The Complementarity of the Iliad and the Odyssey

What does it mean to be a hero? The ancient Greeks who gave us Achilles and Odysseus had a very different understanding of the term than we do today. Based on the legendary Harvard course that Gregory Nagy has taught for well over thirty years, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores the roots of Western civilization and offers a masterclass in classical Greek literature. We meet the epic heroes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but Nagy also considers the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the songs of Sappho and Pindar, and the dialogues of Plato. Herodotus once said that to read Homer was to be a civilized person. To discover Nagy’s Homer is to be twice civilized.

The polytropic character of Odysseus, central epic hero of the Odyssey, stands in sharp contrast to the monolithic character of Achilles, the commensurately central epic hero of the Iliad. Whereas Achilles achieves his epic centrality by way of his role as a warrior, Odysseus achieves his own kind of epic centrality in an alternative way — as a master of crafty stratagems and cunning intelligence.

There are of course many other heroes in Homeric poetry, but Achilles and Odysseus have become the two central points of reference. Just as the central heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey are complementary, so too are the epics that centralize them. The complementarity extends even further: between the two of them, these two epics give the impression of incorporating most of whatever was worth retelling about the world of heroes.

In the case of the Iliad, . . . this epic not only tells the story that it says it will tell, about Achilles’ anger and how it led to countless woes as the Greeks went on fighting it out with the Trojans and striving to ward off the fiery onslaught of Hector. It also manages to retell the entire Tale of Troy.

The Homeric Odyssey is equally comprehensive by way of telling the story of the hero’s nostos, ‘return, homecoming’. This word, as I noted at the beginning of this hour, means not only ‘homecoming’ but also ‘song about homecoming’. As such, the Odyssey is not only a nostos: it is a nostos to end all other nostoi. In other words, the Odyssey is the final and definitive statement about the theme of a heroic homecoming: in the process of retelling the return of the epic hero Odysseus, the narrative of the Odyssey achieves a sense of closure in the retelling of all feats stemming from the heroic age. The Odyssey, as we will see, provides a retrospective even on those epic moments that are missing in the Iliad, such as the story of the Wooden Horse.

A central theme unites the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey: as we see from the pervasive use of the title aristos Akhaiōn, ‘best of the Achaeans’, in both epics, Achilles emerges as the rightful owner of this title in the Iliad, while Odysseus earns the same title in the Odyssey. But the poetry of epic awards this title not by way of measuring the successes achieved by these heroes by virtue of their predominant heroic qualities, namely, strength in the case of Achilles and intelligence in the case of Odysseus. After all, Achilles failed to capture Troy with his heroic strength. As for Odysseus, although he used his heroic intelligence in inventing the Wooden Horse, which was the key to the capture of Troy by the Achaeans, this success did not win for him the title of the ‘best of the Achaeans’ in the Iliad. Rather, Odysseus earned that title by becoming the main hero of the Odyssey, just as Achilles earned the same title by becoming the main hero of the Iliad.

Underlying the complementarity of the Iliad and Odyssey and of the main heroes of these two epics is an element of competition. The kleos or epic glory of Achilles in the Iliad is competitively contrasted with the kleos of Odysseus in the Odyssey.‡ As we are about to see, the key to understanding such a competition is the Homeric use of the word nostos in the sense of a ‘song about a homecoming’, not just a ‘homecoming’. Ironically, as I argue, Odysseus achieves the kleos or epic glory of the Odyssey not because he destroyed Troy, a feat heralded at the very start of his epic, at verse 2 of the Odyssey (as we saw in Text A of this hour), but because he also achieves a nostos in both senses of the word: he comes home and thereby becomes the premier hero of a song about homecoming.

There are further related ironies. As we saw in Text A of Hour 1, Achilles has to choose between kleos and nostos, forfeiting nostos in order to achieve his kleos as the central hero of the Iliad. But Odysseus must have both kleos and nostos in order to merit his own heroic status in the Odyssey. The narrative of the kleos that Odysseus earns in the Odyssey cannot be the Iliad, which means ‘tale of Troy’ (Ilion is the other name for Troy). The Iliad establishes Achilles as the central hero of the story of Troy, even though he failed to destroy the city. Because of the Iliad tradition, “the kleos of Odysseus at Troy was preempted by the kleos of Achilles.” So, the kleos that Odysseus should get for his success in destroying Troy is elusive, by contrast with the kleos that Achilles gets in the Iliad, which is permanent. So, Odysseus cannot afford to dwell on his success at Troy, because the kleos he may get for that success will become permanent only if it extends into the kleos that he gets for achieving a successful homecoming. As we see from the wording of the Song of the Sirens in the Odyssey, which I will quote in Hour 10, the sheer pleasure of listening to a song about the destruction of Troy will be in vain if there is no nostos, no safe return home from the faraway world of epic heroes; and, by extension, the Iliad itself will become a Song of the Sirens without a successful narration of the Odyssey.

There is a final irony, developed in the narrative of the Odyssey: Achilles in Hādēs seems tempted to trade epics with Odysseus. This he will never do, of course, in his own epic. As Achilles himself predicts in the Iliad, the kleos of his own song will be aphthiton, ‘unwilting’.