The Odyssey of Homer

The Odyssey of Homer is a work by Richmond Lattimore (trans.) (2009).

Core claims

• The Odyssey’s nine-book delay on Ithaka is not narrative padding but the poem’s deepest psychological content: the slow reconstitution of identity through concealment, recognition, and restraint is the real homecoming, not the sea voyage.
• Lattimore’s introduction reveals that Homer deliberately excludes Iliadic episodes from the Odyssey not through ignorance but through compositional tact, making the two poems function as complementary psychological portraits — the Iliad as the tragedy of wrath, the Odyssey as the comedy of endurance.
• The Wanderings resist allegorical reading precisely because morality in Homer is “inextricably implicit in the story itself” — a principle that aligns the Odyssey more closely with depth psychology’s insistence on image over abstraction than any later moralizing tradition could.

Related questions

• How does Hillman’s reading of Odysseus’s scar in “Senex and Puer” revise or deepen Lattimore’s claim that the Ithakan books gain their power through “leisurely composition” and “the elaboration of character”?
• In what ways does Lattimore’s argument that Homer’s morality is “inextricably implicit in the story” parallel or challenge Edinger’s method in Ego and Archetype of extracting psychological propositions from mythic narrative?
• How does the Odyssey’s structural suppression of Athene’s wrath — which Lattimore identifies as a deliberate compositional strategy — compare to what Jung describes in Aion as the ego’s selective relationship to the shadow of the Self?

See also

• Library page: /library/ancient-roots/lattimore-odyssey/

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