odysseus is still alive. The beautiful nymph Calypso, possessed by love for him, has imprisoned him on her island, Ogygia. He longs to return to his wife and son, but he has no ship or crew to help him escape. While the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus debate Odysseus’s future, Athena, Odysseus’s strongest supporter among the gods, resolves to help Telemachus. Disguised as a friend of the prince’s grandfather, Laertes, she convinces the prince to call a meeting of the assembly at which he reproaches the suitors. Athena also prepares him for a great journey to Pylos and Sparta, where the kings Nestor and Menelaus, Odysseus’s companions during the war, inform him that Odysseus is alive and trapped on Calypso’s island. Telemachus makes plans to return home, while, back in Ithaca, Antinous and the other suitors prepare an ambush to kill him when he reaches port.

On Mount Olympus, Zeus sends Hermes to rescue Odysseus from Calypso. Hermes persuades Calypso to let Odysseus build a ship and leave. The homesick hero sets sail, but when Poseidon, god of the sea, finds him sailing home, he sends a storm to wreck Odysseus’s ship. Poseidon has harbored a bitter grudge against Odysseus since the hero blinded his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, earlier in his travels. Athena intervenes to save Odysseus from Poseidon’s wrath, and the beleaguered king lands at Scheria, home of the Phaeacians. Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess, shows him to the royal palace, and Odysseus receives a warm welcome from the king and queen. When he identifies himself as Odysseus, his hosts, who have heard of his exploits at Troy, are stunned. They promise to give him safe passage to Ithaca, but first they beg to hear the story of his adventures.

Odysseus spends the night describing the fantastic chain of events leading up to his arrival on Calypso’s island. He recounts his trip to the Land of the Lotus Eaters, his battle with Polyphemus the Cyclops, his love affair with the witch-goddess Circe, his temptation by the deadly Sirens, his journey into Hades to consult the prophet Tiresias, and his fight with the sea monster Scylla. When he finishes his story, the Phaeacians return Odysseus to Ithaca, where he seeks out the hut of his faithful swineherd, Eumaeus. Though Athena has disguised Odysseus as a beggar, Eumaeus warmly receives and nourishes him in the hut. He soon encounters Telemachus, who has returned from Pylos and Sparta despite the suitors’ ambush, and reveals to him his true identity. Odysseus and Telemachus devise a plan to massacre the suitors and regain control of Ithaca.

When Odysseus arrives at the palace the next day, still disguised as a beggar, he endures abuse and insults from the suitors. The only person who recognizes him is his old nurse, Eurycleia, but she swears not to disclose his secret. Penelope takes an interest in this strange beggar, suspecting that he might be her long-lost husband. Quite crafty herself, Penelope organizes an archery contest the following day and promises to marry any man who can string Odysseus’s great bow and fire an arrow through a row of twelve axes—a feat that only Odysseus has ever been able to accomplish. At the contest, each suitor tries to string the bow and fails. Odysseus steps up to the bow and, with little effort, fires an arrow through all twelve axes. He then turns the bow on the suitors. He and Telemachus, assisted by a few faithful servants, kill every last suitor.

Odysseus reveals himself to the entire palace and reunites with his loving Penelope. He travels to the outskirts of Ithaca to see his aging father, Laertes. They come under attack from the vengeful family members of the dead suitors, but Laertes, reinvigorated by his son’s return, successfully kills Antinous’s father and puts a stop to the attack. Zeus dispatches Athena to restore peace. With his power secure and his family reunited, Odysseus’s long ordeal comes to an end.

The 2004 Hollywood Film “Helen of Troy” was loosely based on “The Iliad” by Homer.

This great light of wisdom rested in a body without eyes.  It is apt to call his works as there is light amidst darkness.  

Homer’s great works are eye openers like there is a ray of light at the end of the tunnel.  From Night to Noon – “andhera se ujala tak”.


It gives me immense satisfaction to narrate Homer’s story through JOHNNY’S BLOG.